father and uncle, to whom utility meant commerce and commerce meant everything, laughed as the hunters had done, and chided my sentimentality, and from that time on referred sarcastically to the artak as “Marco’s sheep.”)
As we went on up the Wakhan, the mountains on either side remained as awesomely high as ever, but now, each time the snowfall let up enough for us to raise our eyes to the mountains’ immensity, they stood perceptibly closer to us. And the banks of ice on either side of the Ab-e-Panj River built up thicker and bluer, and constricted the racing water to an ever narrower stream between them, as if vividly to illustrate how the winter was closing its grip on the land.
The mountains kept shouldering in on us day by day, and finally others reared up in front of us as well, until we had those Titans standing close all around us except at our backs. We had come to the head end of that high valley, and the snowfall ceased briefly and the clouds cleared, for us to see the white mountain peaks and the cold blue sky magnificently reflected in a tremendous frozen lake, the Chaqmaqtin. From under the ice at its western end spilled the Ab-e-Panj we had been following, so we took the lake to be the river’s source, hence also the ultimate headwater of the fabled Oxus. My father and uncle marked it so, according to their practice, on the Kitab’s otherwise imprecise map of that region. I was not any help in locating our position, as the horizon was much too high and jagged for me to make use of the kamal. But, when the night sky was clear, I could at least tell, from the height of the North Star, that we were now a far way north of where we had begun our overland march at Suvediye on the Levant shore.
At the northeastern end of Lake Chaqmaqtin stood a community that called itself a town, Buzai Gumbad, but it really comprised only a single extensive karwansarai of many buildings, and roundabout it a tent city and the corrals of karwan trains encamped for the winter. It was evident that, come better weather, almost the entire population of Buzai Gumbad would get up and vacate the Wakhan Corridor by way of its various passes. The landlord of the karwansarai was a jolly and expansive man named Iqbal, which means Good Fortune, and the name was apt for one who prospered richly by owning the only karwan stopping place on that stretch of the Silk Road. He was a native Wakhani, he said, born right there in the inn. But, as the son and grandson and great-grandson of previous generations of Buzai Gumbad’s innkeepers, he of course spoke Trade Farsi, and had, if not experience, good hearsay knowledge of the world beyond the mountains.
Spreading his arms wide, Iqbal welcomed us most cordially to “the high Pai-Mir, the Way to the Peaks, the Roof of the World,” and then confided that his extravagant words were no exaggeration. Here, he said, we were exactly one farsakh straight up—that is, two and a half miles—above the level of the earth’s seas and such sea-level cities as Venice and Acre and Basra. Landlord Iqbal did not explain how he could know so exactly the local altitude. But, assuming he spoke true—and because the mountain peaks around us visibly stood as high again—I would not dispute his claim that we had come to the Roof of the World.
THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
1
WE engaged a room for ourselves, including Nostril as one of us, in the main building of the inn, and corral space for our horses outside, and prepared to stay in Buzai Gumbad until the winter broke. The karwansarai was no very elegant place, and, because all its appurtenances and most of its supplies had to be imported from beyond the mountains, Iqbal charged his guests high for their keep. But the place was actually more comfortable than it had to be, considering the circumstance that it was all there was, and that neither Iqbal nor his forebears need ever have bothered to provide any more than the most rudimentary shelter and provender.
The main building was of two stories—the first karwansarai I had seen built so—the bottom half being a commodious stable for Iqbal’s own cattle and sheep, which constituted both his life savings and his inn’s larder. The upstairs was for people, and was encircled by an open portico which had, outside each sleeping chamber, a privy hole cut in its floor, so that the guests’ droppings fell into the inn yard for the benefit of a flock of scrawny chickens. The lodgings being upstairs over the stable meant that we enjoyed the warmth wafting upward from the animals, but we did not much enjoy the smell of them. Still, that was not so bad as the smell of us and the other long- unwashed guests and our unwashed garments. The landlord would not squander precious dried-dung fuel on anything like a hammam or hot water for washing clothes.
He preferred, and so did we guests, to use the fuel to keep our beds warm at night. All of Iqbal’s beds were of the style called in the East the kang, a hollow platform of piled-up stones covered with boards supporting a heap of camel-hair blankets. Before retiring, one lifted the planks, spread some dry dung inside the kang and placed on that a few burning coals. The newcome traveler usually did it inexpertly at first, and either froze all night or set the planks afire under him. But with practice one learned to lay the fire so that it smoldered all night at an even warmth, and did not make quite enough smoke to suffocate everybody in the room. Each guest chamber also had a lamp, handmade by Iqbal himself, and the like of which I never saw elsewhere. To make one, he would take a camel’s bladder, blow it up to a sphere, then paint it with lacquer to make it hold that shape and to give it a bright design of many colors. With a hole cut out of it so it could be positioned over a candle or an oil lamp, that big globe gave a varicolored and most radiant glow.
The inn’s everyday meals were the usual Muslim monotony: mutton and rice, rice and mutton, boiled beans, big rounds of a thin-rolled, chewy bread called nan, and, for drink, a green-colored cha that always had an inexplicable slight taste of fish. But good host Iqbal did his best to vary the monotony whenever he had an excuse: on every Muslim Sabbath Friday and on the various Muslim feste days which occurred during that winter. I do not know what the days celebrated—they had names like Zu-1-Heggeh and Yom Ashura—but on such occasions we were served beef instead of mutton, and a rice called pilaf, colored red or yellow or blue. There were also sometimes fried meat tarts called samosa, and a sort of sharbat confection of snow flavored with pistachio or sandalwood, and once—once only, but I think I still can taste it—for a sweet, we were served a pudding made of crushed ginger and garlic.
There was nothing to prevent our eating the various foods of other nationalities and religions, and we frequently did. In the lesser outbuildings of the karwansarai, and in tents all around it, were camped the people of many karwan trains, and they were people of many different countries and customs and languages. There were Persian and Arab merchants and Pakhtuni horse traders who had come, like us, from the west, and big blond Russniaks from the far north, and shaggy, burly Tazhiks from the nearer north, and flat-faced Bho from the easterly land called the High Place of the Bho, or To-Bhot in their language, and dark-skinned little Hindus and Tamil Cholas from southern India, and gray-eyed, sandy-haired people called Hunzukut and Kalash from the nearer south, and some Jews of indeterminate origin, and numerous others. This was the commingled population which made of Buzai Gumbad a town-sized community—in the wintertime, anyway—and they all exerted themselves to make it a well- run and livable town. Indeed, it was a much more neighborly and friendly community than many settled and permanent ones I have been in.
At any mealtime, anybody could sit down at any family’s cook fire and be made welcome—even if he and they could not speak a mutually comprehensible language—the understanding being that his next cook fire would be equally hospitable to any comer. By the end of that winter, I think we Polos had sampled every kind of food that was served in Buzai Gumbad, and, since we did there no cooking of our own, had treated as many strangers to meals in Iqbal’s dining hall. Besides offering a variety of eating experiences—some memorable for their deliciousness, a few memorable for their awfulness—the community provided other diversions. Almost every day was a festa day for some group of people, and they were pleased to have everybody else in the encampment come and watch or join in their music making and singing and dancing and games of sport. All the doings in Buzai Gumbad were not festive, of course, but the diversity of people managed to unite in more solemn matters, too. Because they observed among them so many different codes of law, they had elected one man of every color, tongue and religion gathered there, to sit together as a court for hearing complaints of pilferage and trespass and other disturbances of the peace.
I have mentioned the law court and the festivities in the same breath, as it were, because they figured together in one incident I found amusing. The handsome people called the Kalash were a quarrelsome sort, but only among themselves, and not ferociously so; their quarrels usually ended in laughter all around. They were also a merry and musical and graceful sort; they had any number of different Kalash dances, with names like the kikli and
