Yet Chance, in the person of the young and amorous wife of a road guard, put me on the track of a fair balas ruby. It had been presented by the present Emir’s father to a master goldsmith, with the right to sell it in his need; now the recipient’s hands had lamed and his eyes dimmed, and his grandsons had no money to buy wives, and he would sell the precious trophy at a bargain. The upshot of it was, after a night of backing and filling, the old man wept, kissed his pride and joy farewell, and laid it in my palm. Into his scrawny hand went a goatskin bag containing two hundred dinars in gold.
Considering the extreme rarity of balas rubies elsewhere in the world, and the unthinkable ranges, deserts, rivers, and kingdoms still stretching between here and the capital of Cathay, surely the flawless, fire-hearted jewel of five carats’ weight could be a modest and not unseemly gift to Kublai Khan.
When the custom officer at the border asked me if I had rubies, I could not resist bringing forth the stone in Maffeo’s sight. The official admired it, and after examining its carefully inscribed pedigree, assigned to me, he congratulated me on its possession. Maffeo’s smile seemed frozen on his face by a blizzard out of the Pamirs, and presently he entered the pavilion he shared with Nicolo.
In a moment he emerged and beckoned to me. I had been summoned there a good many times before—usually to receive instructions as to giving false information and withholding true, sometimes to plan mutually profitable buying and selling—and I resolved to be very casual about my acquisition. That it would be a subject of discussion I could not doubt.
“Maffeo tells me you have acquired a very beautiful balas ruby,” Nicolo began as soon as I was seated. The bluntness surprised me.
“A fair one, I think.”
“May I see it? The matter concerns the safety of the caravan.”
I showed him the stone. He examined it carefully with vividly lighted eyes.
“It’s very fine. Maffeo and I did no little jewel-buying on our previous expedition, and I flatter myself we both learned something about jewels. You could fairly ask five hundred bezants at the great Alexandrian bazaar.”
“I paid two hundred for it,” I said, wondering whether Nicolo would at last stoop to use me or trick me.
“An excellent bargain. It would be quite an attraction to the bandits that infest the mountains eastward. So I’d like to put two more with it, for a use I have in mind.”
He spoke pleasantly, as was his wont, but I could hardly bear to look at what he held in his palm. To my great relief, neither stone was the equal of mine.
“If I appraise your ruby at five hundred bezants, I should think these two together would be worth another five hundred,” Nicolo went on.
“Certainly.”
“If you agree, we’ll book them at that figure, and use them for bandit bait. If we can’t keep clear of the mountain wolves, and the stones are lost, you’re to be paid on that basis out of the great sum we have saved by the trick. But first, you’ll want to know its necessity.”
“I would, signor, truly.”
“Unlike the renegade Karaunas, who have their own gods and king, the bandits we’re likely to meet are devout Mohammedans and nominally subject to the Emir. So they’ll think twice about killing envoys and merchants in lawful passage. They probably wouldn’t strip us of our heavy goods, since they couldn’t readily dispose of them. Nor would they lay hand on our golden tablet, and would likely kowtow to it. But they’d certainly make off with all the money and jewels they could find. And if they suspect we’ve hidden some, they have ways, not at all pleasant, of uncovering them.”
“You said to use these jewels as bait——”
“Precisely. The bandits won’t expect us to have balas rubies, but they’ll not overlook the possibility. So we’ll have them hidden with what seems a great deal of cunning. One of us will give the secret away through a faked blunder or slip. Then when the rascals find them, they’ll never doubt but these are all we have and won’t look any further.”
I was able to hold my tongue but not the rush of color from my face.
“Well, do you agree?” Nicolo asked.
“Yes, if the amount to be saved justifies such a severe loss.”
“Show him, please, Maffeo.” And as Maffeo bent over a saddlebag, Nicolo continued to address me in a tone of pleasant casualness.
“Technically they’re not mine, although I have carte blanche as to the use of all but one. As the Khan’s envoy, I sought an audience with the Emir, and it happened that he had heard of me from the Khan’s viceroy at Samarkand. When I asked if I could convey his compliments to my master, he straightway decided to send him a gift. The main item was an especially fine ruby, but he furnished me with several more, to give the Khan and his family or trade along the way for equally noble gifts.” Nicolo paused, took a leather pouch that Maffeo handed him, and drew forth a double handful of cotton wool. It appeared about to burst into flame from seven balls of cold, blood-red fire glowing within the fleece. All were balas rubies to make up the lucky number of nine. The largest was the size of a crimson cherry of the Halil Rud; none of the others was less than twice as large as mine.
I had been slow in getting through my head the might, the majesty, even the meaning, of the word “king.” And that was only one of my fallings-short.
2
The road from Badakhshan to Kashgar and Yarkand is a long road, taking thirty days of fast travel. By avoiding narrow defiles where cataracts roared, glassy steeps where avalanches swept with their awful thundering brooms, we took nearer fifty. And it is the highest road, I reckon, in all the world.
It crosses Little Pamir and Great Pamir. It comes by a lake of crescent shape, which a genie cut with Mohammed’s sword, and which is the birthplace of the great, strange Oxus River. There was hardly a moment that we could not hear the distant deep-toned rumble of a snow slide. Everywhere and forever blew the snow clouds. In the lower valleys there were oases watered by melting glaciers, and here fruit ripened and birds sang and yellow grainfields rippled in the breeze; here were temples and schools and marts and crowds. But atop the vast plateau dwelt only wild men, in huts of stone and turf, and beasts and gods. The people called it Bam-i-Dunya, which means “Roof of the World.”
In these hanging gardens of God, even the cooking fires went against nature. The flames under the pot danced and dispersed; the water bubbled fiercely but was slow to scald your finger, and hard corn would not soften in an all-day boiling. Looking down from these heights, we saw the Oxus winding to the rim of the sky, the wild white streams that fed it bounding out from under bridges of snow, and the mighty ranges running without count or end. Amid them hung valleys so deep and savage that even the devilish wolves dared not venture down, and on a thousand peaks no man’s footprints had ever marked the snow.
In the mountains of Badakhshan we had seen and fed upon wild sheep. Fine, fat, and stoutly horned, they could not hold rushlights to the wild sheep of the Pamir, known as argalis.[19] At first I saw them as gray dots on the high grass slopes, and knew them only through their immense twisted horns left about at hunter’s camps, or which were set in the snow to mark a trail, Often a horn was nearly five feet along its spiral, and a big pair measured an equal distance between the points. That a mere sheep could carry such a load upon its head I could hardly believe.
It was not a load, but a crown. This I perceived at my first close glimpse of a big ram. He was standing atop a crag, his head lifted, his feet together, his back arched, his whole bearing noble beyond description. I began to perceive that God had created him expressly to befit and reveal the Great Pamir. No lesser creature could concord with its sublime concept—one vast garth halfway to heaven, tall as the sea is deep, walled in a white wall whose towers and battlements pierced the sky.