“No make trouble!” the girl pleaded, looking scared. “I give you dirham back.”

“I cannot wear a dirham across the city! What kind of lunatic place is this? Why did you people burn my clothes?”

“Wait. Look.” She snatched up a piece of unburned charcoal from the brazier and gave it a swipe across a sleeve of her own tunic to make a black mark. Then she held the sleeve over the burning coals.

“You are divanè!” I exclaimed. But the cloth did not take fire. There was only a single flash as the black mark burned away. The girl took the sleeve from the fire to show me how it was suddenly spotless, and babbled a mixture of Pashtun and Farsi, of which I gradually got the import. That heavy and mysterious fabric was always cleaned in that manner, and my clothes had been so crusty that she had taken them to be of the same material.

“All right,” I said. “I forgive you. It was a well-intentioned mistake. But I am still without anything to wear. Now what?”

She indicated that I could choose which of two things I would do. I could lodge a complaint with the Gebr master, and demand that he procure new raiment for me, which would cost the girl her day’s wages and probably a beating besides. Or I could put on what clothes were available—meaning some of hers—and go across the city of Balkh in feminine masquerade. Well, that meant no choice at all; I must be a gentleman; therefore I must play the lady.

I scuttled out through the shop as fast as I could, but I was still adjusting my chador veil, and the old Gebr behind the counter raised his eyebrows, exclaiming, “You took me seriously! You are showing me a beautiful one among these country rustics!”

I snarled at him one of the few Pashtun expressions I knew: “Bahi chut!” which is a directive to do something to one’s own sister.

He guffawed and called after me, “I would, if she were as pretty as you!” while I scurried out into the still falling snow.

Except for stumbling now and then, because I could see the ground only dimly through the obscuring snow and my chador, and also because I frequently stepped on my own hems, I got back to the karwansarai without incident. That disappointed me a little, for I had gone the whole way with my teeth and fists clenched and my temper seething, hoping to be rudely addressed or winked at by some Eve-baiting oaf, so I could kill him. I slipped into the inn by a rear door, unobserved, and hurried to put on clothes of my own, and started to throw away the girl’s. But then I reconsidered, and cut from her gown a square of the cloth to keep for a curiosity, and with it I have since astonished many persons disinclined to believe that any cloth could be proof against fire.

Now, I had heard of such a substance long before I left Venice. I had heard priests tell that the Pope at Rome kept among the treasured relics of the Church a sudarium, a cloth which had been used to wipe the Holy Brow of Jesus Christ. The cloth had been so sanctified by that use, they said, that it could nevermore be destroyed. It could be thrown into a fire, and left there for a long time, and taken out again miraculously entire and unscorched. I also had heard a distinguished physician contest the priestly claim that it was the Holy Sweat which made the sudarium impervious to destruction. He insisted that the cloth must be woven of the wool of the salamander, that creature which Aristotle averred lives comfortably in fire.

I will respectfully contradict both the reverent believers and the pragmatic Aristotelian. For I took the trouble to inquire about that unburnable fabric woven by the Gebr fire worshipers, and eventually I was shown how it is made, and the truth of the matter is this. In the mountains in the region of Balkh is found a certain rock of palpable softness. When that rock is crushed, it comes apart not in grains, as of sand, but in fibers, as of raw flax. And those fibers, after repeated mashing and drying and washing and drying again and carding and spindling, are spun together into thread. It is clear that of any thread a cloth can be woven, and it is equally clear that a cloth made of earth’s rock ought not burn. The curious rock and the coarse fiber and the magical material woven of it, all are regarded by the Gebr as sacred to their fire god Ahura Mazda, and they call that substance by a word meaning “unsoilable stone,” which I take the liberty of rendering in a more civilized tongue as amianthus.

3

MY father and Nostril were gone for some five or six weeks, and, because Uncle Mafio required my attendance only intermittently, I had a good deal of spare time on my hands. So I went back several times to the house of the Gebr Persian—each time taking care to wear clothes that would not need “laundering.” And every time I spoke the password, “Show me your softest goods,” the old man would convulse with amusement and roar, “Why, you were the softest and most appealing piece that ever passed through this shop!” and I would have to stand and endure his guffaws until he finally subsided into giggles and took my dirham and told me which room was available.

At one time or another, I sampled all three of his back-room wares. But all the girls were Pakhtuni Muslims and tabzir, meaning that I found only release with them, not any satisfaction worth mentioning. I could have done that with the kuch-i-safari, and more cheaply. I did not even learn more than a few words of Pashtun from the girls, deeming it too slovenly a language to be worth learning. Just for example, the sound gau, when spoken normally on an exhaled breath, means “cow,” but the same gau, spoken while breathing in, means “calf.” So imagine what the simple sentence “The cow has a calf” sounds like in Pashtun, and then try to imagine conducting a conversation of any more complexity.

On my way out through the amianthus-cloth shop, though, I would pause to exchange some few words in Farsi with the Gebr proprietor. He would usually make some further mocking remarks about the day I had had to masquerade as a woman, but he would also condescend to answer my questions about his peculiar religion. I asked because he was the only devotee of that old-time Persian religion I had ever met. He admitted that there were few believers left in these days, but he maintained that the religion once had reigned supreme, not only in Persia but west and east of there as well, from Armeniya to Bactria. And the first thing he told me about it was that I should not call a Gebr a Gebr.

“The word means only ‘non-Muslim’ and it is used by the Muslims derisively. We prefer to be called Zarduchi, for we are the followers of the prophet Zaratushtra, the Golden Camel. It was he who taught us to worship the god Ahura Mazda, whose name is nowadays slurred to Ormuzd.”

“And that means fire,” I said knowledgably, for Nostril had told me that much. I nodded toward the bright lamp that always burned in the shop.

“Not fire,” he said, sounding annoyed. “It is a stupid misbelief that we worship fire. Ahura Mazda is the God of Light, and we merely keep a flame burning as a reminder of His beneficent light which banishes the darkness of his adversary Ahriman.”

“Ah,” I said. “Not too different, then, from our own Lord God, Who contends against the adversary Satan.”

“No, not different at all. Your Christian God and Satan you got from the Jews, as the Muslims derived their Allah and Shaitan. And the God and the Devil of the Jews were frankly patterned on our Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. So were your God’s angels and your Satan’s demons copied from our celestial malakhim messengers and their daeva counterparts. So were your Heaven and Hell copied from Zaratushtra’s teachings about the nature of the afterlife.”

“Oh, come now!” I protested. “I hold no brief for the Jews or the Muslims, but the True Religion cannot have been a mere imitation of somebody else’s—”