The Journeyer

together, so I asked them both: why Ferenghi?

“Because you are Ferenghi,” said Ussu, looking puzzled, as if I had asked a witless question.

“But you also call my father Ferenghi. And my uncle.”

“He and he is Ferenghi also,” said Ussu.

“But you call Nostril Nostril. Is that because he is a slave?”

“No,” said Donduk scornfully. “Because he is not Ferenghi.”

“Elder Brothers,” I persisted. “I am trying to find out what Ferenghi means.”

“Ferenghi means only Ferenghi,” snapped Donduk, and threw up his hands in disgust, and so did I.

But that mystery I finally did figure out: Ferenghi was only their pronunciation of Frank. Their people must first have heard Westerners call themselves Franks eight centuries ago, in the time of the Frankish Empire, when some of the Mongols’ own ancestors, then called Bulgars and Hiung-nu, or Huns, invaded the West and gave their names to Bulgaria and Hungary. Ever since then, apparently, the Mongols have called any white Westerner a Ferenghi, no matter his real nationality. Well, it was no more inaccurate than the calling of all Mongols Mongols, though they were really of many different origins.

Ussu and Donduk told me, for instance, how their Mongol cousins the Kirghiz had come into existence. The name derived from the Mongol words kirk kiz, they said, meaning “forty virgins,” because sometime in the remote past there had existed in some remote place that many virgin females, unlikely though it might seem to us moderns, and all forty of them had got impregnated by the foam blown from an enchanted lake, and from the resultant miraculous mass birth had descended all the people now called Kirghiz. That was interesting, but I found more interesting another thing Ussu and Donduk told me about the Kirghiz. They lived in the perpetually frozen Sibir, far north of Kithai, and perforce had invented two ingenious methods of getting about those harsh lands. They would strap to the bottom of their boots bits of highly polished bone, on which they could glide far and fast upon the ice of frozen waters. Or they would similarly strap on long boards like barrel staves, to skim far and fast over the snowy wastes.

The very next farm village on our way was populated by yet another breed of Mongols. Some of the communities on that stretch of the Silk Road were peopled by Uighurs, those nationalities “allied” to the Mongols, and others were peopled by Han folk, and Ussu and Donduk had not made any comment about them. But when we came to this particular village, they told us the people were Kalmuk Mongols, and they spat the name, thus: “Kalmuk! Vakh!”—vakh being a Mongol noise to register sheer disgust, and the Kalmuk were disgusting, right enough. They were the filthiest human creatures I ever saw outside of India. To depict just one aspect of their filthiness, let me say this: not only did they never wash their bodies, they never even took off their clothes, day or night. When a Kalmuk’s outer garment got too worn to be serviceable, he or she did not discard it, but simply donned a new one over it, and continued wearing layers upon layers of ragged clothes until the undermost gradually rotted and shredded away from underneath, like a sort of ghastly scurf of the crotch. I will not attempt to say how they smelled.

But the name Kalmuk, I learned, is not a national or tribal designation. It is only the Mongol word meaning one who stays, or one who settles down in any place. All normal Mongols being nomads, they have a deep disdain for any of their race who ceases roaming and takes up a fixed abode. In the majority opinion, any Mongol who becomes a Kalmuk is doomed to degeneracy and depravity, and if the Kalmuk people I saw and smelled were typical, then the majority have good reason to despise them. And now I recalled having heard the Ilkhan Kaidu speak slightingly of the Khakhan Kubilai as “no better than a Kalmuk.” Vakh, I thought, if I find that he is, I shall turn around and go straight back to Venice.

However, despite my awareness that the word Mongol was a too general term for a multiplicity of peoples, I found it convenient to go on using the name. I soon realized also that the other, the original, inhabitants of Kithai were not all Han, either. There were nationalities called Yi and Hui and Naxi and Hezhe and Miao and God knows how many others, of skin colors ranging from ivory to bronze. But, as with the Mongols, I continued to think of all those other nationalities as Han. For one reason, their languages all sounded very much alike to me. For another, every one of those races regarded every other as inferior, and so called each other by their various words meaning Dog People. For still another reason, they all called any foreigner, including me, a name even less deserved than Frank. In Han and in every other of their singsong languages and dialects, any outlander is a Barbarian.

As we rode farther and farther along the Silk Road, it became increasingly crowded with traffic—groups and trains of traveling traders like ourselves, individual farmers and herders and artisans taking their wares to market towns, Mongol families and clans and whole boks on the move. I remembered how Isidoro Priuli, our clerk of the Compagnia Polo, had remarked, just before we left Venice, that the Silk Road had been a busy thoroughfare from the most ancient times, and now I saw reason to believe him. Over the years and centuries and maybe millennia, the traffic on that road had worn it down far below the level of the surrounding terrain. In places it was a broad trench so deep that a farmer in his nearby bean patch might see no more of the passing processions than the flick of a cart driver’s upraised whip. And down inside that trench, the cartwheels’ ruts had worn so deep that every cart now had to go where the ruts went. A carter never had to worry about his vehicle’s overturning, but neither could he pull it to one side when he needed to relieve himself. To change direction on the road—say, to turn off to some side-village destination—a driver had to keep going until he came to a junction where there were diverging ruts in which to set his wheels.

The carts used in that region of Kithai were of a peculiar type. They had immensely big wheels with knobbed rims, standing so high that they often reached above the wooden or canvas cart roof. Perhaps the wheels had had to be built bigger and bigger over the years just so their axles would clear the hump of ground between the road ruts. Each such wagon also had an awning projecting from its top front, to cover the driver from inclement weather, and that awning was considerately extended on poles far enough so that it also sheltered the team of horses, oxen or asses pulling the wagon.

I had heard much about the cleverness and inventiveness and ingenuity of the inhabitants of Kithai, but I now had cause to wonder if those qualities might be overrated. Very well, every cart had an awning to shelter its draft animals as well as its driver, and maybe that was a clever invention. But every wagon also had to carry several sets of spare axles for its wheels. That was because every separate province of Kithai has its own idea of how far apart a cart’s wheels should be, and of course its local wagons have long ago put the roads’ ruts that far apart. So the distance between the ruts is wide, for example, on the stretch of Silk Road that goes through Sin-kiang, but narrow on the road through the province of Tsing-hai, wide again but not quite so wide in Ho-nan, and so on. A carter traversing any considerable length of the Silk Road must stop every so often, laboriously take the wheels and axles off his wagon, put on axles of a different breadth and replace the wheels.

Every draft animal wore a bag slung under its tail by a webbing around its hindquarters, to collect its droppings while on the move. That was not to keep the road clean or to spare annoyance to people coming along behind. We were by now out of the region where the earth was full of burnable kara rock, free for the taking, so every carter carefully hoarded his animals’ dung to fuel the camp fire on which he would prepare his mutton and mian and cha.

We saw many herds of sheep being driven to market or to pasture, and the sheep too wore peculiar backside appendages. The sheep were of the fat-tailed breed, and that breed is to be seen all over the East, but I had never seen any so fat-tailed as these. A sheep’s clublike tail might weigh ten or twelve pounds, nearly a tenth of its whole body weight. It was a genuine burden to the creature, and also that tail is considered the best part of the animal for eating. So each sheep had a light rope harness to drag a little plank behind it, and on that trailing shelf its tail rode safe from being bruised or unnecessarily dirtied. We saw also many herds of swine being driven, and it seemed to me that they could have used some expenditure of inventiveness, too. The pigs of Kithai are also a distinctive breed, being long in the body and ludicrously swaybacked, so that their bellies actually drag the ground, and I wondered why their herders had not considerately provided something like belly wheels.

Our escorts Ussu and Donduk were contemptuous of the wheeled vehicles and slow-plodding herds on the road. They were Mongols, and they thought all rights of way should be reserved to horseback riders. They grumbled that the Khakhan Kubilai had not yet kept a promise he had made some time ago: to level every least obstruction on every plain in Kithai, so that a horseman could canter across the entire country, even in darkest night, and never fear his horse’s stumbling. They were naturally impatient of our having to lead packhorses and proceed at a sedate pace instead of galloping headlong. So they now and then found a way to enliven what to them was a boring journey.