His horns were of little use to him in defense against his natural enemies, the wolves that hunted in small, bold, villainous bands or the lone, long-furred, heavy-tailed gray-and-black snow leopards, among the most beautiful of beasts, that lay in wait for him on banks and ledges, sprang, transfixed the bounding neck artery with their fangs, and slew. He butted his rivals for the swift, smaller-horned ewes—their collisions could be heard afar through the still air in the great tournaments of the rut—but only to vanquish, not to kill. The horns were a God-given decoration not to the good servant but to the high born. Their wearers must bear them up steeps that would break the heart of an unburdened horse, bound with them from rock to rock, ran with them along ledges and across the deadly crevices. Yet they would rather die than lay them down; their very weight, like that of a king’s crown of massive gold, made demands upon their strength which they gloried to meet.
I longed to test my courage, cunning, endurance, and other human gifts against his splendid strength—eyes eagle-sharp, nose and ears as keen as a fallow deer’s, the swiftness and sureness of his feet, his prowess to ascend where I could not follow. I wished to pursue him into his snowy fastnesses, slay him if I could, and bring back his horns to adorn my lodge, a memento of our conflict, and to eat of his flesh with no mere belly hunger but in the ancient ceremony of obtaining a share of his powers. Thereby, as all wise men knew, I would become more sure-footed, swift, stronghearted, and long-winded, and perhaps more lustful. Countless rams had been foreordained to win or to lose magnificent contests with hunters; that went with their appointment and birthright. And this contest would be more equal than most and hence more thrilling, because the villagers usually went forth in bands, picking no particular quarry but killing any of the flock whose escape they could cut off, while I would hunt alone for a lone mountain king.
Our caravan could not stop to let a junior merchant spend a day on the lofty sheep range. But an avalanche in a defile stopped it until such time as some fair-haired, blue-eyed falcon trappers, calling themselves Kaffirs and bivouacked near by, could shovel out a passage. That would take about five hours, I thought. It would be folly to essay the lofty grass slopes in that short time. . . . But the skin on my neck prickled when I came on a pair of ram’s horns laid out on the sod roof of the chiefs house. They were the largest I had yet seen.
When I admired them, the Kaffir answered me in high spirits. I caught only one word of his language—Iskander, the Central Asian rendition of Alexander, almost synonymous with “king” in this part of the world. What Alexander the Great or his many namesakes had to do with sheep hunting I could not guess. But the fellow’s gestures—an expansive stretching of his arms and vigorous pointings to a mountaintop—arrested my deepest attention and stirred my imagination. Presently a cameleer of the Sarikol addressed him in some lingua franca of the snows, who in turn spoke to me in the base Turki-Persian dialect larded with Arabic words, which I had picked up long since.
“The chief says that these horns are small compared to the horns of the ram that his people have named Iskander.”
“Why have they named him that?”
“Because he is greatest of all the rams they have ever seen.”
“Where are his pasture and his fold?”
“Straight up this mountain.”
“Then why don’t they pursue and kill him?”
“Because he and his ewes, being sharp-eyed as saker falcons, discover their approach, and take off from the grass slopes over a ledge that leads to inaccessible rimrock. It is out of arrow cast and they dare not follow those sure feet across a void deeper than Gehenna.”
Suddenly I was struck by a thought resounding within my skull like a thunderstorm in a mountain chasm. I had remembered Nicolo’s speaking of Kublai Khan’s interest in distant lands, and the delight he took in wonders of all sorts. It was somewhat doubtful if any of his viceroys had sent him horns of these magnificent wild sheep, and highly unlikely that he had seen a head so great that illiterate tribesmen would name its bearer after their hero-god, Alexander. And if the Khan was as illustrious as I liked to picture him, perhaps he would consider such a head, presented to him by its winner, almost as fine a gift as a priceless ruby.
It happened that my red-bay mare Roxana was daily proving herself as beyond praise. I tightened her cinch till she grunted, then mounted her with no load other than my gold and jewels, bow and quiver, a piece of dried goat flesh, and my woolen barracan to wear when I met the wolf-fanged wind on the open mountainsides. The Kaffirs gave me careful directions. Roxana began her long, grueling climb.
I rode her up the broad shoulder of the mountain, across treacherous slide rock, and around the rim of a gully. Already the wide green parklands looked like garden plots, the lakes were as sapphires set in the stone; eagles skimmed screaming over the hollow gorges half a mile below us. If I sat horizontal to my horse’s back both of us would topple to our deaths, so I lay along the saddle, clutching her mane. Not until her eyes were bloodshot and her nostrils red and she sobbed for breath did I get down and fasten her to a pillar-like abutment of a weathered crag to wait for me. She had saved me a little time and perhaps a crucial amount of wind, strength, and sweat.
Now I made my way on foot, by such routes as I could find, toward a lofty grass slope running up to a sheer cliff under the crest. Scattered over it were fifty or more small forms, revealed by the clear air as heavy-headed beasts, some lying down, most of them in the broken movements of grazing. All but one varied in color from snow-white to dark gray. With that one exception, they resembled other flocks that I had seen, made up of lambs, ewes, half-grown rams, and full-grown rams. But the darkest of the lot—showing almost black in this light—was by all means the largest.
I felt a great surge of suspense and feverish desire.
I climbed steadily and steeply for half an hour, and the scope of the adventure widened and deepened every minute. It was partly the effect of my human solitude in all this vastness of mountain and sky. It was like the coming-true of a forgotten dream, which must be the way that Heaven breaks upon the newly dead—a place unimaginable by the living brain and yet instantly recognizable by the soul through some previous instruction. No Heaven would be so empty, cold, silent, and forlornly beautiful, I thought; but some last Hell might be. Beyond the seventh Hell that doers of great evil have dared fear, there may be another in which every soul wanders alone in an ineffable vastness of mountain and sky. There is no pain except a little in his legs and chest, but he must contemplate himself forever in a last, utter, irredeemable divorcement from God.
I stopped, rested a moment, and steadied my swimming head. It came to me that the sheep had already seen me, that even the spring lambs knew of my approach, but being the great argalis, lords of the realm, they took no notice of me. It might be for sport or some symbol untranslatable to the human mind. Those lying down rose one at a time, and I thought that the flock grazed closer to one another and looked up more often. I drew within six hundred yards. Now there was a movement going on, so slow and calm that it was hardly apparent. The ewes with lambs were feeding closest to the rocky flank of the grass slope, the barren ewes were next, then the young rams, and then the heavy-horned and lordly elders. But the king had not partaken in this action. From a dead stop, light as a bouncing ball, he bounded to the top of a six-foot boulder. There he stood in motionless majesty, gazing not in my direction, it seemed, but over my head.
I gained the same slope and almost the same elevation, although still four hundred paces distant. A ewe and her lamb strolled around the curve of the hill and disappeared. Others of her kind followed with gradually quickening pace. The barren ewes left in a group—they were ashamed, I thought, of their dry teats, and hung together for company—and then the half-grown rams in a dignified file, not deigning to look back. As I drew within what we call arrow cast, but too far for any hit but a lucky one from a falling shaft, only mature rams remained on the slope. Five of these had withdrawn to its end, near the top of a ridge. The sixth, who was Iskander the King, remained on his dais, obviously poised, immobile and magnificent. He had turned enough to show me his profile sharp against a snowbank further up the slope. I could hardly believe his magnitude and beauty.