“Samarkand is far to the northwest of here,” Uncle Mafio remarked.
“But Murghab is directly to the north,” said one of the Cholas, a spindly little man named Talvar. “It is on your way, 0 twice-born, and you will have crossed the worst of the mountains when you get there, and the mountain journey from here to Murghab will be easier for you if you travel in karwan with us, and we wish only to say that you would be welcome to join us, for we have been much impressed by the good manners of this twice-born Saudara Marco, and we believe you will be congenial companions for the trail.”
My father and uncle, and even Nostril, looked slightly bemazed at being called twice-born, and at my being praised by strangers for my good manners. But we all concurred in accepting the Cholas’ invitation, expressing gratitude and thanks, and it was in their train that we rode our horses out of Buzai Gumbad and up into the forbidding mountains to the northward.
This was a small train compared to some we had seen in the encampment, trains comprising scores of people and hundreds of animals. The Cholas numbered only a dozen, all men, no women or children, with only half a dozen small and scrawny saddle horses, so they took turns riding and walking. For vehicles they had only three rickety, two-wheeled carts, each drawn by a small harness horse, in which carts they hauled their bedding, provender, animal feed, smithy and other traveling necessities. They had brought their sea salt as far as Buzai Gumbad on twenty or thirty pack asses, but had there effected a trade for a dozen yaks, which could carry the same load but were better suited to the more northerly terrain.
The yaks were good trailbreakers. They were uncaring of snow and cold and discomfort, and they were sure of foot, even when heavy laden. So, as they trudged at the head of our train, they not only picked the best trail, but also plowed it clean of snow and tramped it firm for us who followed. In the evenings, when we made camp and staked the animals roundabout, the yaks showed the horses how to paw down through the snow to find the dingy and shriveled but edible burtsa shrubs left from the last growing season.
I imagine the Cholas had invited us to accompany them only because we were big men—at least in comparison to them—and they must have supposed that we would be good fighters if the train should encounter bandits on the way to Murghab. We did not meet any, so our muscularity was not required for that contingency, but it did come in useful on the frequent occasions when a cart overturned on the rugged trail, or a horse fell into a crevice, or a yak scraped off one of its pack sacks when squeezing past a boulder. We also helped in preparing the meals at evening, but that we did more out of self-interest than affability.
The Cholas’ way of preparing every meat dish was to drench it with a sauce of gray color and mucoid consistency, compounded of numerous different and pungent spices, a sauce called by them kàri. The effect was that, whatever one ate, one could taste only kàri. This was admittedly a blessing when the dish was a tasteless knob of dried or salted meat, or was high on its way toward green putrefaction. But we non-Cholas soon got tired of tasting only kàri and never knowing whether the substance underneath was mutton or fowl or, as it could have been, hay. We first asked permission to improve the sauce, and added to it some of our zafràn, a condiment hitherto unknown to the Cholas. They were much pleased by the new flavor and the new golden color it added to the kàri, and my father gave them a few culms of the zafràn to take back to India with them. When even the improved sauce began to weary us, I and Nostril and my father volunteered to alternate with the Cholas as cooks of the camp-time meals, and Uncle Mafio got from our packs his bow and arrows and began to supply us with fresh-killed game. It was usually small things like snow hares and red-legged partridges, but once in a while something larger, like a goral or an urial, and we cooked plain and simple meals of boiled or broiled meat, served blessedly sauce-less.
The Cholas’ addiction to kàri excepted, those men were good traveling companions. In fact, they were so retiring, and so shy of speaking until they were spoken to, and so reticent of seeming obtrusive, that we others could have journeyed all the way to Murghab without much awareness of their presence. Their timidity was understandable. Although the Cholas spoke Tamil, not Hindi, they were of the Hindu religion and they came from India, so they had to endure the contempt and derision with which all other nations rightly regard the Hindus. Our slave Nostril was the only non-Hindu person I knew who had bothered to learn the lowly Hindi language, and not even he had ever learned the Tamil. So none of us could converse with these Cholas in their own tongue, and they were very imperfect in the Trade Farsi. However, when we made it clear to them that we were not going to shun and scorn them overtly, or laugh at their halting speech, they became almost fawningly friendly to us and exerted themselves to tell us things of interest about this part of the world and things of usefulness on our way through it.
This is the land which most Westerners call Far Tartary and think of as the uttermost eastern end of the earth. But the name is doubly mistaken. The world extends far eastward beyond this Far Tartary, and the word Tartary is even more of a misnomer. A Mongol is called a Tatar in the Farsi language of Persia, which is where Westerners first heard mention of the Mongol people. Later, when the Mongols-called-Tàtars rampaged across the borders of Europe, and all Europe trembled with fear and hatred of them, it was perhaps natural that many Westerners confused the word Tàtar with the ancient classical name for the infernal regions, which was Tartarus. So the Westerners came to speak of “the Tartars from Tartary,” much as they would speak of “the demons from Hell.”
But even Eastern men who should have known the proper names hereabout, the veterans of many karwan journeys across this land, had told us several different names for the mountains we were now making our way through—the Hindu Kush, the Himalaya, the Karakoram and so on. I can attest that there are indeed enough individual mountains and entire ranges of mountains and whole nations of mountains to justify and support any number of appellations. However, for the sake of our mapmaking, we asked our Chola companions if they could clarify the matter. They listened as we repeated all the various names we had heard, and they did not deride the men who had told them to us—because no man, they affirmed, could possibly say precisely where one range and one name left off and another began.
But, to locate us as accurately as possible, they said we were currently forging northward through the ranges called the Pai-Mir, having left behind us the Hindu Kush range to the southwest, and the Karakoram range to the south, and the Himalaya range somewhere far off to the southeast. The other names which we had been told—the Keepers, the Masters, Solomon’s Throne—the Cholas said were probably local and parochial names bestowed by and used only by the folk living among the various ranges. So my father and uncle marked the maps of our Kitab accordingly. To me, the mountains all looked very much alike: great high crags and sharp-edged boulders and sheer cliffs and the tumbled detritus of rock slides—all of rock that would have been gray and brown and black if it had not been so heavily quilted with snow and festooned with icicles. In my opinion, the name of Himalaya, Abode of the Snows, could have served for any and every range in Far Tartary.
For all its bleakness and the lack of lively color, however, this was the most magnificent landscape I have seen in all my travels. The Pai-Mir mountains, immense and massive and awesome, stood ranked and ranged and towering heedless above us few fidgety creatures, us insignificant insects twitching our way across their mighty flanks. But how can I portray in mere insect words the overwhelming majesty of these mountains? Let me say this: the fact of the highness and the grandeur of the Alps of Europe is known to every traveled or literate person in the West. And let me add this: if there could be such a thing as a world made entirely of Alps, then the peaks of the Pai-Mir would be the Alps of that world.