At one of our night stops, when we camped by the road instead of pushing on to a karwansarai, Ussu and Donduk bought from a nearby camp of drovers one of their fat-tailed sheep and some doughy ewe cheese. (I should probably say they
“Tonight’s meal,” said Ussu. “Good and tender now, uu?”
Somewhat to my surprise, he and Donduk volunteered to do the skinning and butchering and cooking themselves. It seems that Mongol men do not mind doing woman’s work when there are no women about to do it. The meal they made was one to remember, but not with bon-gusto. They began by retrieving the sheep’s lopped-off head, and it was spitted with the rest of the animal over our fire. A whole sheep should have sufficed to gorge several families of hearty eaters, but Ussu and Donduk and Nostril, with not much help from us other three, consumed that entire animal from nose to fat tail. The eating of the head was the least appetizing to watch and listen to. One of the gourmands would slice off a cheek from it, another an ear, the other a lip, and they would dip those awful fragments in a bowl of peppered juice from the meat, and chew and slurp and slobber and swallow and belch and fart. Since Mongols consider it bad manners for men to talk while they dine, that succession of good- mannered noises was not varied until they got down to the body bones and added the sound of sucking out the marrow.
We Polos ate only the meat sliced from the sheep’s loins—well-beaten by the bous-kashia and admittedly most tender. Or we would have preferred to eat only that, but Ussu and Donduk kept carving and pressing on us the real delicacies: pieces of the tail, meaning blobs of yellow-white fat. They quivered and trembled repulsively in our fingers, but we could not in politeness refuse, so we somehow managed to gag them down, and I can still feel the way those ghastly gobbets went slimily palpitating down my gullet. After the first dreadful mouthful, I tried to clean my palate with a hearty swig of cha—and nearly strangled. Too late I discovered that Ussu, after brewing the cha leaves with boiling water, had not stopped there as civilized cooks do, but had melted into the drink chunks of mutton fat and ewe cheese. That Mongol-style cha would make a nourishing full meal all by itself, I suppose, but I must say that it was downright revolting.
We ate other meals on the Silk Road that are more pleasant to recall. This far into the interior of Kithai, the Han and Uighur karwansarai landlords did not limit their fare to only the things a Muslim can eat, so we found a good diversity of meats—including that of the illik, which is a tiny roe deer that barks like a dog, and of a lovelily golden-feathered pheasant, and steaks cut from yaks, and even the meat of black bears and brown bears, which abound here. When we camped in the open, Uncle Mafio and the two Mongols vied at providing game for the pot: ducks and geese and rabbits and once a desert qazel, but more usually they sought ground squirrels to shoot, because those little creatures thoughtfully provide the fuel for their own cooking. A hunter knows that, when he has no kara or wood or dried dung to make a fire with, he has only to look for the ground squirrels and their holes; even in a desert barren, they somehow contrive to put a weather-protective dome over their holes, of laced twigs and grass, well dried for the burning.
There were many other wild creatures in that region, not for eating but interesting to observe. There were black vultures with wings so broad that a man would have to take three paces to walk from tip to tip; and a snake so much resembling yellow metal that I would have sworn it was made of molten gold, but, having been informed that it was deadly venomous, I never touched one to find out. There was a little animal called a yerbo, like a mouse but with extravagantly long hind legs and tail, upon which three appendages it hopped about upright; and a magnificently beautiful wild cat called a palang, which I once saw making a meal of a wild ass it had downed, and which was like the heraldic pard, only not yellow of coat, but silvery gray with black rosettes spotted all over it.
The Mongols taught me to pick various wild plants as vegetable dishes for our meals—wild onions, for example, which go so well with any venison meat. There was a growth that they called the hair plant, and it did look exactly like a shock of black human hair. Neither its name nor its appearance was very appetizing, but when boiled and seasoned with a bit of vinegar, it made a delicate pickle condiment. Another oddity was what they called the vegetable lamb; they averred that it was indeed a mongrel creature bred from a mating of animal and plant, and said they preferred eating it to eating real lamb. It was tasty enough, but it was really only the woolly rootstalk of a certain fern.
The one ravishingly delicious novelty I found on that stage of the journey was the wonderful melon called the hami. Even the method of its growing was a novelty. When the vines started forming their fruit buds, the melon farmers paved over the whole field with slabs of slate for the vines to lie on. Instead of the melons’ getting sunshine only on their upper sides, those slates reflected the sun’s heat so that the hami ripened evenly all the way around. The hami had flesh of a pale greenish-white, so crisp that it crackled when bitten, dripping with juice, of a cool and refreshing flavor, not cloying but
When we had been traveling for two or three weeks, the Silk Road abruptly turned northward for a little way, the only time it touched the Takla Makan, making a very short traverse across that desert’s eastern-most edge, then turning directly east again toward a town named Dun-huang. That northward jink of the road took us through a pass that twined among some low mountains—really they were extremely high sand dunes—called the Flame Hills.
There is a legend to account for every place-name in Kithai, and according to legend these hills once were lushly forested and green, until they were set afire by some malicious kwei, or demons. A monkey god came along and kindly blew out the flames, but there was nothing left except these mountainous heaps of sand, still glowing like embers. That is the legend. I am more inclined to think that the Flame Hills are so called because their sands are a sort of burnt ocher color, and are windswept into flame-shaped furrows and wrinkles, and they perpetually shimmer behind a curtain of hot air, and—especially at sunset—they do glow a truly fiery red-orange color. But the most curious thing about them was a nest of four eggs which Ussu and Donkuk uncovered from the sand at the base of one of the dunes. I would have thought the objects were only large stones, perfectly oval and smooth and about the size of hami melons, but Donduk insisted:
“These are the abandoned eggs of a giant rukh bird. Such nests can be found all along the Flame Hills here.”
When I held one, I realized that it was indeed too light for a stone of that size. And when I examined it, I saw that it did have a porous surface, exactly as do the eggs of hens or ducks or any other bird. These were eggs, all right, and far bigger even than those of the camel-bird, which I had seen in Persian markets. I wondered what kind of a for-tagiona these would make if I broke them and scrambled them and fried them for our evening meal.
“These Flame Hills,” said Ussu, “must have been the rukh’s favored nesting place in times past, Ferenghi, do you not think so, uu?”
“Times very long past,” I suggested, for I had just tried to crack one of the eggs. Although it was not of stonelike weight, it had long ago aged and petrified to stonelike solidity. So the things were both uneatable and unhatchable, and they were too unwieldy for me to carry one off for a memento. They were most certainly eggs, and of a size that could have been laid only by a monster bird, but whether in truth that bird had been a rukh, I cannot say.
5
DUN-HUANG was a thriving trade town, about as big and as populous as Kashgar, sitting in a sandy basin ringed by camel-colored rock cliffs. But where Kashgar’s inns had catered to Muslim travelers, those of Dun-huang made special provision for the tastes and customs of Buddhists. This was because the town had been founded, some nine hundred years ago, when a traveling trader of the Buddhist faith was beset, somewhere on the Silk Road hereabout, by bandits or the azghun voices or a kwei demon or something, and was somehow miraculously saved
