When my escorts and I dined that night in Chieh-chieh, the meal was served in bowls that were halved joints of big zhu-gan, and the nimble tongs were slender sticks of zhu-gan, and the meal included—besides river fish fresh-caught with a zhu-gan fiber net and broiled over a fire of burning zhu-gan scraps—the soft-boiled and succulent shoots of new-sprouted zhu-gan, and some of the same shoots pickled for a condiment, and some more of them candied for a sweet. None of us visitors was ill or injured, but, if we had been, we might have been doctored with tang-zhu, which is a liquid that fills the hollow joints of the zhu-gan when it has just come to maturity, and that tang-zhu has many medicinal uses.
I learned all those things about the zhu-gan from Chieh-chieh’s elderly headman, one Wu. He was the only villager who spoke Mongol, and in consequence he and I sat up talking quite late, while my two escorts, one after the other, wearied of listening to us and went off to their allotted bedchambers. Old Wu and I were at last interrupted by a young woman coming into the cane-walled room where we sat on cane couches, to make what sounded like a whine of complaint.
“She wishes to know if you are never coming to bed,” said Wu. “This is the prime female of Chieh-chieh, chosen from all the others to make your night here memorable, and she is eager to get on with it.”
“Hospitable of her,” I said, and regarded her with speculation.
The people in that Land of the Four Rivers, men and women alike, wore clothing that was lumpy and shapeless: a hat like a sort of pod for the head, robes and wraps and shawls layered from shoulders to feet, clumsy boots with upturned toes. The body garments were all patterned in broad stripes of two different colors, and everybody in a village wore the same two colors, and the colors of each village were different—so a “foreigner” from the next village down the road could be instantly recognized—and the colors were always dark and dingy ones (in Chieh-chieh they were brown and gray) so they would not show the ingrained dirt of them. In the mountain communities, that costume made the people blend into their background, which may have been useful for hunting or hiding. But in Chieh-chieh, against the background of bright gold and green, it made them obtrusively unsightly.
Since the men and women were indistinguishably garbed, indistinguishably hairless of face, flat of features, ruddy-brown of complexion, they had to show—even for their own convenience, I would suppose—something to mark their sex. So the stripes of a woman’s garments went up and down, the stripes of a man’s from side to side. A real foreigner like myself, not immediately perceiving that subtle difference of costume, could only tell them apart when they took off their pod hats. The men could then be seen to have their heads shaven and a gold or silver ring in the left ear. The women had their hair twisted into a multitude of thin, spiky braids—to be specific, exactly one hundred and eight braids, that being the number of books in the Kandjur, the Buddhist scriptures, and these people being all Buddhists.
Since my journey that day had not been a punishing one, and since the prettiness of the cane-built village had relaxed and rested me, I was inclined to indulge my curiosity as to what other evidences of femininity might lurk beneath this young woman’s graceless garments. I noticed that she was wearing an ornament: a neck chain from which depended a fringe of jingling silver coins—and, assuming that they also numbered one hundred and eight, I said to old Wu:
“When you call her the village’s prime female, do you refer to her wealth or her piety?”
“Neither,” he said. “The coins attest to her female charms and desirability.”
“Indeed?” I said, and stared at her. The neck chain was attractive enough, but I could not see how it made her any more so.
“In this land, our young women compete,” he explained, “as to which of them can lie with the most men—those of their own village, or other villages, or casual passersby, or the men of trains traveling through —and require of each man a coin in token of the coupling. Clearly, the girl who amasses the most coins has attracted and satisfied the most men, and is preeminent among women.”
“You mean marked an outcast, surely.”
“I mean preeminent. When she finally is ready to marry and settle down, she can take her pick of husbands. Every eligible young man vies for her hand.”
“Her hand no doubt being the least used-up part of her,” I said, slightly scandalized. “In civilized lands, a man marries a virgin whom he knows is his alone.”
“That is all that can be known of a virgin,” said old Wu, with a disparaging sniff. “A man wedding a virgin risks getting a fish less warm than the one you ate at dinner. A man wedding any of our women gets credentials of her desirability and experience and talents. He also gets, not incidentally, a fair dowry of coins. And this young lady is most eager now to add your coin to her string, for she has never had one from a Ferenghi.”
I was not averse to lying with nonvirgins, and it might have been instructive to lie with one who brought credentials to the encounter. But the young woman was most regrettably plain, and I did not much like being regarded as just one more of a string. So I mumbled some excuse about being on a pilgrimage, and bound by a vow of the Ferenghi religion. I gave her a coin anyway, as recompense for my spurning of her well-attested charms, and escaped to my bed. It was a bedstead woven of strips of zhu-gan and it was very comfortable, but it creaked all night, with just me alone in it, and must have waked the whole village if I had availed myself of Chieh-chieh’s prime female. So I decided that the zhu-gan cane, for all its marvelous usefulness to mankind, was not ideal for every human purpose.
2
MY escorts and I rode on, through the alternation of mountains, ravines and valleys, sometimes up on the stark heights of the Pillar Road, occasionally down in the bright zhu-gan lowlands. That terrain did not change noticeably, but we realized that we had reached the High Land of To-Bhot when the people we met began to greet us by uncovering their heads, scratching the right ear, rubbing the left hip, and sticking out their tongues at us. That absurd salute—signifying that the greeter intends to think, hear, do or speak no evil—was peculiar to the people called Drok and Bho. Actually, they were the same people, only the nomads were called Drok and the settled ones Bho. The herder-and-hunter Drok lived like the plains-dwelling Mongols, and might have been indistinguishable from them except for their style of tent, which was black instead of yellow and was not supported by an interior lattice, as was the yurtu. A Drok tent had its walls pegged to the ground and its top hung up by long ropes which ran over high poles propped some distance away, then down to ground pegs farther off. That gave the tent the appearance of a black karakurt spider, crouched among its skinny, high-kneed legs.
The farmer-and-merchant Bho, though they had settled in communities, lived even more uncomfortably than the nomad Drok. They had tucked their villages and towns into high cliff crannies, which required them to pile their houses one atop another and another. That was contrary to what I knew of the Buddhist religion, which holds that the human head is the residence of the soul, so that a mother will not even pat the head of her own child. Yet here were the Bho living in such a manner that everybody dumped his wastes and trash and excretions on his neighbor’s plot and rooftop, and often enough in his very hair. That custom of building as high up as possible, I learned, dated from some long-ago time when the Bho worshiped a god called Amnyi Machen, or “Old Man Great Peacock,” who was believed to live in the highest peaks, and everyone tried to reside close to the god.