the dhamal, and they danced them almost every day. But one of their dances, called the luddi, remains unique in my experience of dances.
I saw it performed first by a Kalash man who had been hailed before the motley court of Buzai Gumbad, accused of having stolen a set of camel bells from a Kalash neighbor. When the court acquitted him, for lack of evidence, the entire contingent of Kalash folk—including his accuser—set up a squalling and clattering music of flutes and chimta tongs and hand drums, and the man began to dance the flailing, flinging luddi dance, and eventually his whole family joined him in it. I saw the luddi performed next by the other Kalash man, the one who had lost the camel bells. When the court was unable to produce either the bells or a punishable culprit, it ordered that a collection be taken up from every head of household in the encampment to recompense the victim. This meant only a few coppers from every contributor, but the total was probably more than the purloined bells had been worth. And when the man was handed the money, the entire contingent of Kalash folk—including the accused but acquitted thief—again set up a screechy, rackety music of flutes and tongs and hand drums, and that man began to dance the flailing, flinging luddi dance, and eventually his whole family joined him in it. The luddi, I learned, is a Kalash dance which the happily quarrelsome Kalash dance only and specifically to celebrate a victory in litigation. I wish I could introduce to litigious Venice something of the sort.
I thought the composite court had judged wisely in that case, as I thought they did in most cases, considering what a touchy job they had. Of all the peoples gathered in Buzai Gumbad, probably no two were accustomed to abiding by (or disobeying) the same set of laws. Drunken rape seemed to be a commonplace among the Nestorian Russniaks, as Sodomite sex was among the Muslim Arabs, while both those practices were regarded with horror by the pagan and irreligious Kalash. Petty thievery was a way of life for the Hindus, and that was tolerantly condoned by the Bho, who regarded anything not tied down as ownerless, but theft was condemned as criminal by the dirty but honest Tazhiks. So the members of the court had to tread a narrow course, trying to dispense acceptable justice while not insulting any group’s accepted customs. And not every case brought to trial was as trivial as the affair of the stolen camel bells.
One that had come to court before we Polos arrived was still being recounted and discussed and argued over. An elderly Arab merchant had charged the youngest and comeliest of his four wives with having abandoned him and eloped to the tent of a young and good-looking Russniak. The outraged husband did not want her back; he wanted her and her lover condemned to death. The Russniak contended that under the law of his homeland a woman was as fair game as any forest animal, and belonged to the taker. Besides, he said, he truly loved her. The errant wife, a woman of the Kirghiz people, pleaded that she had found her lawful husband repugnant, in that he never entered her except in the foul Arab manner, by the rear entrance, and she felt entitled to a change of partners, if only to get a change of position. But besides that, she said, she truly loved the Russniak. I asked our landlord Iqbal how the trial had come out. (Iqbal, being one of the few permanent inhabitants of Buzai Gumbad, hence a leading citizen, was naturally elected to every winter’s new court.)
He shrugged and said, “Marriage is marriage in any land, and a man’s wife is his property. We had to find for the cuckolded husband in that aspect of the case. He was given permission to put his faithless wife to death. But we denied him any part in deciding the fate of her lover.”
“What was his punishment?”
“He was only made to stop loving her.”
“But she was dead. What use—?”
“We decreed that his love for her must die, too.”
“I—I do not quite understand. How could that be done?”
“The woman’s dead body was laid naked on a hillside. The convicted adulterer was chained and staked just out of reach of her. They were left that way.”
“For him to starve to death beside her?”
“Oh, no. He was fed and watered and kept quite comfortable until he was released. He is free now, and he still lives, but he no longer loves her.”
I shook my head. “Forgive me, Mirza Iqbal, but I really do not understand.”
“A dead body, lying unburied, does not just lie there. It changes, day by day. On the first day, only some discoloration, wherever there was last a pressure on the skin. In the woman’s case, some mottling about the throat, where her husband’s fingers had strangled her. The lover had to sit and see those blotches appearing on her flesh. Perhaps they were not too gruesome to look at. But a day or so later, a cadaver’s abdomen begins to swell. In another little while, a dead body begins to belch and otherwise expel its inner pressures in manners most unmannerly. Later, there come flies—”
“Thank you. I begin to understand.”
“Yes, and he had to watch it all. In the cold here, the process is slowed somewhat, but the decay is inexorable. And as the corpse putrefies, the vultures and the kites descend, and the shaqal dogs come boldly closer, and—”
“Yes, yes.”
“In ten days or thereabouts, when the remains were deliquescing, the young man had lost all love for her. We believe so, anyway. He was quite insane by then. He went away with the Russniak train, but being led on a rope behind their wagons. He still lives, yes, but if Allah is merciful, perhaps he will not live long.”
The karwan trains wintering there on the Roof of the World were laden with all sorts of goods and, while I found many of them worth admiring—silks and spices, jewels and pearls, furs and hides—most of those were no great novelty to me. But some of the trade items I had never even heard of before. A train of Samoyeds, for instance, was bringing down from the far north baled sheets of what they called Muscovy glass. It looked like glass cut into rectangular panes, and each sheet measured about my arm’s length square, but its transparency was marred by cracklings and webbings and blemishes. I learned that it was not real glass at all, but a product of another strange kind of rock. Rather like amianthus, which comes apart in fibers, this rock peels apart like the pages of a book, yielding the thin, brittle, blearily transparent sheets. The material was far inferior to real glass, such as that made at Murano, but the art of glassworking is unknown in most of the East, so the Muscovy glass was a fairly adequate substitute and, said the Samoyeds, fetched a good price in the markets.
From the other end of the earth, from the far south, a train of Tamil Cholas was transporting out of India toward Balkh heavy bags of nothing but salt. I laughed at the dark-skinned little men. I had seen no lack of salt in Balkh, and I thought them stupid to be lugging such a common commodity across whole continents. The tiny, timid Cholas begged my indulgence of their obsequious explanation: it was “sea salt,” they said. I tasted it—no different from any other salt—and I laughed again. So they explained further: there was some quality inherent to sea salt, they claimed, that is lacking in other sorts. The use of it as a seasoning for foods would prevent people’s being beset by goiters, and for that reason they expected the sea salt to sell in these lands for a price worth their trouble of bringing it so far. “Magic salt?” I scoffed, for I had seen many of those ghastly goiters, and I knew they would require more than the eating of a sprinkling of salt to remove. I laughed again at the Cholas’ credulity and folly, and they looked properly chastened, and I went on my way.
The riding and pack animals corraled about the lakeside were almost as various as their owners. There were whole herds of horses and asses, of course, and even a few fine mules. But the many camels there were not the same sort that we had formerly seen and used in the lowland deserts. These were not so tall or long-legged, but bulkier of build, and made to look even more ponderous by their long, thick hair. They also wore a mane, like a horse, except that the mane depended from the bottom, not the top, of their long necks. But the chief novelty of them was that they all had two humps instead of one; it made them easier to ride, since they had a natural saddle declivity between the two humps. I was told that these Bactrian camels were best adapted to wintry conditions and mountainous terrain, as the single-humped Arabian camels are to heat and thirst and desert sands.
Another animal new to me was the pack-carrier of the Bho people, called by them an yyag and by most other people a yak. This was a massive creature with the head of a cow and the tail of a horse, at opposite ends of a body resembling a haystack in shape and size and texture. The yak may stand as high as a man’s shoulder, but its head is carried low, at about a man’s knee level. Its shaggy, coarse hair—black or gray or mixed dark and white in patches—hangs all the way to the ground, obscuring hoofs that look too dainty for its great bulk, but those hoofs are astonishingly precise of step and placement on narrow mountain trails. A yak grunts and grumbles like a pig, and continuously gnashes its millstone teeth as it shambles along.
I learned later that yak meat is as good to eat as the best beef, but no yak-herder in Buzai Gumbad had occasion to slaughter one of the animals while we were there. The Bho did, however, milk the cow yaks of their
