We ate other meals on the Silk Road that are more pleasant to recall. This far into the interior of Kithai, the Han and Uighur karwansarai landlords did not limit their fare to only the things a Muslim can eat, so we found a good diversity of meats—including that of the illik, which is a tiny roe deer that barks like a dog, and of a lovelily golden-feathered pheasant, and steaks cut from yaks, and even the meat of black bears and brown bears, which abound here. When we camped in the open, Uncle Mafio and the two Mongols vied at providing game for the pot: ducks and geese and rabbits and once a desert qazèl, but more usually they sought ground squirrels to shoot, because those little creatures thoughtfully provide the fuel for their own cooking. A hunter knows that, when he has no kara or wood or dried dung to make a fire with, he has only to look for the ground squirrels and their holes; even in a desert barren, they somehow contrive to put a weather-protective dome over their holes, of laced twigs and grass, well dried for the burning.
There were many other wild creatures in that region, not for eating but interesting to observe. There were black vultures with wings so broad that a man would have to take three paces to walk from tip to tip; and a snake so much resembling yellow metal that I would have sworn it was made of molten gold, but, having been informed that it was deadly venomous, I never touched one to find out. There was a little animal called a yerbò, like a mouse but with extravagantly long hind legs and tail, upon which three appendages it hopped about upright; and a magnificently beautiful wild cat called a palang, which I once saw making a meal of a wild ass it had downed, and which was like the heraldic pard, only not yellow of coat, but silvery gray with black rosettes spotted all over it.
The Mongols taught me to pick various wild plants as vegetable dishes for our meals—wild onions, for example, which go so well with any venison meat. There was a growth that they called the hair plant, and it did look exactly like a shock of black human hair. Neither its name nor its appearance was very appetizing, but when boiled and seasoned with a bit of vinegar, it made a delicate pickle condiment. Another oddity was what they called the vegetable lamb; they averred that it was indeed a mongrel creature bred from a mating of animal and plant, and said they preferred eating it to eating real lamb. It was tasty enough, but it was really only the woolly rootstalk of a certain fern.
The one ravishingly delicious novelty I found on that stage of the journey was the wonderful melon called the hami. Even the method of its growing was a novelty. When the vines started forming their fruit buds, the melon farmers paved over the whole field with slabs of slate for the vines to lie on. Instead of the melons’ getting sunshine only on their upper sides, those slates reflected the sun’s heat so that the hami ripened evenly all the way around. The hami had flesh of a pale greenish-white, so crisp that it crackled when bitten, dripping with juice, of a cool and refreshing flavor, not cloying but just the right sweetness. The hami had a taste and a fragrance different from all other fruits, and was almost as good when dried into flakes for travel rations, and has never been surpassed in my experience by any other garden sweet.
When we had been traveling for two or three weeks, the Silk Road abruptly turned northward for a little way, the only time it touched the Takla Makan, making a very short traverse across that desert’s eastern-most edge, then turning directly east again toward a town named Dun-huang. That northward jink of the road took us through a pass that twined among some low mountains—really they were extremely high sand dunes—called the Flame Hills.
There is a legend to account for every place-name in Kithai, and according to legend these hills once were lushly forested and green, until they were set afire by some malicious kwei, or demons. A monkey god came along and kindly blew out the flames, but there was nothing left except these mountainous heaps of sand, still glowing like embers. That is the legend. I am more inclined to think that the Flame Hills are so called because their sands are a sort of burnt ocher color, and are windswept into flame-shaped furrows and wrinkles, and they perpetually shimmer behind a curtain of hot air, and—especially at sunset—they do glow a truly fiery red-orange color. But the most curious thing about them was a nest of four eggs which Ussu and Donkuk uncovered from the sand at the base of one of the dunes. I would have thought the objects were only large stones, perfectly oval and smooth and about the size of hami melons, but Donduk insisted:
“These are the abandoned eggs of a giant rukh bird. Such nests can be found all along the Flame Hills here.”
When I held one, I realized that it was indeed too light for a stone of that size. And when I examined it, I saw that it did have a porous surface, exactly as do the eggs of hens or ducks or any other bird. These were eggs, all right, and far bigger even than those of the camel-bird, which I had seen in Persian markets. I wondered what kind of a for-tagiona these would make if I broke them and scrambled them and fried them for our evening meal.
“These Flame Hills,” said Ussu, “must have been the rukh’s favored nesting place in times past, Ferenghi, do you not think so, uu?”
“Times very long past,” I suggested, for I had just tried to crack one of the eggs. Although it was not of stonelike weight, it had long ago aged and petrified to stonelike solidity. So the things were both uneatable and unhatchable, and they were too unwieldy for me to carry one off for a memento. They were most certainly eggs, and of a size that could have been laid only by a monster bird, but whether in truth that bird had been a rukh, I cannot say.
5
DUN-HUANG was a thriving trade town, about as big and as populous as Kashgar, sitting in a sandy basin ringed by camel-colored rock cliffs. But where Kashgar’s inns had catered to Muslim travelers, those of Dun-huang made special provision for the tastes and customs of Buddhists. This was because the town had been founded, some nine hundred years ago, when a traveling trader of the Buddhist faith was beset, somewhere on the Silk Road hereabout, by bandits or the azghun voices or a kwei demon or something, and was somehow miraculously saved from those malign clutches. So he paused here to give thanks to the Buddha, and he did that by making a statue of that deity and placing it in a niche in one of the cliffs. In the nine centuries since, every other Buddhist traveler on the Silk Road has added an adornment to another of those caves. And now the name of Dun-huang, though it really means only Yellow Cliffs, is sometimes translated as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.
The designation is too modest. I would call these the Caves of the Million Buddhas, at the very least. For there are now some hundreds of caves pocking the cliffs, some natural, some hewn out by hand, and in them are perhaps two thousand statues of the Buddha, large and small, but on the cave walls are painted frescoes displaying at least a thousand times that many images of the Buddha, not to mention lesser divinities and worthies of the Buddha’s retinue. I could discern that most of the images were male, and some just as clearly female, but a goodly number were indistinct as to sex. However, all had one feature in common: they all had tremendously elongated ears with lobes dangling to their shoulders.
“It is a common belief,” said the old Han caretaker, “that a person born with large ears and well-defined earlobes is destined for good fortune. Since the most fortunate of all humans were the Buddha and his disciples, we assume that they had such ears, and we depict them so.”