India may once have been inhabited in all its vastness by the small, dark people we now know as the Indians. But long ago the incursions of more vigorous and courageous peoples pushed those original Indians into a smaller and smaller compass of land, so that nowadays the Hindu India lies far distant to the south and east of here. This northern India Aryana is the habitat of the descendants of those long-ago invaders, and they are not of the Hindu but of the Muslim religion. Every least tribe calls itself a nation and gives its nation a name and asserts that its nation has mappable borders. Most of the names hereabout end in -stan, which signifies “land of”—Khaljistan, meaning Land of the Khalji, and Pakhtunistan and Kohistan and Afghanistan and Nuristan and I disremember how many others.
In olden time, it was somewhere in this area, in either the then-Arya or the then-Bactria, that Alexander the Great, during his eastward march of conquest, met and fell enamored of and took to wife the Princess Roxana. Nobody can say exactly where that happened, or of what tribe’s “royal family” Roxana was a member. But nowadays and hereabout, every one of the local tribes—Pakhtuni, Khalji, Afghani, Kirghiz and every other—claims descent from, first, the royal line which produced Roxana and, also, the Macedonians of Alexander’s army. There may even be some cause for those claims. Although the greater number of people one sees in Balkh and its environs possess dark hair and skin and eyes, which presumably Roxana also had, there are among them many persons of fair complexion and blue or gray eyes and reddish or even yellow hair.
However, each tribe purports to be the only true descendants, and on that basis claims sole sovereignty over all these lands now constituting India Aryana. To me, that seemed a devious sort of reasoning, since even Alexander was a latecomer here, and an unwelcome marauder, so all the natives here—except perhaps the Princess Roxana—should have felt about the Macedonians as they now feel about the Mongols.
The one thing we found common to all the peoples in these regions was the still later come religion of Islam. In accord with Muslim custom, then, we never got to converse with any but the male persons, and that made Uncle Mafio skeptical of their boasts of their lineage. He quoted an old Venetian couplet:
La mare xe segura
E’l pare de ventura.
Which is to say that, while a father may claim to know, only a mother can know for certain who sired each of her children.
I have recounted this tangled and disjointed bit of history merely to indicate how it added to the other frustrations of us would-be mapmakers. Whenever my father and uncle sat down together to decide the designations to ink onto our map pages, hoping to do that tidily, the discussion might go untidily thus:
“To begin with, Mafio, this land is in the portion of the Khanate governed by the Ilkhan Kaidu. But we must be more specific.”
“How specific, Nico? We do not know what Kaidu or Kubilai or any other Mongol officially calls this region. All the Western cosmographers call it merely the India Aryana of Greater India.”
“They have never set foot upon it. The Westerner Alexander did, and he called it Bactria.”
“But most of the local folk call it Pakhtunistan.”
“On the other hand, al-Idrisi has it marked as Mazar-i-Sharif.”
“Gèsu! It occupies only a thumb span of the map. Is it worth this fuss?”
“The Ilkhan Kaidu would not maintain a garrison here if the land were worthless. And the Khakhan Kubilai will wish to see how accurately we have done our maps.”
“All right.” Sigh of exasperation. “Let us give it a good thinking over … .”
2
WE dawdled in Balkh for a time, not because it was an attractive city, but because there were high mountains to the eastward, on the way we had yet to go. And now there was snow thick on the ground even here in the lower lands, so we knew the mountains would be impassable until perhaps late in the spring. Since we had to wait out the winter somewhere, we decided that our Balkh karwansarai was a comfortable enough place to spend at least part of it.
The food was good and ample and fairly various, as it should have been, at such a crossroads of commerce. There were excellent breads, and several sorts of fish, and the meat, though it was mutton, was broiled in a tasty brochette manner called shashlik. There were savory winter melons and well-kept pomegranates, besides all the usual dried fruits. There was no qahwah in those parts, but there was another hot beverage called cha, made of steeped leaves, almost as vivifying as qahwah and equally fragrant, though in a different way, and much thinner in consistency. The staple vegetable was still beans and the only other accompaniment to the meals was the everlasting rice, but we contributed a fragment of a brick of zafràn to the kitchen, and so made the rice palatable and won those cooks the praise of every other patron of that karwansarai.
Since zafràn was as much of a novelty and a nonesuch in Balkh as it had been in other places, our budgets were ample for buying anything we needed or wanted. My father traded bits of the brick and hay zafràn for coin of the realm and, when an occasional merchant pleaded eloquently enough, would even deign to sell him a culm or two or three, so the khaja could start growing his own crocus crop. For each culm, my father demanded and got a number of gems of beryl or lapis lazura, of which stones this land is the chief source in all the world, and those were worth a great deal of coin indeed. So we were nicely well-to-do, and had not yet so much as opened our cods of musk.
We bought for ourselves heavy winter clothing, wools and furs, made in the local style. In that locality, the main garment was the chapon, which, as need required, could serve either for an overcoat or for a blanket or for a tent. When worn as a coat, it hung to the ground all around and its capacious sleeves hung a good foot-length beyond the fingertips. It looked ungainly and comical, but what people really looked at was not the fit but the color of one’s chapon, for that told one’s wealth. The lighter the color of the chapon, the harder it was to keep clean, and the more frequently it had to be cleaned, and the more it cost for that cleaning, and so it signified that the man wearing it cared little for that cost, and a chapon of pure snow-white color meant that its wearer was a man so rich he could be criminally spendthrift. My father and uncle and I each settled for a chapon of a medium tan color, indicating something modestly between opulence and the dark-brown of the chapon we bought for our slave Nostril. We also donned the local style of boot, called the chamus, which had a tough but flexible leather sole, bound to a soft leather upper which reached to the knee, and was held on by thongs wrapped around the calf. We also traded our flatland saddles, and paid a goodly sum of coin besides, to buy new saddles with high pommels and cantles that would seat us more securely during upland riding.
What time we were not buying or trading in the bazàr, we put to other uses. The slave Nostril fed and curried and combed our horses to prime condition, and we Polos made conversation with other karwan journeyers. We gave them our observations on the routes to the westward of Balkh, and those of them who had come from the east told us news of the routes and travel conditions out there. My father painstakingly wrote a letter of several pages to the Dona Fiordelisa, recounting our travels and progress and assuring her of our wellbeing, and gave it to the leader of a westbound train, to start it on the long way back to Venice. I remarked that a letter might have had a better prospect of getting there if he had posted one on the other side of the Great Salt.