However, because I was young, I was resilient. After a while, I convinced myself that no real harm had been done—except perhaps to my self-esteem—and that neither of the Princesses was likely to gossip and make me a universal laughingstock. By the time Jamshid gave us his final “salaam aleikum” and turned his horse back for Baghdad, I was able again to look about me and see the country through which we were riding. We were then, and would be for some time, in a land of pleasantly green valleys winding among cool blue hills. That was good, for it enabled us to get used to our camels before we should reach the harder going in the desert.
I will mention that riding a camel is no more difficult than riding a horse, once one has acquired a head for the much higher altitude where one is perched. A camel walks with a mincing gait and wears a supercilious sneer, exactly like certain men of a certain sort. That gait is easy for even a new rider to adjust to, and the riding is easiest done with both legs on the same side, in the way a woman rides a horse sidesaddle, one’s forward leg crooked around the saddle bow. The camel is reined, not with a bridle, but with a line tied to a wooden peg permanently fixed in its snout. The camel’s sneer gives it a look of haughty intelligence, but that is entirely spurious. One must constantly be aware that a camel is among the most stupid of beasts. An intelligent horse may take a notion to play pranks, to vex or unseat its rider. A camel would never be capable of such an idea, but neither does it have a horse’s good sense to watch its way and sidestep avoidable hazards. A camel’s rider must stay alert and guide it even around obvious rocks and holes, lest it fall or snap a leg.
As we had been doing ever since Acre, we were still traveling through country that was as new to my father and uncle as it was to me, because they had earlier crossed Asia, both going eastward and returning home, by a much more northerly route. Therefore, with whatever misgivings, they left our direction to the slave Nostril, who claimed to have traversed this country many times in his life of wandering. And so he must have done, for he confidently led us along, and did not pause at the frequent branchings of the trail, but always seemed to know which fork to take. Precisely at that first day’s sundown, he brought us to a comfortably appointed karwansarai. By way of rewarding Nostril’s good conduct, we did not make him put up in the stable with the camels, but paid for him to eat and sleep in the main building of the establishment.
As we sat about the dining cloth that night, my father studied the papers the Shah had given us, and said:
“I remember your telling us, Nostril, that you have borne other names. It appears from these documents that you have served each of your previous masters under a different one. Sindbad. Ali Babar. Ali-ad-Din. They are all nicer sounding names than Nostril. By which would you prefer that we call you?”
“By none of them, if you please, Master Nicolò. They all belong to past and forgotten phases of my life. Sindbad, for example, refers only to the land of Sind where I was born. I long ago left that name behind.”
I said, “The Shahryan Zahd told us some stories about the adventures of another habitual journeyer who called himself Sindbad the Sailor. Could that possibly have been you?”
“Someone very like me, perhaps, for the man was clearly a liar.” He chuckled at his own self-deprecation. “You gentlemen are from the marine republic of Venice, so you must know that no seaman ever calls himself a sailor. Always seaman or mariner, sailor being a landsman’s ignorant word. If that Sindbad could not get his own by-name correct, then his stories must be suspect.”
My father persisted, “I must inscribe on this paper some name for you under our ownership … .”
“Put down Nostril, good master,” he said airily. “That has been my name ever since the contretemps which earned it for me. You gentlemen might not believe it, but I was a surpassingly handsome man before that mutilation of my nose ruined my looks.”
He went on at great length about how handsome he had been when he still had two nostrils, and how sought after by women enamored of his manly beauty. In his early days, as Sindbad, he said, he had so entranced a lovely girl that she had risked her life to save him from an island peopled by winged and wicked men. Later, as Ali Babar, he had been captured by a band of thieves and thrust into a jar of sesame oil, and would have had his talking head pulled off his softened neck but that another lovely girl, beguiled by his charm, had rescued him from the jar and the thieves. As Ali-ad-Din, he with his handsome looks had emboldened yet another comely girl to save him from the clutches of an afriti commanded by an evil sorcerer … .
Well, the tales were as implausible as any told by the Shahryar Zahd, but no more implausible than his assertion that he had once been a good-looking man. No one could have believed that. Had he had the normal two nostrils, or three, or none, it would not have improved his resemblance to a large-beaked, chinless, pot-bellied shuturmurq camelbird, made even more comical by a stubble of beard under its beak. He went on even more incredibly, embellishing his claim of physical appeal by claiming to have done exploits of bravery and ingenuity and fortitude. We listened politely, but we knew all his rodomontata to be—as my father said later—“All vine and no grapes.”
Some days afterward, when my uncle compared our eastward progress against the maps in the Kitab of al-Idrisi, he announced that we had arrived at a historic place. According to his calculations, we were somewhere very near the spot, recorded in The Book of Alexander, where, during the conqueror’s march across Persia, the Amazon Queen Thalestris had come with her host of warrior women to greet and pay homage to him. We could only take Uncle Mafìo’s word, for there was in that place no monument to commemorate the occasion.
In after years, I have often been asked whether I in my journeyings ever found the nation of Amazonia, or, as some call it, the Land of Femynye. Not there in Persia, I did not. Later, in the Mongol domains, I met many warrior women, but they were all subservient to their menfolk. I have also been often asked whether, out yonder in those far lands, I ever met the Prete Zuàne, called in other languages Presbyter Johannes and Prester John, that reverend and mighty man so shrouded in myth and fable and legend and enigma.
For more than a hundred years, the Western world has been hearing rumor and report of him: a direct descendant of the royal Magi who first worshiped the Christ child, hence himself royal and devoutly Christian, and furthermore wealthy and powerful and wise. As the Christian monarch of a reputedly immense Christian realm, he has been a figure to tantalize Western imagination. Given our fragmented West, of many and little nations, ruled by comparatively petty kings and dukes and such, forever warring against each other—and a Christianity continually sprouting new and schismatic and antagonistic sects—we needs must look with wistful admiration on a vast congeries of peoples all peaceably united under one ruler and one supreme pontiff, and both of those embodied in one majestic man.
Also, whenever our West has been beleaguered by heathen savages swarming out of the East—Huns, Tàtars, Mongols, the Muslim Saracens —we have fervently hoped and prayed that the Prete Zuàne would emerge from his still farther East and come up behind the invaders with his legions of Christian warriors, so that those heathens would be caught and crushed between his armies and ours. But the Prete Zuàne never has ventured out of his mysterious fastnesses, neither to help the Christian West in its recurrent times of need nor even to make demonstration of his existence in reality. Does he then exist, and if so, who is he? Does he really hold sway over a far-off Christian empire, and if so, where is it?