was then the Empire of Chin—and they conquered it, and called it Kithai. The other conquests made by the Mongols, in the rest of the world, I need not recount in series, since they are too well known to history. Suffice it to say that Chinghiz and his lesser Ilkhans and later his sons and grandsons extended the Mongol domains westward to the banks of the River Dnieper in the Polish Ukraine, and to the gates of Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara —which sea, incidentally, like the Adriatic, we Venetians regard as our private pond.
“We Venetians made the word ‘horde’ from the Mongol word yurtu,” my father reminded me, “and we called the marauders collectively the Mongol Horde.” Then he went on to tell me something I had not known. “In Constantinople I heard them called by a different name: the Golden Horde. That was because the Mongol armies invading that region had come originally from this region, and you have seen the yellowness of the soil hereabout. They always colored their tents yellow like the earth, for partial concealment. So—yellow yurtu: Golden Horde. However, the Mongols who marched straight west out of their native Sibir were accustomed to coloring their yurtus white, like the Sibir snows. So those armies, invading the Ukraine, were called by their victims the White Horde. I suppose there may yet be Other-Colored Hordes.”
If the Mongols had never conquered more than Kithai, they would have had much to boast about. The tremendous land stretches from the mountains of Tazhikistan eastward to the shores of the great ocean called the Sea of Kithai, or by some people the Sea of Chin. To the north, Kithai abuts on the Sibir wasteland where the Mongols originated. In the south—in those days, when I had first arrived in the country—Kithai bordered on the Empire of Sung. However, as I shall tell in its place, the Mongols later conquered that empire, too, and called it Manzi, and absorbed it into Kubilai’s Khanate.
But even in those days of my first arrival, the Mongol Empire was so immense that—as I have repeatedly indicated—it was divided into numerous provinces, each under the sovereignty of a different Ilkhan. Those provinces had been parceled out with no particular attention paid to any previous map-drawn borders observed by former rulers now overthrown. The Ilkhan Abagha, for example, was the lord of what had been the Empire of Persia, but his lands also included much of what had been Greater Armenia and Anatolia to the west of Persia and, on the east, India Aryana. There, Abagha’s domain bordered on the lands apportioned to his distant cousin, the Ilkhan Kaidu, who reigned over the Balkh region, the Pai-Mir, all of Tazhikistan and this western Sin-kiang Province of Kithai where my father, my uncle and I now lodged.
The Mongols’ accession to empire and power and wealth had not lessened their lamentable propensity for quarreling among themselves. They quite frequently fought each other, just as they had used to do when they were only ragged savages in the wastes of Sibir, before Chinghiz unified them and impelled them to greatness. The Khakhan Kubilai was a grandson of that Chinghiz, and all the Ilkhans of the outlying provinces were likewise direct descendants of that Perfect Warrior. It might be supposed that they should have constituted a close-knit royal family. But several were descended from different sons of Chinghiz, and had been distanced from each other by two or three generations of the family tree’s branchings apart, and not all were satisfied that they had inherited their fair share of the empire bequeathed by their mutual progenitor.
This Ilkhan Kaidu, for instance, whose summons to audience we were now awaiting, was the grandson of Kubilai’s uncle, Okkodai. That Okkodai, in his time, had himself been the ruling Khakhan, the second after Chinghiz, and evidently his grandson Kaidu resented the fact that the title and throne had passed to a different branch of the line. Evidently he felt, too, that he deserved more of the Khanate than he presently held. Anyway, Kaidu had several times made incursions on the lands given to Abagha, which was tantamount to insubordination against the Khakhan, for Abagha was Kubilai’s nephew, son of his brother, and his close ally in the otherwise disputatious family.
“Kaidu has never yet rebelled openly against Kubilai,” said my father. “But, besides harassing Kubilai’s favorite nephew, he has disregarded many court edicts, and usurped privileges to which he is not entitled, and in other ways has flouted the Khakhan’s authority. If he deems us friends of Kubilai, then he must regard us as enemies of himself.”
Nostril, sounding woeful, said, “I thought we were only having a trivial delay, master. Are we instead in danger again?”
Uncle Mafio muttered, “As the rabbit said in the fable: ‘If that is not a wolf, it is a damned big dog.’”
“He may snatch for himself all the gifts we are carrying to Khanbalik,” said my father. “Out of envy and spite, as much as rapacity.”
“Surely not,” I said. “That would most certainly be flagrant lesa-maesta, defying the Khakhan’s letter of safe conduct. And Kubilai would be furious, would he not, if we arrived empty-handed at his court, and told him why?”
“Only if we did arrive there,” my father said ominously. “Kaidu is presently the gatekeeper of this stage of the Silk Road. He holds the power of life and death here. We can only wait and see.”
We were kept waiting for some days before we were bidden to our confrontation with the Ilkhan, but no one hindered our freedom of movement. So I spent some of that time in wandering about within the walls of Kashgar. I had long ago learned that crossing a border between two nations is not like going through a gate between two different gardens. Even in the far countries, all so exotically different from Venice, to go from one land into the next usually brought no more surprise than one finds, say, in crossing from the Veneto into the Duchy of Padua or Verona. The first commonfolk I had seen in Kithai looked just like those I had been seeing for months, and at first glimpse the city of Kashgar might have been only a much bigger and better-built version of the Tazhik trade town of Murghab. But on closer acquaintance I did find Kashgar different in many respects from anywhere I had visited before.
In addition to the Mongol occupiers and settlers in the vicinity, the population included Tazhiks from across the border, and people of various other origins, Uzbek and Turki and I know not how many others. All of those the Mongols lumped under the name of Uighur, a word which means only “ally,” but signified more. The various Uighurs were not just allied to the Mongols, they were all in some measure related by racial heritage, language and customs. Anyway, except for some variation in their dress and adornments, they all
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
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
