Most of them had faces paler than mine, of a delicate ivory tint, like the best grade of parchment, and bearing little or no facial hair. Their eyes were not narrowed by heavily pouched lids, like the Mongols’, but were nevertheless so very slitlike as to appear slanted. Their bodies and limbs were fine-boned, slim and seeming almost fragile. If, when one looked at a shaggy Mongol or one of his Uighur relatives, one thought at once, “That man has lived always out of doors,” then one was inclined to think, when looking at a Han, even a wretched farmer hard at work in his field, filthy with mud and manure, “That man was born and raised indoors.” But one did not have to look; a blind man would perceive a Han to be unique, merely hearing him talk.
The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
But there were no fish to be had in Kashgar. Our Uighur innkeeper almost proudly explained why. Here in this place, he said, we were as far inland as a person could get from any sea on the earth—the temperate oceans to the east and west, the tropic seas to the south, the frozen white ones in the north. Nowhere else in the world, he said, as if it were a thing to boast about, was there any spot farther from the sea. Kashgar had no freshwater fish either, he said, for the Passage River was too much befouled by the city’s effluxions to support any. I was already aware of the effluxions, having noticed one sort here that I had never seen before. Every city spews out sewage and garbage and smoke, but the smoke of Kashgar was peculiar. It came from the stone that burns, and this was the first place I saw it.
In a sense, the burnable rock is the exact opposite of that rock I earlier saw in Balkh, which produces the cloth that will not burn. Many of my untraveled fellow Venetians have derided both stones as unbelievable, when I have spoken of them. But other Venetians—mariners in the English trade—tell me that the burning rock is well known and commonly used for fuel in England, where it is called kohle. In the Mongol lands it was called simply “the black”—kara—for that is its color. It occurs in extensive strata just a little way under the yellow soil, so it is easily got at with simple picks and spades, and, being rather crumbly, the stone is easily broken into wieldy chunks. A hearth or brazier heaped with those chunks requires a kindling fire of wood, but once the kara is alight it burns much longer than wood and gives a greater heat, as does naft oil. It is abundant and free for the digging and its only fault is its dense smoke. Because every Kashgar household and workshop and karwansarai used it for fuel, a pall hung perpetually between the city and the sky.
At least the kara did not, like camel or yak dung, give a noxious flavor to the food cooked over it, and the food served us in Kashgar was already dismally familiar of flavor. There were flocks of goats as well as sheep, and herds of cows and domestic yaks all over the landscape, and pigs and chickens and ducks in every backyard, but the staple meat at the Five Felicities was still the everlasting mutton. The Uighur peoples, like the Mongol, have no national religion, and I could not then make out whether the Han did. But Kashgar, as a trade crossroads, represented in its permanent and transient population just about every religion that exists, and the sheep is the one animal edible by communicants of all of them. And the aromatic, weak, not intoxicating, hence not religiously objectionable cha was still the staple beverage.
Kithai did introduce one pleasing improvement to our meals. Instead of rice, we got a side dish called miàn. That was not exactly new to us, as it was only a pasta of the vermicelli string sort, but it was a welcome old acquaintance. Usually it was served boiled al dente, just as Venetian vermicelli is, but sometimes it was cut into small bits and fried to crunchy kinks. What was new about it—to me, anyway—was that it was served with two slender sticks for the eating of it. I stared at this curiosity, nonplussed, and my father and uncle laughed at the expression on my face.
“They are called kuài-zi,” said my father. “The nimble tongs. And they are more practical than they look. Observe, Marco.”
Holding both of his sticks in the fingers of one hand, he began most adroitly to pick up bits of meat and skeins of the miàn. It took me some fumbling minutes to learn the use of the nimble-tong sticks, but, when I had, I found them to be notably neater than the Mongol fashion of eating with the fingers, and indeed more efficacious for twirling up strings of pasta than our Venetian skewers and spoons.
The Uighur landlord smiled approvingly when he saw me begin to pick and peck and spool with the sticks, and informed me that the nimble tongs were a Han contribution to fine dining. He went on to assert that the miàn-vermicelli was a Han invention, too, but I contested that. I told him that pasta of every variety had been on every table of the Italian peninsula ever since a Roman ship’s cook fortuitously conceived the making of it. Perhaps, I suggested, the Han had learned of it during some Caesarean era of trade between Rome and Kithai.
“No doubt it happened so,” said the innkeeper, he being a man of impeccable politeness.
I must say that I found all the commonfolk of Kithai, of every race—when they were not bloodily engaged in feud, revenge, banditry, rebellion or warfare—to be exceptionally courteous of address and comportment. And that gentility, I believe, was a contribution of the Han.
The Han language, as if to make up for its many inherent deficiencies, is replete with flowery expressions and ornate turns of phrase and intricate formalities, and the Han’s manners are also exquisitely refined. They are a people of a very ancient and high culture, but whether their elegant speech and graces impelled their civilization or simply grew out of it, I have no idea. However, I do believe that all the other nations in proximity to the Han, though woefully inferior in culture, acquired from them at least those outward trappings of advanced civilization. Even in Venice, I had seen how people ape their betters, in appearance if not in substance. No shopkeeper is ever anything loftier than a shopkeeper, but he who purveys to fine ladies will converse better than the one who sells only to boat wives. A Mongol warrior may be by nature an uncouth barbarian, but when he chooses—as witness the first sentry who had challenged us—he can speak as politely as any Han, and exhibit manners suitable for a court ballroom.
Even in this rough frontier trade town, the Han influence was evident. I walked through streets with names like Flowery Benevolence and Crystallized Fragrance and, in a market square called Productive Endeavor and Fair Exchange, I saw lumpish Mongol soldiers buying caged bright songbirds and bowls of shiny tiny fish to adorn their rude army quarters. Every stall in the market had a sign, a long, narrow board hung vertically, and passersby helpfully translated for me the words inscribed in the Mongol alphabet or the Han characters. Besides giving notice of what the stall sold: “Pheasant Eggs for Making Hair Pomade” or “Spicy-Odored Indigo Dye,” each board added a few words of advice: “Loitering and Gossiping Are Not Conducive to Good Business” or “Former Customers Have Induced the Sad Necessity of Denying Credit” or something of the sort.