The Journeyer

running or flying.

Behind the Khakhan’s chariot or steed or elephant would come the train of his company, all lords and ladies and distinguished guests mounted only a little less royally than the Khan himself, and all—depending on the game to be sought that day—carrying hooded hawks on their gauntleted wrists, or accompanied by servants carrying their lances or bows or leading on leash their chase dogs. Out ahead of the train, earlier in the day, would have gone the many beaters, to form up in three sides of a vast square and, at the proper time, to start flushing the game—stags or boars or otters or whatever—out the fourth side of the square, toward the approaching hunters.

Whenever Kubilai’s train passed through or by one of the villages situated around his parkland, all the families of women and children living there would run outdoors to cry “Hail!” They also kept welcome fires always burning, in case the Khan should come that way, and would cast into the flames spices and incense to perfume the air as the Khakhan went by. At midday, the hunting party would repair to the zhu-gan palace, always set up at a convenient place, for food and drink and soft music and a brief nap before going afield again in the afternoon. And when the day’s hunt was done, depending on how tired they all might be, or how far from the main palace, they would either return there or stop the night in the zhu-gan palace, for it had copious room and comfortable bedding.

I and Ali and our four Mongols reached Xan-du in the middle of a morning, and were told by a steward where to find the Khakhan’s portable palace, and arrived there at midday, when the whole party was lolling over its meal. Several people recognized me and hailed me, including Kubilai. I introduced Ali Babar to him as “a citizen of Khanbalik, Sire, one of your rich merchant princes,” and Kubilai received him cordially, not having noticed Ali in my company in the days when he had been the lowly slave Nostril. Then I started to say, “I bring from Yunnan both good and bad news, Sire—” but he held up his hand to stop me.

“Nothing,” he said firmly. “Nothing is important enough to interrupt a good hunt. Hold your news until we return to the Xan-du palace this evening. Now, are you hungry?” He clapped for a servant to bring food. “Are you fatigued? Would you rather precede us to the palace and rest while you wait, or would you take a lance with us? We have been starting some admirably big and vicious boar hogs.”

“Why, thank you, Sire. I should like to join the hunt. But I have little experience with a lance. Can boar be killed with bow and arrow?”

“Anything can be killed with anything, including bare hands. And those you may have to use, to finish a boar.” He turned and called, “Hui! Mahawat, make ready an elephant for Marco Polo!”

It was my first ride aboard an elephant, and it was most pleasant, infinitely more so than riding a camel, and very different from riding a horse. The hauda was made like a basket, of woven zhu-gan strips, with a little bench on which I sat beside the elephant driver, who is properly called a mahawat. The hauda had high sides to protect us from flicking tree branches, and a roof canopy over us, but was open in the front, so the mahawat could direct the elephant by prodding it with a stick, and so I could let fly my arrows. At first I was a little dizzied by my great height above the ground, but I soon got used to that. And when the animal first stepped out on the march through the park, I did not immediately realize that it was walking rather faster than a horse or camel does. Also, when it came time to chase a fleeing boar, it took me a while to realize that the elephant, for all its immense bulk, was running as fast as a galloping horse.

The mahawat took great pride in his great charges, and bragged about them, and I found his bragging informative. Only cow elephants, he told me, were used as working beasts. The bulls being not very amenable to training, only a few of those were kept in any domestic herd, as company for the cows. The elephants all wore bells, big chunky things carved of wood, that sounded with a hollow thunking noise instead of a jangle. The mahawat said that if I ever heard a clanging metal bell, I had better move in a hurry, because metal bells were hung only on elephants that had misbehaved and so could not any longer be trusted—in other words, those elephants most resembling people: usually a cow maddened, like any human mother, by the loss of a calf, or a bull gone grumpy and mean and irascible with age, like any old man.

An elephant, said the mahawat, was more intelligent than a dog, and more obedient than a horse, and more adept with its trunk and tusks than a monkey with its paws, and could be taught to do many things both useful and entertaining. In the timber forests, two elephants could work a saw between them to cut down a tree, then pick up and stack the giant logs or drag them to a log road, with the attendance of only a single human logger to select the trees to be cut. As a beast of burden, the elephant was incomparable to any others—being able to carry as much of a load as three strong oxen, and carry it for a distance of thirty to forty li in an ordinary working day, or more than fifty li in an emergency. The elephant was not at all shy of water, as a camel is, for it is a good swimmer, and a camel cannot swim at all.

I do not know if an elephant could have negotiated a precarious trail like the Pillar Road, but that animal carried us swiftly and surely across a variety of Da-ma-qing terrain. Since my elephant was just one in a line of them, the Khan’s and several others ahead of me, my mahawat did not have to do much directing. But when he wished the elephant to turn, he merely had to touch one or the other of the door-sized ears. When we were traveling among trees, the animal would, unbidden, use its trunk to move aside any impeding limbs, and the more whippy branches it would even break off to ensure that they did not swipe back at us riders. It went sometimes between trees that looked too close together to allow passage, and did that so sinuously and smoothly as not to scrape the belts that held our hauda on its shoulders. When we came to the wet clay bank of a small stream, the elephant, almost as playfully as a child, put its four tree-trunk feet close together and slid down the slope to the water’s edge. At that place, the river was laid with stepping stones for crossing. Before venturing out onto them, the elephant first gently tested its weight on one, and sounded with its trunk the depth of the water roundabout. Then, seeming satisfied, it stepped out onto the stones and from one to the next, never hesitating, but treading as delicately and precisely as a fat man who has drunk a drop too much.

If the elephant has one unlovely trait, it is one that is common to all creatures, but is amplified to a prodigious degree by the animal’s size. That is to say that the elephant I rode frequently and appallingly broke wind. Other animals do that—camels, horses, even human beings, God knows—but no other animal in God’s Creation can do it so thunderously and odoriferously as an elephant, which produces a noxious miasma almost as visible as it is audible. With heroic effort, I pretended not to notice those lapses of manners. But I did make some small complaint of another trait: the elephant several times coiled its trunk back over its head and sneezed in my face—so windily as to rock me on my seat, and so wetly that I was soon damp all over. When I voiced my vexation at the sneezing, the mahawat said loftily:

“Elephants do not sneeze. The cow is just blowing your aroma away from her.”

“Gesu,” I muttered. “My aroma is bothering her?”

“It is only that you are a stranger, and she is unaccustomed to you. When she gets to know you, she will put up with your smell and will moderate her behavior.”

“I rejoice to hear it.”

So we rollicked along, rhythmically swaying in the high hauda, and the mahawat told me other things. Down in the jungles of Champa, he said, where the elephants came from, there were such things as white elephants.

“Not really white, of course, like the Khakhan’s snow-white horses and hawks. But a paler gray than ordinary. And because they are rare, like albinos among humans, they are held to be sacred. They are often employed for revenge against an enemy.”

“Sacred,” I repeated, “but instruments of revenge? I do not understand.”

He explained. When a white elephant was caught, it was always presented to the local king, because only a king could afford to keep one. Being sacred, the elephant could never be put to labor, but had to be pampered with a fine stable and dedicated attendants and a princely diet, and its only function was to march in religious processions, when it had to be festooned with gold-threaded blankets and jeweled chains and baubles and such. That was a burdensome expense even for a king. However, said the mahawat, suppose a king got displeased with some one of his lords, or feared his rivalry, or simply took a dislike to him … .

“In the old days,” he said, “a king would have sent him poisoned sweetmeats, so that the recipient would die when he ate them—or a beautiful slave girl poisoned in her pink places, so that the noble would die after he lay with her. But those stratagems are now too well-known. So the king nowadays simply sends the noble a white elephant. He cannot refuse a sacred gift. He can make no profit from it. But he has the ruinous expense of maintaining it in proper style, so he is soon bankrupted and broken—if he waits to be. Most commit suicide on first receiving the white elephant.”