We departed the inn at sunrise, when all the just-waking birds were uttering their morning chirps and cheeps and twitters, so many and so loud that they sounded like grease sizzling in a great pan. Then the later-rousing doves awoke, to murmur their discreet plaints and regrets, but in such numbers that their low warbling was near a roar. A considerable karwan train was also leaving the inn yard that morning, and in these regions the camels wore their bells not on a neckband, but on their front knees. So they strode out jingling and clanging and bonging as if they musically rejoiced in being on the move. I rode my horse alongside one of that train’s wagons for a space, and one of its massive wheels had caught up somewhere a spray of jasmine in its spokes, and every time that high wheel revolved it brought the blossoms past my face and wafted their sweet scent to my nose.
The route out of the Dun-huang basin took us through a cleft in the cave-pocked cliffs, and that opened into a valley verdant with trees and fields and wildflowers, the last such oasis we would see for a while. As we rode through that valley I saw something so beautiful that I still can see it in my memory. Some way ahead of us, a plume of golden-yellow smoke rose up on the morning breeze, and we all remarked on it and wondered at it. Perhaps it came from a fire in a karwan camp, but what could the campers be burning to make such a distinctively colored cloud? The smoke continued to rise and billow, and eventually we came up to it and saw that it was not smoke at all. On the left side of the valley there was a meadow totally covered with golden-yellow flowers, and all those numberless flowers were exultantly freeing their golden-yellow pollen to let the breeze carry it across the Silk Road and away to the other slopes of the valley. We rode through that cloud of seeming smoke, and we came out the other side of it, and we and our horses shimmered in the sunlight as if we had been freshly plated with pure gold.
Another thing. From the valley, we emerged into a land of undulant sand dunes, but the sand was no longer the color of camels or lions, it was a dark silvery gray, like a powdered metal. Nostril got down from his horse to relieve himself, and climbed over a dune of the gray sand, seeking privacy, and to his surprise—and mine—the sand barked like a peevish dog at each of his footsteps. It made no particular noise when Nostril wetted on it, but, as he turned to descend the dune, his foot slipped and he slid the whole way down from the crest, and his slide was accompanied by a lovely loud musical note, vibrato, as if a string on the world’s biggest lute had been thrummed.
“Mashallah!” Nostril blurted fearfully, as he picked himself up. He ran all the way from the sand to the firmer surface of the road before pausing to dust himself off.
My father and uncle and the two escorts were all laughing at him. One of the Mongols said, “These sands are called the lui-ing.”
“The thunder voices,” Uncle Mafio translated for me. “Nico and I have heard them when we passed this way before. They will cry also if the wind blows hard, and they cry loudest in winter, when the sands are cold.”
Now, that was a thing most marvelous. But it was only a thing of this earth, as were the sunrise birdsongs and the common camel bells and the perfumed jasmine and the golden wild flowers so determined to flourish that they flung their seed haphazard to the wind.
This world is fair, I thought, and life is good, no matter whether one is certain of Heaven or apprehensive of Hell at the end of it. I could only pity such pathetic persons as Buddhists, deeming the earth and their existence on it so ugly and miserable and repugnant that their highest yearning was to flee into sheer oblivion. Not I, not ever I. If I might accept any of the Buddhist beliefs, it would be that of rebirth over and over into this world, though it mean coming back sometimes as a lowly dove or a sprig of jasmine between my human incarnations. Yes, I thought, if I could I would go on living forever.
6
THE land continued gray, but that color got darker as we went eastward, darkening to veritable black—black grit and black gravel drifting over black bedrock—for we had come now to another desert, one too broad and extensive for the Silk Road to skirt around. It was called by the Mongols the Gobi, and by the Han the Sha-mo, both words meaning a desert of that peculiar composition: one from which all the sand had long ago blown away, leaving only the heavier particles, and they all black. It made for an unearthly landscape, appearing to be not of pebbles and stones and rocks, but of even harder metal. In the sun, every black hill and boulder and ridge glittered with a sharp bright rim as if it had been honed on a whetstone. The only growing things were the colorless plumes of camel-weed and some tufts of colorless grass like fine metal wires.
The Gobi is also called by travelers the Great Silence, because any conversation softer than a shout goes unheard there, and so does the clatter of black stones rolling and shifting underfoot, and so do the piteous whinnies of sore-footed horses, and so do the whines and grumbles of a complainer like Nostril, all such noises blotted out by the everlasting wail of the wind. Over the Gobi the wind blows ceaselessly through three hundred and sixty days of the year, and, in the late summer days of our crossing, it blew as hot as a blast from the opened doors of the fearsome ovens of the vasty kitchens of the nethermost levels of Satan’s fiercest Inferno.
The next town we came to, Anxi, must be the most desolately situated community in all Kithai. It was a mere cluster of shacky shops peddling karwan necessities, and some travelers’ inns and stables, all of unpainted wood and mud-brick much pitted and eroded by wind-blown grit. The town had come into being there on the edge of the dreary Gobi only because at this point the two branches of the Silk Road came together again—the southerly one by which we arrived in town, and the other route that had circled around north of the Takla Makan—and at Anxi they merged into the single road that goes on, without again dividing, over the interminable more li to the Kithai capital of Khanbalik. At this convergence of roads, there was of course an even more bustling traffic of individual traders and groups and families and karwan trains. But one procession of mule-drawn wagons made me ask our escorts:
“What kind of train is that? It moves so slowly and so quietly.”
All the wheels of the wagons had their rims tied about with bunched hay and rags, to muffle the sound of them, and the mules had their hoofs tied in bags of wadding for the same purpose. That did not make the train entirely noiseless, for the wheels and hoofs still made a rumbling and clumping sound, and there was much creaking of the wooden wagon beds and leather harness, but its progress was quieter than that of most trains. Besides the Han men driving the wagon mules, other Han were mounted on mules as outriders and, as they accompanied the train through Anxi, they rode like an honor guard, shouldering a path through the crowded streets, but never using their voices to demand clear passage.
The street folk moved obligingly aside and silenced their own chatter and averted their faces, as if the train were that of some grand and haughty personage. But there was no one in the procession except those drivers and escorts; no one rode in any of the several score wagons. They were occupied only by heaps of what might have been rolled tents or rugs, many hundreds of them, cloth-wrapped long bundles, piled like cordwood in the wagon beds. Whatever those objects were, they looked very old, and they gave off a dry, musty smell, and their cloth wrappings were all tattered and shredded and flapping. When the wagons jounced on the rutted streets, they shed bits and flakes of cloth.