I must remark that the riverside inns in the Karabil provided better ferriage than forage for their guests. At only one karwansarai did we have a decent meal, in fact something unique in our experience thus far: huge and tasty steaks carved from a fish caught in the river outside the door. The steaks were so tremendous that we marveled and asked permission to go into the kitchen for a look at the fish they had been cut from. It was called an ashyotr, and it was bigger than a big man, bigger than Uncle Mafio, and instead of scales it had a shell of bony plates, and beneath its long snout it had barbels like whiskers. In addition to giving edible flesh, the ashyotr yielded a black roe, each egg of seed-pearl size, and we ate some of that too, salted and pressed to make a relish called khavyah.

But at the other inns the food was awful, and there was no reason for it to be, given the abundance of game in that country. Every landlord of a karwansarai seemed to think that he must serve his guests something they had not lately been eating. Since we had been dining on such delicacies as game birds and wild qazèl does, the innkeepers fed us the mutton of domestic sheep. The Karabil is not sheep country, meaning that the meat had probably traveled as far from its point of origin as we had, to get to the karwansarai. Mutton had long since ceased to delight me, and this was dried and salted and tough, and there was no oil or vinegar or anything else to season it with, only pungent red meleghèta pepper, and it was invariably accompanied by beans boiled in sugar water. After enough such gaseous meals, we could probably have served instead of the goatskins to support the masak rafts. But, to say one good thing about the inns in the Karabil, they charged only for their human patrons, not for the karwan animals. That was because wood was hard to come by, and the beasts paid their own way by leaving their dung to be dried for fuel.

The next city of any consequence to which we came was Balkh, and in times past that had been a city of truly great consequence: the site of one of Alexander’s main encampments, a major station for karwan traders traveling the Silk Road, a city of crowded bazars and majestic temples and luxurious karwansarais. But it had stood in the path of the first waves of Mongols rampaging out of the fastnesses to the east—meaning that earliest Mongol Horde commanded by the invincible Chinghiz Khan—and in the year 1220 the Horde had stamped upon Balkh as a booted foot might stamp upon an ant nest.

It was more than half a century later that my father, my uncle, our slave and I arrived in Balkh, but the city had not even yet recovered from that disaster. Balkh was a grand and noble ruin, but it was still a ruin. It was perhaps as busy and thriving as of old, but its inns and granaries and warehouses were only slatternly buildings thrown together of the broken bricks and planks left after the ruination. They looked even more dingy and pathetic, standing as they did among the stumps of once towering columns, the tumbled remains of once mighty walls and the jagged shells of once perfect domes.

Of course, few of Balkh’s current inhabitants were old enough to have been there when Chinghiz sacked the city, or before, when it had been far-famed as Balkh Umn-al-Bulud, the “Mother of Cities.” But their sons and grandsons, who were now the proprietors of the inns and counting houses and other establishments, appeared as dazed and miserable as if the devastation had occurred only yesterday, and in their own seeing. When they spoke of the Mongols, they recited what must have been a litany committed to memory by every Balkhite: “Amdand u khandand u sokhtand u kushtand u burdand u raftand,” which means, “They came and they slew and they burned and they plundered and they seized their spoils and they went on.”

They had gone on, yes, but this whole land, like so many others, was still under tribute and allegiance to the Mongol Khanate. The glum demeanor of the Balkhites was understandable, since a Mongol garrison was still encamped nearby. Armed Mongol warriors strode through the bazàr crowds, remindful that the grandson of Chinghiz, the Khakhan Kubilai, still held his heavy boot poised over the city. And his appointed magistrates and tax collectors still peered watchfully over the shoulders of the Balkhites in their market stalls and money-changing booths.

I could say, as I have said before, and say it truthfully, that everywhere east of the Furat River basin, away back at the far western beginning of Persia, we journeyers had been traversing the lands of the Mongol Khanate. But if we had thus simplistically marked our maps—writing nothing but “Mongol Khanate” over that whole vast area of the world—we might as well not have kept up our maps at all. They would have been of little use to us or anyone else without more detail than that. We did expect to retrace our trail someday, when we returned home again, and we also hoped that the maps would be of use even after that, for the guidance of whole streams of commerce flowing back and forth between Venice and Kithai. So, every day or so, my father and uncle would get out our copy of the Kitab and, only after deliberation and consultation and final agreement, they would inscribe upon it the symbols for mountains and rivers and towns and deserts and other such landmarks.

That had now become a more necessary task than before. From the shores of the Levant all the way across Asia, to Balkh or hereabouts, the Arab mapmaker al-Idrisi had proved a dependable guide for us. As my father had long ago remarked, al-Idrisi himself must at some time have traveled through all those regions and seen them with his own eyes. But, from the vicinity of Balkh on eastward, al-Idrisi seemed to have relied on hearsay information from other travelers, and not very observant travelers at that. The Kitab’s more easterly map pages were notably empty of landmarks, and what major things it did show—things like rivers and mountain ranges—frequently turned out to be incorrectly located.

“Also, the maps from here on seem exceedingly small,” said my father, frowning at those pages.

“Yes, by God,” said my uncle, scratching and coughing. “There is an almighty lot more land than he indicates, between here and the eastern ocean.”

“Well,” said my father. “We must be that much more assiduous in our own mapping.”

He and Uncle Mafio could usually agree, without long debate, on the penning-in of mountains and waters and towns and deserts, because those were things we could see and judge the measure of. What required deliberation and discussion, and sometimes sheer guesswork, was the drawing-in of invisible things, which is to say the borders of nations. That was maddeningly difficult, and only partly because the spread of the Mongol Khanate had engulfed so many once-independent states and nations and even whole races as to render immaterial—except to a mapmaker—the question of where they had been, and where they had abutted, and where the lines between them had lain. It would have been difficult even if some native of each nation had come with us to pace off the bounds of it for us. I daresay that would be a troublesome job on our own Italian peninsula, where no two city-states can yet agree on each other’s limits of ownership and authority. But in central Asia the extents of the nations and their frontiers and even their names have been in flux since long before the Mongols made those matters moot.

I shall illustrate. Somewhere during our long traverse from Mashhad to Balkh, we had crossed the invisible line which, in Alexander’s time, marked the division between two lands known as Arya and Bactria. Now it marks—or at least it did until the Mongols came—the division between the lands of Greater Persia and Greater India. But let me pretend for a moment that the Mongol Khanate does not exist, and try to give some idea of the confusion attendant throughout history on that imprecise border.