Nicolo looked grave, Maffeo frightened, I tried to wear a mask. But Maffeo gave the Nestorian priest two pieces of gold—to be laid on the altar—and somehow this caused the warning to ring less true.
We rose and loaded our beasts and took our places soon after midnight, so we could make our march when the winds were low and the air more clear of sand. We need not fetch water save for a two-day journey—the road lay close to the snow-capped ranges, and wells of scanty store were found at almost all caravan rests for the thirty-day march—but food for man and beast must be transported by camelback. I had known wastes of rock and snow to be bitter cold, but not the desolate sands. So the cold stars and the icy air of late fall seemed to add to the strangeness and the wickedness of the scene. And we had followed a made road less than a league when it ran out and disappeared.
Every footprint of beast or man was buried in wind-blown sand. Yet there were signs in plenty to guide our steps, strange-looking in the moonlight—an endless train of white bones. Some were of cattle and horses and camels, but frequently I saw a rib case, half filled with sand, that caused my skin to prickle, and now and then a skull too round to fit the neck of a beast.[20]
Where seepage from mountain snows fed underground veins, tamarisk bushes found root. These would bind fast a pile of sand, more would be blown onto it by the wind, so that green-topped mounds, twice man’s height, dotted the plain. Sometimes there were stretches of loose clay on which no beast, bird, reptile, or insect cast its shadow. Mostly the Takla Makan was a waste of sand dunes, the larger running east and west, crisscrossed with smaller ones, so that the effect was that of a sea of sand arrested by enchantment in an instant of wildest tumult.
We should have waited at Lob for the intense cold of winter. If we had, we could have loaded our camels with ice, perhaps to save us from death from thirst in some awful pass, or, held to our faces in a dust storm, to help us to survive the worst pass of all. No, there was greater calamity than this to be met on the desert, although it smote with great rarity at this time of the year. It was called a dry fog, and was a lowering of dust-laden air that sometimes hung for days, from which there was no flight. If the fog was light, the traveler suffered torments past description. If heavy, he quickly smothered and died.
On and on into this earthly hell we forced our way. From dark to dawn the sand was cold as snow, the wind bit to the bone despite our woolen barracans; it was as though we wandered on the opposite side of the moon, divorced from the sun. The sun’s rising brought a gentle warmth, but on many a day it turned to parching heat, with the sand burning our feet and the dust hot in our eyes, nostrils, and mouth. The worst was our solitude among the dunes and the white bones under the dust-darkened sky. Our realization of the world of God and man dimmed every day; ever more credible became our sense of having passed its bourns into a realm of dreadful dreams, more awful than any we had ever dreamed, which had come true.
Various people in the caravan began to see visions and hear voices. Some were illusionary, I thought—not one of us, unless it be Nicolo, was in his perfect mind—but many were strange twistings by our fancies of real sights and sounds. What appeared as lakes, surrounded by lush meadows and verdant trees, was a common phantom; many-towered castles and walled cities hung in the empty air; one day our whole party saw what seemed an armed host on the march. Banners fluttered in the wind; horses pranced and armor gleamed; captains rode up and down the lines. I had trouble staying clear of believing this deceit and could not have done so save that ten thousand hoofs raised no dust and the army moved in an eerie silence. Perhaps such a force had passed here in some forgotten war and had been blasted by the sirocco, and this was an army of ghosts.
Demoniac faces and forms thrust out from tamarisk mounds, sworn to by every heathen in our company—and perhaps we Christians would have testified the same if we would believe our eyes. Creatures that looked half human, half beast, appeared to dodge behind the sand dunes. If we could believe our ears, zither players surrounded our camps in the deep of night, playing not in harmony, not in melody that the mind could catch, but in weird discord, harrowing our souls with the sense of unfathomable evil.
One lurid afternoon I made out some small, moving objects in the dust haze two arrow casts distant. Had they kept to the caravan road, I would have thought them survivors from some waylaid caravan, retracing the steps of their fellows by scent to some picket ground they knew. Although of camel shape, I thought, they moved too swiftly to be real, and suddenly they vanished. My head became dizzy and aching from the seeming realness of the illusion. . . .
Revulsion from this weakness came upon me quickly. Perhaps it was a deep-lodged terror of going mad. I had seen the figures, whether substance or empty air, between the road and a two-humped sand dune clearly distinguishable from any other nearby, and this lay directly toward the setting sun. I resolved to ride to the ground, see what I could see, follow my mare’s own footprints back to the road, and overtake the caravan.
Ten seconds after I had left the road my companions disappeared in a defile. I rode in the cold shadow of dunes and remembered that since this was the seventh day since we had left Lob, the Devil had only three days left of his allowance of ten to deal someone in our caravan a deadly blow. The wind seemed to be rising, lifting more dust and causing the sands to creep a little, as if with the wicked mind to cover my tracks. When I caught sight of the sun over the dunes it seemed to hang in a different place in the sky.
I rode on, my gaze fixed on the two-humped dune. Almost at its base, when I had thought a dozen times of turning back, I found the fresh track of camels, unmistakably real. Although our caravaneers had told us they were nonexistent in all this part of the Takla Makan, beyond a doubt I had seen a small herd of wild camels on some swift and portentous errand.
I regained the road and soon caught sight of the caravan. Of the many who had seen me turn out, not one looked back in concern for my befalling; the all of every man was straining ahead to the next rest, and God, by whatever name, forbid that the well be dry! I decided not to tell my fellows about the camels. I would let them think I had dropped behind to answer a call of nature, which was the truth in a deeper sense than they would know. I must be true to my own nature, such as it was; and if the Devil struck before the end of the tenth day, I could fight him a better fight if I fought alone.
2
On the following march, the course was long, rough, and dangerous to flesh and spirit. Coming to the mouth of a road out of the far Tien Shan, by an ancient well supplying brackish water, we hoped to find and fall in with other eastbound caravans, but all was silent and forsaken, and the tracks of the last comers were so nearly erased by blown sand that we could not judge their age. And in that same hour I was weighed in a balance with Nicolo and found wanting.
I was riding in the van with the head dragoman, employing my long-range eyes in finding the far-strewn markers hard to descry under the dust clouds that hid the sun. Presently they became abundant, the bones in little piles or clusters. Such neat assortments, each the bracing of a beast’s body or a man’s only a few weeks before, should have put me on my guard; instead I followed the course they set, the caravan behind me, for a good half-mile. Then Nicolo rode up beside me.
“I fear, Marco, that you’re off the road,” he said quietly.
“I think not, signor.” My brain seemed clogged with dust.