Sometimes, above the street noise—literally above it—could be heard a thin melodious fluting in the air. The first few times, I was puzzled by it. But then I realized that at least one in every flock of the city’s common pigeons had been banded with a little whistle that sang as it flew. Also, among the more ordinary pigeons was a very fluffy sort I have never seen anywhere else. In its flight it would suddenly pause in midair and somehow, like a tightrope tumbler but without a tightrope, it would topple end for end, merrily making a perfect somersault in the air, and then fly on as sedately as if it had done nothing wonderful.
And if I lifted my gaze even higher above the city roofs, on any breezy autumn day I would see flocks of feng-zheng flying. These were not birds, though some were shaped and painted like birds; others were made to resemble immense butterflies or small dragons. The feng-zheng was a construction of light sticks and very thin paper, and to it a string from a reel was tied. A man would run with the feng-zheng and let the breeze take it, and then, by subtle twitches at his end of the string, he could make it ascend and fly and swoop and curvet in the sky. (Myself, I never could master the art of it.) The height of its ascent was limited only by the amount of string on the flyer’s reel, and sometimes one would go up almost out of sight. Men liked to engage in feng-zheng battles. They would glue on their string an abrasive grit of powdered porcelain or Muscovy glass and then let their feng-zheng fly, and try to guide them so that one’s string would saw and cut another’s, and make that contraption come tumbling down from the sky. The flyers and other men would make heavy wagers on the battle’s outcome. But women and children liked to fly the feng-zheng just for enjoyment.
In the nighttimes, I did not have to make any special effort to observe the peculiar things that happened in the Kithai sky—for my head would be jerked up, volente o nolente, by the noises of those things. I mean the violent booms and bangs and sputters of the artificial lightnings and thunders, the so-called fiery trees and sparkling flowers. As in so many other Eastern countries, in Kithai too every day seemed to mark some folk holiday or anniversary requiring celebration. But only in Kithai did the festivities go on into the night, so there would be reason to send those curious fires flying skyward to burst into brighter fires and then into corpuscles of multicolored fire drifting down to the ground. I regarded the displays with admiration and awe, which was not lessened when later I discovered how those marvels were effected.
Outside the cities, Kithai’s variegated landscape also differed from those of other countries. I have already described a few of Kithai’s distinctive terrains, and will speak of others in their turn. But let me here say this. While I lived in Khanbalik I could, whenever I wished to spend a day in the country, command a horse from the palace stables and in just a morning’s ride go to look at something to be seen in no other landscape on this earth. It may be a relic of total uselessness and vainglory, but the Great Wall, that monster serpent petrified in the act of wriggling from horizon to horizon, is still a fantastic feast for the eyes.
I do not mean to give the impression that everything in Kithai, or even within the Khan’s capital city, was all beautiful, easy, rich and sweet. I would not have wished things so, for an unrelieved niceness can be as tiresome as the monotonously grand landscape of the Pai-Mir. Kubilai could have located his capital in a city of more temperate climate, for instance—there were places to the south that enjoyed perpetual springtime, and some much farther south that basked in perpetual summer. But the people who lived in such places, I found when I visited them, also were boringly bland. The climate of Khanbalik was very like that of Venice: springtime rains, winter snows and a sometimes oppressive summer heat. While its inhabitants did not have to contend with the mildewing dampness of Venice, their houses and clothes and furnishings were pervaded by the yellow dust forever being blown from the western deserts.
Like the seasons and the weathers, Khanbalik was ever changing and various and invigorating, never cloying. For one reason, besides such splendors and happy novelties as I have cited, there were dark and not so happy aspects as well. Beneath the Khan’s magnificent palace crouched the dungeons of the Fondler. The gorgeous robes of nobles and courtiers sometimes cloaked men of mean ambitions and base designs. Even my own two pretty maidservants evinced some not so pretty turns of temperament. And outside the palace, in the streets and markets, not everybody in those throngs was a prosperous merchant or an opulent purchaser. There were poor people, too, and wretched ones. I remember seeing a market stall that sold meat to the poor, and someone translated its signboard for me: “Forest shrimp, household deer, brushwood eels”—then told me those were only high-flown Han names. The meats for sale were really grasshoppers and rats and the tripes of snakes.
6.
FOR many months, my workdays consisted of talking to and asking respectful questions of one after another of the many lords-ministers and administrators and accountants and courtiers responsible for the smooth functioning of the entire Mongol Khanate and this land of Kithai and this city of Khanbalik and this palace court. Chingkim introduced me to most of them, but he had his own work to do as Wang of Khanbalik, so he then left it to me and them to arrange our meetings at our mutual convenience. Some of the men, including lords of high position, were most hospitable to my interest and forthcoming in their explications of their offices. Others, including some mere palace stewards of laughably low degree, regarded me as a prying busybody and would talk only grudgingly. But all, by their Khakhan’s command, had to receive me. So I did not neglect to visit any of them, and did not let even the unfriendly ones put me off with scanty or evasive interviews. I must admit, though, that I found some of the men’s work more interesting than others’, and so spent more time with some than with others.
My colloquy with the Court Mathematician was particularly brief. I have never had much of a head for arithmetic, as my old teacher Fra Varisto could have attested. Although Master Lin-ngan was friendly—having been the first courtier I had met on arrival in Khanbalik—and was proud of his duties and eager to explain them, I fear that my lackluster responses rather dampened his enthusiasm. We did not get any further, in fact, than his showing me a nan-zhen, a Kithai-style instrument for marine navigation.
“Ah, yes,” I said. “The north-pointing needle. Venetian ships’ captains have them, too. It is called a bussola.”
“We call it the south-riding carriage, and I submit that it cannot be compared to your crude Western versions. You in the West are still dependent on a circle divided into only three hundred and sixty degrees. That is but a clumsy approximation of the truth, arrived at by some of your primitive forebears, who could not count the days of the year any better than that. The true span of the solar year was known to us Han three thousand years ago. You will notice that our circle is divided into the accurate number of three hundred and sixty-five and one-quarter degrees.”
I looked, and it was so. After contemplating the circle for some moments, I ventured to say, “A perfect count, certainly. A perfect division of the circle, undoubtedly. But what good is it?”
He stared at me, aghast. “What good is it?”
“Our outmoded Western circle is at least easily divisible into fourths. How could a man using this one ever mark off a right angle?”