stretches of the Great Wall out in the countryside.
We went through that gateway and we were in one of the courtyards of the Khakhan’s palace. But palace is a word not comprehensive enough. That was more than a palace; it was a fair-sized city within the city; and it also was still a-building. The courtyard was full of the wagons and carts and draft animals of stonemasons and carpenters and plasterers and gilders and such, and the conveyances of farmers and tradesmen purveying provender and necessities to the inhabitants of the palace city, and the mounts and carriages and porter-borne palanquins of other visitors come on other business from near and far.
From the group of courtiers who had accompanied us through the city, one stepped forward, a quite old and fragile-appearing Han, saying in Farsi, “I shall summon servants, my lords.” He only gently clapped his pallid, papery hands, but somehow that imperceptible command carried through the confusion of the courtyard and he was instantly obeyed. Out of somewhere came half a dozen stable grooms, and he instructed them to take charge of our mounts and packhorses, also to lead Ussu and Donduk and Nostril to quarters in the palace guard barracks. He clapped his hands almost soundlessly again, and three female servants just as magically appeared.
“These maids will attend you, my lords,” he said to my father and uncle and me. “You will lodge temporarily in the pavilion of honored guests. I will come on the morrow and conduct you to the Khakhan, who is most eager to greet you, and at that time doubtless he will appoint more permanent quarters for you.”
The three women bowed four times before us in the abjectly humble Han salute called the ko-tou, which is a prostration so low that the bowing forehead actually is supposed to knock the ground. Then the women smilingly beckoned and, with curiously birdlike, tripping little steps, led us across the courtyard, and the crowd made way before us. We went another considerable distance through the twilit palace city—along galleries and through cloisters and across other open courtyards and down corridors and over terraces—until the women again did the ko-tou at the guest pavilion. It had a seemingly blank wall of translucent oiled paper in frames of wood filigree, but the women easily opened it by sliding two panels apart and aside, and bowed us in. Our chambers were three bedrooms and a sitting room, en suite, lavishly decorated and ornamented, with an ornate brazier already alight— burning clean charcoal, not animal dung or the smoky kara coals. One of the women began turning down our beds —real beds, high standing and piled higher with downy quilts and pillows—while another set water to heat on the brazier for our baths and the third began bringing in trays of already hot food from some kitchen somewhere.
We fell first on the food, almost snatching and stabbing with our nimble-tong sticks, for we were hungry and it was fine fare: bits of steamed shoat in a garlic sauce, pickled mustard greens cooked with broad beans, the familiar mian pasta, a porridge very like our Venetian chestnut-meal polenta, a cha flavored with almonds and, for the sweet, red-candied little crabapples impaled on twigs for ease of eating. Then, in our separate rooms, we bathed all over—or got bathed, I should say. My father and uncle seemed to accept those ministrations as indifferently as if the young women had been male rubbers in a hammam. But it was the first time I had been so served by a female since the long-ago days of Zia Zulia, and I felt both embarrassment and titillation.
To distract myself, I watched the maid instead of what she was doing to me. She was a young woman of the Han, perhaps a little older than I, but at that time I knew not how to gauge the age of such alien beings. She was far better dressed than any Western servant would have been, but also was much more meek and docile and solicitous than any Western servant.
She had face and hands of ivory tint, an upswept mass of blue-black hair, barely perceptible eyebrows, no apparent eyelashes, and eyes also invisible because their opening was so narrow and she kept them always downcast. She had rosebud lips, red and dewy-looking, but a nose almost nonexistent. (I was beginning to resign myself to never seeing a shapely Verona-style nose in these lands.) Her ivory face was at the moment marred by a smudge on her forehead, from her ko-tou in the courtyard. However, a small imperfection in a woman can sometimes be a most appealing feature. I began to wish very much that I could see what the rest of the young woman looked like, under her many layers of brocade —stole and robe and gown and sashes and ties and other furbelows.
I was tempted to suggest that, as soon as she had me clean all over, she might serve me in other ways. But I did not. I could not speak her language, and the necessary gestures of suggestion might have been taken as more offensive than inviting. Also, I did not know how liberal or how strict the local conventions might be in regard to such things. So I decided prudence was called for, and, when she finished my bath and made the ko-tou, I let her depart. The hour was still early, but the day had been a tiring one. My combined fatigue of traveling, excitement at having finally arrived, and languor induced by the bath put me immediately to sleep. I dreamed that I was undressing the Han maidservant like a toy doll, layer by layer, and when the last garment was peeled away she suddenly became that other toy: that bursting, blazing display called fiery trees and sparkling flowers.
In the morning, the same three women brought trays of food which they served upon our laps while we still lay in bed, and, while we broke our fast, prepared hot water to give us each another bath. I endured it without complaint, though I did think that two all-over bathings in the course of a single day was rather excessive. Then Nostril came, leading some of the stable hands carrying our travel packs. So, after the baths, we donned the finest and least worn clothes we owned. Those were our dashing Persian costumes—tulbands on our heads, embroidered waistcoats over loose shirts with tight cuffs, kamarbands around our middles, and ample pai-jamah tucked into well-cut boots. Our three maids giggled, and nervously put their hands over their mouths, as Han women always do when they laugh, but they hastened to indicate that they were tittering in admiration of our handsomeness.
Then arrived our elderly Han guide of the evening before—this time he introduced himself: Lin-ngan, the Court Mathematician—and led us from the pavilion. Now, in full morning light, I could better appreciate our surroundings, as we went along arcades and colonnades and through vine-trellised bowers and along porticoes overhung by curly-edged roof eaves and along terraces that overlooked flower-filled gardens and over high-arched bridges that spanned lotus ponds and little streams in which golden fish swam. In every place and passage we saw servants, most of them Han, male and female, richly garbed but timorously hastening on their errands, and many Mongol guardsmen in dress uniforms, standing rigid as statues but holding weapons which they looked ready to use, and we saw the occasional strolling noble or elder or courtier, as dignified and sumptuously robed and important- appearing as our guide Lin-ngan, with whom they exchanged ceremonious nods in passing.
All the unwalled passages open to the air had intricately carved and fretted balustrades and exquisitely sculptured pillars and hanging, tinkling wind chimes and silk tassels swishing like horses’ tails. All the enclosed passages where the sun did not enter were lighted by tinted Muscovy-glass lanterns like soft-colored moons, and they glowed with a lovely diffuse light, because every such passage was misted by the fragrant smoke of burning incense. And all the passages, open or enclosed, were decorated with standing objects of art: elegant marble sundials and lacquered screens and figured gongs and images of lions and horses and dragons and other animals which I could not recognize, and great urns of bronze and vases of porcelain and jade, overflowing with cut flowers.
We crossed again the gateside courtyard by which we had entered on the previous evening, and it was again or still thronged with saddle horses and pack asses and camels and carts and wagons and palanquins and people. Among that press, I happened to see two Han men just dismounting from mules and, though they were but two faces in an innumerable crowd, I had a vague sense of having seen those men before. After leading us some way farther, old Lin-ngan brought us finally to a south-facing pair of immense doors, chased and gilded and lacquered in many colors, doors so massive in size and so weighty with metal studs and bosses that they might have been intended to keep giants out—or in. Pausing with his wisp of a hand on one of the formidable wrought-dragon handles, Lin-ngan said in his whisper of a voice:
“This is the Cheng, the Hall of Justice, and this is the hour of the Khakhan’s dispensing judgment to plaintiffs and supplicants and miscreants. If you will but attend until that is concluded, my Lords Polo, he wishes to make his greetings immediately afterward.”
The frail old man, with no apparent effort, swung open the ponderous doors—they must have been cleverly counterpoised and on well-oiled hinges—and bowed us inside. He followed us in and closed the door behind us, and remained standing with us to provide helpful interpretations of what was going on in the hall.
The Cheng was a tremendous and lofty chamber, fully as big as an indoor courtyard, its ceiling held up by carved and gilded columns, its walls paneled with red leather, but its floor space empty of furniture. At the far end was a raised platform and on that a substantial thronelike chair, flanked by rows of lower and less elegantly upholstered chairs. There were dignitaries occupying all those seats, and in the shadows behind the dais were other figures standing and moving about. Between us and the platform knelt a great crowd of petitioners, enough to fill the chamber from wall to wall, most of them in coarse peasant dress but others in noble raiment.
