Days passed, nights sped, and we came to the Kingdom of Mosul. This was the homeland of the great merchants who we called Musolini, sellers of the cloth called muslin (musolino). Here dwelt many Nestorian Christians, living at peace with the Saracens who worshiped Allah, but both paid taxes to the king of the Tatars, who bowed only to a distant emperor and a rag doll over his bed. And just across the river lay some ruins strangely differing from most we had seen along the route, in not being the handiwork of the Tatars, who had passed here less than twenty years ago. The new desolation had looked almost as old as this, but men said it was as the age of a kitten compared to that of a sea turtle. Men said that the rubble of the immense double walls marked the battlements in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria two thousand years ago, and that the great pile atop the hill was once the palace of Sennacherib, and a blackened spot amid the waste was the temple of the goddess Ishtar, on which God poured His wrath.
Now we followed the River Tigris as it wound through a wide, rich plain shut in by impenetrable mountains and pathless deserts. The land widened and warmed with the slow weeks; great reaches of it were garden-green, crowded with towns and villages; the spires of the Nestorian churches stood as thick as the minarets of the Infidel; and except for an occasional scar on the face of the land, or suddenly met stretches of desert in the midst of plenty, you would never know that the Tatar had passed this way.
He had come in the person of Hulaqu the Mongol, brother and viceroy of the Emperor Mangu Khan, who preceded Kublai Khan. He had brought a host of mounted archers and spearmen, and his destination was Baghdad. We too came to Baghdad, in due course, and at first glance you would wonder at his charity and restraint. He had not lost his temper once, so the whole vast wondrous city, the capital of Harun al-Rashid, was not razed and laid utter waste. True, he had shut the Calif in his own treasure tower with only gold to eat, but the Calif was known to love gold above all things, and he handled full much of it, piling it about, before he died of belly hunger and thirst. Hulaqu had marched only a hundred thousand of the people, on the pretense of counting them, to a nearby plain, but their bones lay out of sight beyond the city walls and half-a-hundred thousand children and babes nearly filled the gap. The huge caravanserai were a good half-full. The merchants offered great stores of silk stuffs and gold brocades, some of this so lavish with figures of birds and animals that the material for one robe cost two hundred bezants, or the same number of Persian dinars. And a Tatar governor still held court in the great palace of the Emir, made of sandalwood, ebony, ivory, jasper, lapis-lazuli, and black-and-white jade, and whose meanest stone was alabaster white as snow.
Yet it was whispered that a little way back from the caravan roads where his envoys rode amid pleasant sights, the mark of the Tatar was plain. There, half the water reservoirs and their aqueducts and wheels had been destroyed as if by playful giants, whereby whole countrysides were turned to desert, and this ever marched against the fertile farms; and in time all Mesopotamia, once the Garden of the World, the pride of kings, would become the sun-baked abode of a few shepherds, the lair of the lion, the pasture of the wild ass, and the haunt of the desert asp.
What did I care? Five years ago I had scarcely heard of Mesopotamia.
2
When we had reached the city of Hormuz, atop the straits of the same name, midway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and so far from Venice that I could hardly believe in the same sun, it mattered greatly to me whether we continued our journey by land or by sea.
Nicolo wanted to go by sea. The voyage would be star-far, all around India and God knew what other vast lands outthrusting into the Indian Ocean, and then northward up the illimitable shores of China—but he reckoned it as shorter in the count of days, weeks, months, and years than the journey overland through the body of Asia. True, it would be a longer sail than any European had made since the world began. But men with dark or yellow skins sailed between port and port, goods were carried and traded, king’s horses were transported, and every pilot’s knowledge of reef and shoal overlapped his neighbor’s. The danger should be no greater, Nicolo said, and the hardships somewhat less.
Maffeo believed what Nicolo said and did what he told him, but he was badly frightened of the Persian dhows on which we must seek passage—wooden craft innocent of an iron nail, their planks held together by ropes of coconut fiber.
Nicolo was a little less afraid only because he had other matters—mainly, to reach our destination as quickly as possible—on his mind. I was the like for a different reason. A good half of the people in and about the docks were either Arabs or spoke Arabic as well as Persian. Knowing a nation’s language is a shibboleth whereby its queerest customs and strangest ways begin to show merit. These rope-stitched boats, anointed with whale oil, rode the choppy coastal water as limply as a Tatar did his rough-gaited pony. However, the great billows hurled by the tempest in the high ocean might tear one of them into scraps and tatters in one swoop.
Had the ships been as sturdy as a Venetian bireme, I would still have striven to go by land. In the first place, I was in no great haste to reach the Court of Kublai Khan—the longer in journey, in reason, the better schooled and muscled I would be for the tasks ahead. In the second place, riding the road across Asia was a harder and hence a far better school for a man of my abilities and ambitions than being batted about a hired cabin over the albatross path; before its end I would come closer to Nicolo in the lore of travel and the science of success.
In the third and fourth places, it was somewhat less expensive, and far more exciting. In the fifth place, if we went by sea, I could not get my hands on a helmet and a cloak and boots fashioned in a city called Fuchow, so far from us that you would think that ministering angels would lose their way.
“We’ll go by sea,” declared Nicolo to his brother Maffeo in the hearing of his unacknowledged son.
“If you say so,” answered Maffeo, “but I shall leave moneys with the Nestorian priests to say Mass for my soul.”
Still Nicolo would have held to it if a Tatar-speaking Persian had not come along selling opium pellets to ward off seasickness, and engaged him and Maffeo in a conversation of which I could not translate one word. However, this proved to be its general drift.
“Effendi, is the ship you are to take a new one or an old one?” the Persian asked, when they had made friends over the fact of knowing the same tongue.
“The latest from the yards, of course,” Nicolo answered. “I don’t trust those fiber fastenings not to weaken with use.”
“Malik, if I tell you a secret known to the shipbuilders, but closely guarded from the merchants, will you give me backsheesh?”
“If I count it of profit to know.”
“It’s true that the fiber ropes binding the planks grow weaker with age and use. The sailors care not for that, for if the ship falls apart in a gale they will speed straight to Paradise, to drink nectar and break maidenheads throughout eternity, but sober men think twice before entrusting their goods to these bottoms, let alone their lives. But if your Kismet ordains that you go to sea, in Allah’s name—and there is no God but Allah—go forth in vessels five or more years old, and eschew the new.”
“What’s the sense of that?”
“The sixth year past was the Year of the Locust. They came in black swarms and stripped and killed the palm trees of Oman, whence came the strong fiber most prized by shipbuilders. In its place they bought fiber of Yemen, greatly inferior to the other. If you do not believe me, count the score of lost ships in these waters since that dread year.”
“Could it be that you are in the pay of the owner of a fleet of old ships falling apart at the seams?”