No one could have been sorrier for the death of Aziz than I was, but I realized that my reasons were mainly selfish, and gave me no right to make loud lamentation. One reason was that I had promised both Sitarè and my father that I would keep the boy from harm, and I had not. So I could not be sure whether I was feeling more sorry for his death or for my failure as a guardian. Another of my selfish reasons was that I was grieving because someone worth keeping had been snatched out of my world. Oh, I know that all people grieve so, on the occasion of a death, but that makes it no less a selfish reason. We survivors are deprived of that one person newly dead. But he or she is deprived of everything—of all other persons, of all things worth keeping, of the entire world and every least thing in it, all in an instant—and such a loss deserves a lamentation so loud and vast and lasting that we who stay are incapable of expressing it.
I had yet another selfish reason for lamenting the death of Aziz. I could not help recalling the Widow Esther’s admonition: that a man should avail himself of everything life offers, lest he die repining for those opportunities he neglected to seize. It was perhaps virtuous of me, and laudable, that I had declined what Aziz offered me, and so left his chastity unsmirched. It would perhaps have been sinful of me, and reprehensible, if I had accepted, and so despoiled his chastity. But, I asked myself now, since Aziz would have gone so soon to his grave in either case, what difference could it have made? If we had embraced, it might have meant one last pleasure for him, and a unique one for me: what Nostril had called “a journey beyond the ordinary”—and whether it had been innocuous or iniquitous, it would have left no trace on the all-covering quicksand. But I had refused, and in all the rest of my life, if any such chance ever came again, it could not come from the beautiful Aziz. He was gone, and that opportunity was lost, and now—not on some putative future deathbed—now I was sorry.
But I was alive. And I and my uncle and my father and our companions journeyed on, for that is all that the living can do to forget death, or defy it.
We were not accosted by any more Karauna, or any other sorts of lurkers, and we did not even meet any other fellow travelers during the rest of our desert crossing. Either our Mongol escort had been unnecessary or its presence had discouraged any further molestation. We came finally out of the lowland sands at the Binalud Mountains, and up through that range to Mashhad. It was a fair and pleasant city, somewhat larger than Kashan, and its streets were lined with chinar and mulberry trees.
Mashhad is one of the very holy cities of Persian Islam, because a highly revered martyr of olden time, the Imam Riza, is entombed in an ornate masjid there. A Muslim’s worshipful visit to Mashhad earns him the prefix of Meshadi to his name, as a pilgrimage to Mecca earns him the right to be addressed as Hajji. So the greater part of the city’s population consisted of transient pilgrims and, because of that, Mashhad had very good and clean and comfortable karwansarai inns. Our three Mongols led us to one of the best, and themselves spent a night there before turning back to resume their patrol of the Dasht-e-Kavir.
There at the karwansarai, the Mongols demonstrated yet another of their customs. While my father, my uncle and I gratefully took lodging inside the inn, and our camel-puller Nostril gratefully took lodging in the stable with his animals, the Mongols insisted on laying their bedrolls outside in the center of the courtyard, and staked their horses to the ground about them. The Mashhad landlord indulged them in that eccentricity, but some landlords will not. As I later discovered, when a Mongol party is commanded by the innkeeper to lodge indoors like civilized folk, the Mongols will grudgingly comply, but they still will not depend on the karwansarai kitchen. They will lay a fire in the middle of their chamber floor, put a tripod over it and do their own cooking. Come night, they will not repose on the beds provided, but will unroll their own carpets and blankets and sleep on the floor.
Well, I could now sympathize in some measure with the Mongols’ reluctance to reside under a fixed roof. Myself, my father and my uncle, after our long crossing of the Great Salt, had also developed a taste for unconfined spaces and unrestricted elbow room, and the limitless silence and clean air of the outdoors. Though at first we exulted in the refreshment of a hammam bath and rubbing, and were pleased to have our meals cooked and presented to us by servants, we soon found ourselves vexed by the noise and agitation and turmoil of indoor living. The air seemed close and the walls even closer and the other karwansarai guests a terribly talkative crowd. The all-pervading smoke especially tormented Uncle Mafìo, who was troubled by intermittent coughing spells. So, for all that the inn was well appointed and Mashhad an estimable city, we stayed only long enough to exchange our camels again for horses, and to replenish our traveling gear and rations, and we moved on.
BALKH
1
WE went now a little south of east, to skirt the Karakum, or Black Sands, which is another desert lying due eastward of Mashhad. We chose a route across the Karabil, or Cold Plateau, which is a long shelf of more solid and verdant land extending like a coastline between the bleak dry ocean of Black Sands to the north and the bleak escarpment of the treeless Paropamisus Mountains to the south.
It would have made a shorter journey to go straight across the Karakum desert, but we were weary of desert. And it would have been a more easeful journey if we had gone farther to the southward, through the valleys of the Paropamisus, for there we would have found accommodation in a succession of villages and towns and even cities of respectable size, such as Herat and Maimana. But we preferred to take the middle course. We were well accustomed to camping out of doors, and that high Karabil plateau must have got its name only by comparison to lower and warmer lands, for it was not terribly cold even then in early wintertime. We simply added layers of shirts and pai-jamah and abas as we needed them, and found the weather tolerable enough.
The Karabil consisted mostly of monotonous grassland, but there were also stands of trees—pistachio, zizafun, willow and conifers. We had seen many greener and more pleasant lands, and would see many others, but, after having endured the Great Salt, we found even the dull gray grass and scanty foliage of the Karabil a delight to our eyes, and our horses found it adequate for forage. After the lifeless desert, that plateau seemed to us to teem with wildlife. There were coveys of quail, and flocks of a red-legged partridge, and everywhere marmots peeking from their burrows and whistling peevishly at our passing. There were migrant geese and ducks wintering there, or at least passing through: a kind of goose with a barred head-feathering, and a duck of lovely russet and gold plumage. There were multitudes of brown lizards, some of them so immense—longer than my leg—that they frequently startled our horses.
There were herds of several different sorts of delicate qazèl, and of a large and handsome wild ass, called in that region the kulan. When we first saw it, my father said that he almost wished we could stop and capture some, and tame them, and take them back to the West for sale, as they would fetch a far better price than the mules which noblemen and ladies buy for their mounts. The kulan is veritably as big as a mule, and has the same jug head and short tail, but it is of an extraordinarily rich dark-brown coat with a pale belly, and it is beautiful. A man can never tire of watching the herds of them swiftly running and frisking and wheeling in unison. But the Karabil natives told us the kulan cannot be tamed and ridden; they value it only for its edible flesh.