“We could try going around,” said my father.
“The maps of the Kitab show no such details as this,” said my uncle, scratching meditatively at his elbow. “We have no way of knowing its extent, or of guessing whether a north or a south detour would be shorter.”
“And if we are going to skirt every one of these,” said Nostril, “we will be in this desert forever.”
I said nothing, being totally ignorant of desert travel, and not ashamed to leave the decisions to the more expert. So we four sat our camels and looked out over the sparkling waste. But the boy Aziz, behind us, prodded his pack camel and made it kneel, and he dismounted. We did not notice what he was doing until he walked out from among us and walked onto the salt crust. He turned and looked up at us, and smiled prettily, and said in his little bird voice:
“Now I can repay your kindness in bringing me along. I shall walk ahead, and I can tell from the trembling underfoot how strong is the surface. I will keep to the firmest ground, and you have only to follow.”
“You will cut your feet!” I protested.
“No, Mirza Marco, for I am of light weight. Also, I took the liberty of extracting these plates from the packs.” He held up two of the golden dishes the Shah Zaman had sent. “I shall strap them under my boots as an extra protection.”
“It is dangerous nonetheless,” said my uncle. “You are brave to volunteer, lad, but we have sworn that no harm must come to you. Better one of us—”
“No, Mirza Mafìo,” said Aziz, still staunchly. “If by chance I should fall through, it would be easier for you to pluck me out than any larger person.”
“He is right, masters,” said Nostril. “The child has good sense. And, as you remark, a good heart for courage and initiative.”
So we let Aziz precede us, and we followed at a discreet distance. It was slow going, keeping to his shuffle pace, but that made the walking less painful for the camels. And we did cross that trembling land in safety, and before nightfall had come to an area of more trustworthy sand on which to camp.
Only once that day did Aziz misjudge the crust. With a sharp crackle, it broke like a sheet of glass, and he plummeted waist-deep into the muck under it. He did not exclaim in fright when it happened, nor did he make so much as a whimper during the time it took for Uncle Mafio to get down from his camel and make a loop in his saddle rope and cast it over the boy and draw him gently back above ground and onto a firmer place. But Aziz had known very well that he was, for that while, precariously suspended over a bottomless abyss, for his face was very pale and his blue eyes very big when we all clustered solicitously around him. Uncle Mafio embraced the boy and held him, murmuring inspiriting words, while my father and I brushed the fast-drying salt mud from his garments. By the time that was done, the boy’s courage had returned, and he insisted on going ahead again, to the admiration of us all.
In the days thereafter, each time we again came upon a salt flat, we could do no more than make guesses or take a vote to determine whether we should venture upon it at once, or camp there at its near edge and wait to start upon it early the next morning. We were always apprehensive that we might find ourselves still in the middle of a trembling land at nightfall, and therefore have to take one of two equally unappealing alternatives: try to press on, braving the night’s dark and its dry fog, which could be much more nerve-racking than making such a crossing by day; or camp upon the salt flat and have to do without a fire, for we feared that laying a fire upon such a surface might melt it, and drop ourselves, our animals and all our packs into the quicksand. Surely it was only through good fortune—or Allah’s blessing, as our two Muslims would have put it—certainly not through any wisdom informing our guesses, but each time we guessed right, and each time got across the salt to safe sand by nightfall.
So we never had to make a cold camp on the dreaded trembling lands, but making camp anywhere in that desert, even on the sand which we could trust not to dissolve from under us, was no holiday treat. Sand, if you look closely enough at it, is nothing but an infinite multitude of little tiny rocks. Rocks do not hold heat, and no more does sand. The desert days were comfortable enough, even warm, but when the sun went down the nights were cold, and the sand under us even colder. We always needed a fire just to keep us warm until we crawled into our blankets inside our tents. But many nights were so very cold that we would rake the fire into five separate fires, well apart, and let them burn a while to warm those separate plots of sand, and only then spread our blankets and raise our tents on top of the warmed places. Even so, the sand did not for long hold that heat either, and by morning we would be chilled and stiff, in which unjoyous condition we would have to rise and face another day of the joyless desert.
The nightly camp fires served for warmth, and for some illusion of homelikeness in the middle of that empty, lonely, silent, dark wasteland, but they were not much use for cookery. Wood being nonexistent in the Dasht-e-Kavir, we used dried animal dung for fuel. The animals of countless generations of earlier desert crossers had dropped easily found supplies of it, and our own camels contributed their deposits for the benefit of future wayfarers. Our only comestibles, however, were several varieties of dried meats and fruits. A hunk of cold dry mutton might be rendered more palatable by soaking it and then broiling it over a fire, but not over a fire built of camel dung. Though we ourselves already reeked of the smoke of those fires, we could not bring ourselves to eat something similarly impregnated. When we felt we could spare the water, we sometimes heated it and steeped our meat in it, but that did not make a very tasty dish either. When water has been carried for a long time in a hide bag, it begins to look and smell and taste rather like the water a man carries in his bladder. We had to drink it to survive, but we less and less desired to cook our foods in it, preferring to gnaw them dry and cold.
Each night we also fed the camels—a double handful of dried peas apiece, and then a fair drink of water to make the peas swell inside their bellies and simulate a hearty meal. I will not say the beasts enjoyed those scant rations, but then camels have never been known to enjoy anything. They would not have muttered and grumbled less if we had been feeding them banquets of delicacies, and they would not, out of gratitude, have performed any better at their labors the next day.
If I sound unloving of camels, it is because I am. I think I have straddled or perched upon every sort of transport animal there is in the world, and I would prefer any other to a camel. I grant that the two-humped camel of the colder lands of the East is somewhat more intelligent and tractable than the single-humped camel of the warm lands. And that lends some credibility to the belief of some people that the camel’s brains are in its hump, if it has any anywhere. A camel whose hump has diminished from thirst and starvation is even more sullen, irritable and unmanageable than a well-fed camel, but not much more.
The camels had to be unloaded each night, as would any other karwan animals, but no other animals would have been so maddeningly difficult to reload in the morning. The camels would bawl and back away and roar and prance about and, when those tricks only exasperated but did not dissuade us, they would spit on us. Also, once on the trail, no other animals are so devoid of a sense of direction, or self-preservation. Our camels would have walked indifferently, and one after another, into every quicksand hole in those salt flats if we riders or our puller had not taken pains to steer them around. Camels are also, more than any other animals, devoid of a sense of balance. A camel, like a man, can lift and carry about one-third of its own weight for a whole day and a goodly distance. But a man, with only two legs, is not so teetery as a camel with four. One or another of ours would frequently slip in the sand, even more often on the salt, and grotesquely collapse sideways, and be impossible to raise again until it was entirely unloaded and loudly encouraged and powerfully assisted by our combined strength. At which it would give thanks by spitting on us.
I have used the word “spit” because, even back home in Venice, I had heard far-trave
lers speak of camels doing that, but in fact they do not. I wish they did. What they actually do is to hawk up from their nethermost cud an awfulness of regurgitated matter to spew. In the case of our camels, that was a substance compounded of peas first dried, then eaten, then soaked and swollen and made gaseous, then half-digested and half-fermented, then—at that substance’s peak of noxiousness—churned together with stomach juices, vomited up, collected in the camel’s mouth, aimed through pouted lips and ejected with all possible force at some one of us, and preferably into his eye.
There is of course no such thing as a karwansarai anywhere in the Dasht-e-Kavir, but on two occasions in the month or more that it took us to cross it, we had the blessedly good fortune to come upon an oasis. This is a spring which wells up from underground, only God or Allah knows why. Its waters are fresh, not salt, and around it has sprung up an area of vegetation, several zonte in extent. I never could discover anything edible growing there, but the very greenness of the scrub trees and stunted bushes and sparse grass was a refreshment as welcome as fresh fruit or vegetables. On both those occasions, we were pleased to halt our journey for a while before moving on. During that time, we dipped up water from the spring to bathe our dust-coated and salt-encrusted and dung-smoke-smelling bodies, and water to fill the camels’ bowel tanks, and water to be boiled—and sieved through the charcoal my father always carried—to flush out and refill our water bags. Those labors done, we just lay about to enjoy the novel sensation of resting in a green shade.
I noticed, at the first oasis halt, how we all soon separated and drew apart and found separate shade trees under which to loll, and later put up our individual tents at a considerable distance from each other. None of us had recently quarreled, and we had no definable reason for shunning each other’s company—except that for so long we had been in each other’s company, and now it was pleasant to have some privacy for a change. I might have kept Aziz protectively close to me, but the slave Nostril was at that time all too plainly preoccupied with his shameful private affliction, and I deemed him incapable of molesting the little boy. So I let Aziz also go off to be by himself.
Or so I thought. But, after we had been luxuriating in the oasis for a day and a night, I took a notion on the succeeding night to go for a stroll through the surrounding grove. I pretended that I was in a less constricted garden, perhaps the environs of the Baghdad palace, where I had walked so often with the Princess Moth. It was easy enough to pretend, for that night had brought the dry fog, making it impossible for me to see anything but the trees closest about me. Even sounds were muffled by that fog, so I must have been almost stepping on Aziz when I heard him laugh his musical laugh and say:
“Harm? But that is no harm to me. Or to anybody. Let us do it.”
A deeper voice responded, but in a murmur, so its words were indistinguishable. I was about to shout in outrage, and seize Nostril and drag him off the boy, but Aziz spoke again, and in a voice of marveling:
“I never saw one like that before. With a sheath of skin that encloses it …”
I stood where I was, unmoving, stupefied.
“ … Or can be pulled back at will.” Aziz still sounded awed. “Why, it is like having your own private mihrab always tenderly enveloping your zab.”
Nostril possessed no such apparatus. He was a Muslim, and circumcised, like the boy. I began to back away from that place, being careful to make no noise.
“It must make for a blissful sensation, even without a partner,” the little bird voice went on, “when you move the sheath back and forth like that. May I do it for you …?”
The fog closed around his voice, as I got farther away. But I was waiting, awake and watchful outside his tent, when he eventually returned to it. He came like a stray moonbeam out of the darkness, radiant, for he was entirely naked and carrying his clothes.
“Look at you!” I said sternly, but keeping my voice low. “I swore a binding oath that no harm would come to you—”
“None has, Mirza Marco,” he said, blinking, all innocence.
“And you swore on the Prophet’s beard not to tempt any of us—”
“I have not, Mirza Marco,” he said, looking hurt. “I was fully dressed when he and I chanced to meet in the grove yonder.”
“And to be totally chaste!”
“And I have been, Mirza Marco, all the way from Kashan. No one has penetrated me, and I no one. All we did was kiss.” He came close and sweetly kissed me. “And this …” He demonstrated, and after a moment insinuated his little self into my hand, and breathed, “To each other we did it …”
“Enough!” I said hoarsely. I let go of him and put his hand away from me. “Go to sleep now, Aziz. We ride again at sunrise.”
I myself did not get to sleep that night until I acknowledged the excitement Aziz had raised in me, and manually relieved myself of it. But my sleeplessness was also partly on account of my new view of my uncle, and the disillusionment it caused me, and the tinge of disdain that now colored my feelings toward him. It was no trivial disappointment, to have learned that Uncle Mafìo’s bold, bluff, black-bearded and hearty aspect was a mask he wore, and that behind it he was only a simpering and sly and despicable Sodomite.
I knew I was no saint, and I tried hard not to be a hypocrite. I could frankly admit that I, too, was susceptible to the charms of the boy Aziz. But that was because he was here, near at hand, and no woman was, and he was as comely and seductive as a woman, and he was freely amenable to being used as a substitute for a woman. But Uncle Mafio, I now realized, must see him differently; he must see Aziz as an available and beautiful and beddable boy.
I recalled previous events involving other males: hammam rubbers, for instance—and previous words spoken: that furtive exchange between my father and the Widow Esther, for instance. The inference was unavoidable: Uncle Mafio was a lover of persons of his own sex. A man of that bent was no curiosity here in the Muslim lands, where almost every male seemed similarly warped. But I knew very well that, in our more civilized West, his kind was laughed at and sneered at and cursed at. I suspected that the same situation must obtain in the totally uncivilized nations farther east. At any rate, it appeared that somewhere my uncle’s depravity had caused problems in the past. I gathered that my father had already had reason to try breaking his brother of his perversion, and Mafio himself had apparently made some attempt to suppress the urges. If that was so, I reflected, then he was not entirely detestable, and perhaps there was hope for him.
Very well. I would lend my own best efforts to help his reformation and redemption. When we rode on, I would not ride reproachfully far apart from him, or avoid his eye, or refuse to speak to him. I would say nothing of what had occurred. I would give no hint that I was privy to his shameful secret. What I would do was resume keeping a close watch on Aziz, and not again let the child run at liberty under cover of night. Especially would I be paternally careful and strict if we should come upon another green oasis. In such a place, there was a tendency to let discipline lapse, and self-restraints, just as we let our weary muscles relax. If we again found ourselves in that ambience of comparative ease and abandon, my uncle might find the temptation irresistible: to enjoy more of Aziz than he had already sampled.
The next day, as we proceeded once more northeastward into the ungreen wasteland, I was as affable as usual to all in the party, Uncle Mafio included, and I think no one could have discerned my inner feelings. Nevertheless, I was glad that the burden of conversation that day was taken by the slave Nostril. Possibly to get his own mind off his own problems, he began expatiating on one subject, then veered onto others, and I, at least, was content to ride silent and listen and let him ramble.
What started him off was that, during our loading of the camels, he had found a small snake coiled asleep in one of our pack hampers. He had let out a screech at first, but then he said, “We must have brought the poor thing all the way from Kashan,” and, instead of killing the thing, he had tipped it out onto
the sand and let it slither away. As we rode, he told us why.
“We Muslims do not abhor and loathe serpents as you Christians do. Oh, we are not particularly fond of them, but neither do we fear and hate them as you do. According to your Holy Bible, the snake is the incarnation of the Devil Satan. And in your legends, you have inflated the snake to the monster called a dragon. All our Muslim monsters take the form of human beings—the jinn and afarit—or a bird, in the case of the giant rukh, or combinations like the mardkhora. That is a monster comprising the head of a man, the body of a lion, the quills of a porcupine and the tail of a scorpion. Notice, there is no snake included.”
My father said mildly, “The serpent has been accursed ever since that unfortunate affair in the Garden of Eden. It is understandable that Christians should fear it, and right that they should hate it and kill it at every opportunity.”
“We Muslims,” said Nostril, “give credit where credit is due. It was the serpent of Eden who bequeathed to Arabs the Arabic language, for he contrived that language in which to speak to Eve and seduce her, because Arabic, as every man knows, is the most subtle and suasive of languages. Of course, Adam and Eve spoke Farsi when they were alone together, for the Persian Farsi is the loveliest of all languages. And the avenging angel Gabriel always speaks Turki, for that is the most menacing of all languages. However, that is by the way. I was speaking of serpents, and it must be obvious that it was the snake’s sinuosity and convolutions which inspired the writing of characters, the Arabic alphabet which is also employed for the transcription of Farsi, Turki, Sindi and all other civilized languages.”
My father spoke again. “We Westerners have always called it the fish-worm writing, and never knew how nearly right we were.”
“And the serpent gave us more than that, Master Nicolò. His mode of progression along the ground, by bending and straightening himself—that inspired some ingenious one of our ancestors to invent the bow and arrow. The bow is thin and sinuous, like a snake. The arrow is thin and straight, like a snake, and it has a killing head. We have good reason to honor the serpent, and we do. For example, we call the rainbow the celestial snake, and that is a compliment to them both.”
The Journeyer Page 36
