Though Kubilai’s advance riders had made sure that all the mountain inhabitants expected the arrival of me and my escorts, and we got the best hospitality those people could give us, it was not exactly of royal quality. Only occasionally did we come to a place in the mountains flat and habitable enough to support even a meager village of woodcutters’ huts. More often we spent the night in a cliff niche where the road was built wide enough for travelers going in opposite directions to edge past each other. At those places there was a group of rough men stationed, waiting to receive us, having erected a yak-hair tent for us to sleep in, and having brought some meat or killed a mountain sheep or goat to cook for us over an open camp fire.

I well remember the first time we stopped in such a place, when the day was just darkening to dusk. The three mountain men awaiting us made salutations and ko-tou and—since we could not converse; they knew no Mongol, and spoke some tongue which was not even Han—they immediately set about making our evening meal. They built up a good fire, and spitted some cutlets of musk deer over it, and hung a pot of water to heat. I noticed that the men had made the fire of wooden branches—which must have required much labor of clambering up and down the steep ravine sides to collect—but also had a small pile of pieces of zhu-gan cane lying beside it. The dusk had deepened to full darkness by the time the food was ready, and, while two of the men served us, the other tossed one of those bits of cane onto the fire.

The deer meat was better than the usual mountain fare of mutton or goat, but the accompaniments were ghastly. The meat was handed to me in a hunk, for me to hold while I tore at it with my teeth. The only implement provided me was a shallow wooden bowl, into which one of the servers poured hot green cha. But I had taken only a couple of sips before the other server politely took it from me, to add to it. He held a platter of yak butter, all stuck about with hairs and lint and road dust, and grooved by the fingers of those who had dug at it previously, and with his own black fingernails raked off a lump and dropped it into my cha to melt. The dirty yak butter would have been repellent enough, but then he opened a filthy cloth sack and poured into the cha bowl something that looked like sawdust.

“Tsampa,” he said.

When I only peered at the mess with disgust and bewilderment, he demonstrated what was to be done with it. He stuck his grimy fingers into my bowl and worked the sawdust and butter together until it became a paste, then a doughy lump when it had absorbed all the cha in the bowl. Then, before I could move to prevent it, he pinched off a wad of that tepid, dirty dough and poked it into my mouth.

“Tsampa,” he said again, and chewed and swallowed as if to show me how.

I could now taste—apart from the bitter green cha and the rancid, cheesy yak butter—that the apparent sawdust was really barley meal. But I do not know if I would voluntarily have swallowed the wad, except that I was abruptly startled into doing so. The camp fire gave a sudden, tremendous bang! and threw up a constellation of sparks into the darkness—and I gulped my tsampa and leaped to my feet, and so did my two escorts, while the noise echoed and reechoed from all the mountains around. Two things went through my mind in that instant. One was the dreadful thought that one of the charged brass balls had somehow fallen into the fire. The other was a recollection of words once heard: “Expect me when you least expect me.”

But the mountain men were laughing at our surprise, and making gestures to calm us and explain what had happened. They held up one of the pieces of zhu-gan cane and pointed to the fire and jumped about and bared their teeth and growled. They made it clear enough. The mountains were full of tigers and wolves. To keep them off, it was their practice to toss into the camp fire every so often a joint of zhu-gan. The heat evidently made its inner juices seethe until the steam burst the cane apart—quite like a charge of the flaming powder—with that enormous noise. I had no doubt that it would keep predators at bay; it had made me swallow the awful stuff called tsampa.

Later on, I got so I could eat tsampa, never with enjoyment, but at least without violent repugnance. A man’s body requires other nourishment than meat and cha, and barley was the only domestic vegetable grown in those highlands. Tsampa was cheap and easily transportable and sustaining, if nothing else, and could be made a trifle more appetizing by the addition of sugar or salt or vinegar or the fermented bean sauce. I never got as fond of it as were the natives, who, after making the dough at mealtime, would tuck balls of the stuff inside their clothes and wear the tsampa all night and next day, so it got salted by their sweat, and they would pluck out a bit whenever they felt like having a snack.

I also got better acquainted with the zhu-gan cane. In Khanbalik, I had known it only as a graceful floral subject for painters like the Lady Chao and the Master of the Boneless Colors. But in these regions it was such a staple of life that I believe the people could not have existed without it. The zhu-gan grew wild, everywhere in the lowlands, from the Si-Chuan-Yun-nan border country southward throughout the tropics of Champa—where it was variously named in the various languages: banwu and mambu and other names—and everywhere it was used for many more purposes than frightening off tigers.

The zhu-gan would resemble any ordinary reed or cane, at least when it is young and only as thick as a finger, except that at intervals it has—very like a finger—nodes or knuckles along its length. Those mark little walls inside the cane, which interrupt its tubular length into separate compartments. For some uses—such as being thrown into a fire to burst—a single joint-length of the cane is employed, the wall intact at either end. For other purposes, the walls inside are punched through to make the cane a long tube. When the zhu-gan is no bigger around than a finger, it is easily cut with a knife. As it grows—and a single cane can get as tall and as big around as any tree—it must be laboriously sawed, for then it is almost as rigid as iron. But big or small, the zhu-gan is a beautiful plant, the cane part of it a golden color, the nodes sprouting withes with delicate green leaves at the ends; an immense clump of zhu-gan, all gold and green and catching the sun in its fronds, is a subject worthy of any painter.

In one of the few lowland places we crossed in that region, we came to a village built entirely of zhu-gan, and furnished with it, and totally dependent on it. The village, called Chieh-chieh, sat in a wide valley, through which ran one of the innumerable rivers of that country, and the whole valley bottom was thick with groves of the zhu-gan, and Chieh-chieh looked as if it too had grown there. Its houses were all made of the golden cane. Their walls were composed of arm-thick stalks of it, stood up side by side and lashed together; thicker lengths of zhu-gan were the posts and columns that held up roofs of split-cane segments laid over-and-underlapping like curved tiles. Inside each house, the furniture of tables and couches and floor mats was woven of slender strips peeled from the zhu-gan, as also were things like boxes, bird cages and baskets.

Because the river was bordered by extensive marshes, Chieh-chieh was situated several li distant from it, but the river’s water was brought all that way through a pipe made of waist-thick canes joined end to end, and in the village square that water spilled into a trough made of half a log-sized zhu-gan. From the trough, the village boys and girls carried water to their cane-built homes in buckets and pots and bottles, all of which were joints of zhu-gan of various sizes. In the homes, the women used splinters of the cane for pins and needles, and the unraveled fiber of it for thread. The menfolk made from split lengths of the cane both their hunting bows and the arrows for them, and carried the arrows in a quiver that was only a big joint of zhu-gan. They used tree-sized stalks of the cane as the masts for their fishing boats and, with ropes braided of zhu-gan fibers, hung from those masts sails of lattice-worked zhu-gan strips. The village’s headman probably had little writing to do, but he did it with a pen made of cane strip, split at one end, and wrote on paper made from the pulp scraped from the soft interior walls of the cane, and kept his written scrolls in a vase-sized joint of zhu-gan.