We were able to converse in Persian, a language that he knew better than me. But when I told him that I was trusting my lucky star to get me out of the adventure, he did not understand me, either because I expressed myself poorly or because the notion of a star shining for an individual was known to him and he expected no other protection than that of his own cunning.
I learned that his name was Lao Yang. His parents had large domains in China, but the taste for science as well as that for adventures had driven him to leave his homeland. He had gone into the regions of northern Asia, pushed by a chimera. Far beyond the kingdom of Xambalu, in the mountains of Hai-Lin, there was a region surrounded by great wild forests that covered in snow most of the time. There was nothing there but red wolves, white leopards always drunk on blood and Houndhouze pirates as cruel as the wolves and the leopards. But he had believed that there was also a root there that has a human form and which cures all maladies and even confers a relative immortality. He had found that root but had not been able to keep it because one cannot get out of the Hai-Lin mountains without being despoiled by the inhabitants, who keep watch on the passes and rob travelers.
He had learned, however that there were mountains in India where the little green flower produced by the Gin Seng root was also found. Lao Yang had traversed the Himalaya and had gone as far as Delhi. The cures he had achieved in that city had given him a certain celebrity and Mourad, who was then the Viceroy of the northern provinces, had summoned him and had attached him to his person.
“How were you able to get out of difficulty in the midst of all the dangers that you have traversed?” I asked him, for the physician, expert in knowledge, was not a man of war like me and I thought at that time that a man who did not know how to strike a blow at the right moment is badly served in life.
But he smiled like a strong man talking to someone weaker than him.
“I got out of difficulty thanks to this,” he said. And he took out of the folds of his robe a kind of flute, which he began to play. But in doing so he drew nearer to the room in which the imperfectly embalmed body of Mourad lay.
“He considered the sounds of my flute more highly than my medicines,” he said, when he had finished.
Now, that door closed poorly, and our preoccupation was to know whether the decomposition of the body might be active enough to poison the atmosphere.
I had the surprise, on the first night, of being woken by the sound of Lao Yang’s flute. He was playing right next to the door, almost stuck to it, as if he wanted the sounds to pass through the cracks.
Seeing me sitting up he murmured in a low voice: “Music, with the aid of the will, might stop the decomposition of the molecules of the body.
Sometimes, Aboul Fazi or Khan Khanan came. Then, leaning on the arm of one or the others, I traversed the large halls, where I always had the surprise of encountering a flock of bats, and walked like a convalescent under the colonnades of the gallery that overlooked the monumental staircase of the palace. It was sufficient for a few people to be assured that the Emperor’s son was still alive to take away the pretext for the revolt that was brooding in Ahmednagar, so great was Akbar’s prestige.
“What is the purpose of that gong?” I asked Lao Yang, pointing at a gong whose ball was a massive block of gold.
“My master, the Subadar Mourad, stuck it three times when he wanted to summon his servants.”
I had no other thought than that of distracting myself. It was a day of optimism. I estimated that the comedy that was being played was too enormous to be understood by anyone.
I made the gong resonate. Lao Yang simulated fear, but I sensed in the gleam of his little eyes that she shared the amusement of my action.
The servants were figures of stone lent to the most servile obedience. In a terrible voice—for Mourad was harsh with everyone—I gave the order to bring me he various alcoholic beverages from which the son of Akbar drew his preferred intoxications.
I was surprised by the number and color of the bottles that I was brought. I was examining them with a severe eye when, without being summoned, a stout and rubicund individual of short stature, undoubtedly a eunuch, arrived. He must have been one of Mourad’s intimates, because he was not at all frightened and had a broad smile on his face.
He handed me a casket of precious wood encrusted with gold, which I took negligently, making a gesture signifying that I was satisfied. I was to discover shortly afterwards that it contained a green paste, which the physician told me was Persian hashish. The eunuch had not gone away and he continued to stand before me. In the end, lowering his voice slightly, he said: “The Ethiopian is awaiting orders, with the young women and the musicians. The house is two cosses from the city.”
I made another sign that I was quite satisfied, while Lao Yang winked at me. The eunuch went away and I thought that it was necessary to do honor to the various beverages that had been brought.
I did them honor, to such an extent and so well that when Aboul Fazi appeared, my soul had emerged mysteriously from the limits that reason had assigned to it. I conceived life differently. I no longer had the same respect for the wise minister and for wisdom in general. I was joyful, and above all full of curiosity. I could not bear the idea that I was in the bosom of a vast and picturesque city, without being able to enjoy the sight of it.
“It’s necessary that I make a tour of the city,” I said. And scarcely had I pronounced those words that the idea imperiously took possession of me, chasing away all others. I added, negligently: “It’s dark. No one will recognize Mourad. And if anyone does recognize him, won’t that be for the best? The rumor will immediately run around that he’s entirely recovered, that he can ride a horse and put himself at the head of troops. It’s surely in the Emperor’s interest that I’m seen passing by on horseback.”
And without waiting for any response, I seized the golden ball, which was within arm’s reach, by its copper handle, and made the gong resonate.
The eunuch appeared.
“Have two horses saddled,” I shouted, in a tone that brooked no reply. “Lao Yang will accompany me.”
Night had fallen. As we went along the exterior walls of the ultimate enclosure, we heard the sound of arms and horses.
“An escort is certainly being sent after you to protect you,” Lao Yang told me.
“Or to murder me. Who knows?” I replied.
“An accident might happen to a Chinese physician,” he replied. “That is of no importance. But the son of the Emperor Akbar cannot die until the imperial troops are in view.”
The lights of shops were illuminated on all sides. We had turned a corner and entered a street bordered with bazaars and swarming with a crowd of people who were almost all clad in nothing but a loincloth and wore their hair long, knotted down their back.
“This is the Hindu quarter,” Lao Yang told me.
It was immense. A year before there had been fierce fighting here. The Omrahs of the Deccan had put around the rumor that of Mourad succeeded his father he would suppress the worship of the gods of India to the profit of Mohammedanism, for which he sometimes had fits of fanaticism. So Hindus had been killed in large numbers, and the streets through which we passed had large holes left by houses that the Mongols had burned. The streets were very narrow; our two horses could hardly get through them, and were obliged to go at walking pace because of the crowd.
“The pillage of all the Hindu houses was organized in spite of the Emperor’s orders,” my companion told me. “It would be unfortunate if anyone recognized this evening the man who had allowed it to happen.”
I smiled, I was drunk on my reconquered liberty as much as on the palm, alcohols mixed with sagre. I showed my sword, which was suspended at my side, and which I had passed hastily through my belt at the moment of departure, although its unusual form clashed with the rest of my costume. In truth, I was another man when I wore it. Without my daring to admit it to myself, it exercised a superstitious influence on me. I attrib
uted a power to it, and almost a personal activity, that sometimes thwarted my will and drove me to certain evil actions that I would probably not have accomplished without it. But it was, above all, a pledge of victory.
That evening, the sword might have saved my life. It was already improbable that the Emperor’s son was circulating in a popular street without being preceded and followed by an escort, but how could he be carrying that strange weapon of elongated form instead of a curved saber with the hilt of precious stones, the distinctive sign of every warrior of Mongol origin?
People stood aside with an ill grace and considered me with a visible hatred. The splendor of my costume designated me as one of the execrated conquerors. And when a passing camel train obliged us to remain motionless at a crossroads for a few minutes, there was a murmur around us of sinister augury.
“Do you know how the people of this country hunt tigers?” my companion said to me, doubtless to dissipate an anxiety that I did not have.
I shook my head negatively.
“They go to lie in wait in the jungle near its lair, when they discover one. They place themselves facing it, having no other weapon than a short, sharp dagger like the one that man over there has, who is looking in our direction. And when the tiger leaps upon them they flatten themselves on the ground and raise the arm holding their weapon. The firmly-held dagger opens the belly of the tiger along its entire length. Then they run away. If the blow has been skillfully struck, all the beast’s intestines are spread on the ground and hook on to plants and roots before it is able to overtake the hunter.”
“Why are you telling me that?”
“Because there might be hunters of that sort in this crowd: very nimble men, almost acrobats. They might leap on to the rump behind us in a single bound and stick the dagger destined for the tiger into our back.”
Nothing is more disagreeable than the sensation of an attack from behind. I made my horse rear up. The cries around us increased, but we were able to reach other streets, less animated.
I enjoyed the sight of things, in spite of the inopportune story of the tiger hunters and the enumeration of their qualities. Night had come but the moon was making the domes of the mosques resplendent, and singular pagodas guarded by stone monsters. We galloped along a broad avenue bordered with palm trees, where there were monuments to the right and left with columns, which must have been the sepulchers of saints. The more rapidly our horses went, the more my intoxication increased in seeing new things and filling my lungs with the air of the starry night.
“I also like life,” said Lao Yang, suddenly, as if our sensations were common. “One does not seek in vain for the root of the Gin Seng. It’s necessary not to hold it against me if I demonstrate that I want to live.”
I did not pay any heed to those words. With a joyful tone, he showed me several side-streets where we would be able to dismount from our horses.
“This is the Chinese quarter. There are Chinese everywhere.”
“And this?” I asked him. I pointed across the square where we were at a dilapidated construction that had the appearance of a very ancient palace that had been repaired in haste.
“Your compatriots the Portuguese”—Lao Yang thought I was Portuguese, and in any case, all foreigners were reckoned to be Portuguese—“bought that old dwelling and tried to chase away the night birds. If those Portuguese have not been exterminated in the course of wars, a few of your priests might still be there, the ones wearing the black robes.”
“Is that possible?” I exclaimed. And I pushed my horse as far as a low wall, half-demolished, which preceded a courtyard. “But there’s a window illuminated!”
I raised my head and I saw that a rose-bush with roses in flower was draping its branches along a balustrade over which the flap of a mosquito-met hung. At that moment I heard the sounds of a guitar and those of the melodious voice of a woman who was singing, but in a very low tone, as if the singer was afraid of being overheard.
“In Heaven’s name, Lao Yang, tell me what this means!” I cried. “To whom does that rose-bush belong?”
I did not receive any reply. I turned round. My companion had disappeared. I saw that his horse was taking a few hesitant steps across the square. I raised my voice and shouted: “Lao Yang!”
Suddenly, I remembered what he had said to me a few minutes earlier about his love of life and what he had told me the previous evening about the danger there was in possessing a State secret. The Chinese quarter was nearby and that experienced man must have judged it wise to lose himself therein. No, I didn’t hold that against him.
I suddenly felt strangely alone. As I was looking round I saw a group of cavaliers emerge into the square, whom I recognized by their uniform as imperials. The officer uttered a cry of joy at the sight of me, and advanced respectfully to my side. It was necessary to put on a brave face against fortune.
“What is your name?” I asked him, abruptly.
I understood by his surprise that he ought to be familiar to me, so I didn’t insist, and pointed at the riderless horse, in order that it could be brought back. I launched myself at a gallop, followed by my escort, along the avenue of palm trees and sepulchers, promising myself to find out how that rose-bush had flowered in that window of an ancient palace.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HASHISH
It was the dread of a conversation with Aboul Fazi that caused me to absorb a little of the green paste that the eunuch had brought me in a casket covered with incrustations.
Perhaps, I thought, it’s good to taste what the Emperor’s son consumed. Mourad wanted to forget life, so I might forget the remonstrations of a wise man.
I would not advise anyone to spend a solitary night after having absorbed without measure the paste of hashish in an apartment where bats are flying near a door behind which there is a cadaver that one knows to be only imperfectly embalmed.
A thought had taken possession of my head and did not want to abandon me. How do sovereigns who possess unusual wealth consent to inhabit palaces through which large lizards wander, where nocturnal birds fly and where rats of some sort with tails like plumes scurry along the cornices?
Hashish suppresses—I have made the experiment—the notion of dimensions. I thought that the bats were brushing my face when they were at the ceiling. And in the morning, when I summoned the officer that I had met the previous evening and tried to place an amicable hand gesture on his shoulder, I only groped empty air, for he was still near the door when I thought he was beside me. And that lasted all day.
That officer, Omar Ali, had appeared to me to play a preponderant role in the palace. I gave him curt and severe orders—curt, especially, for I feared being betrayed by my accent or some fault in the Persian language, which I only spoke in a mediocre fashion. Mourad must have had the habit of talking to that officer in the Tchagatai language, because it was in Tchagati that he replied, and I was obliged to lose myself in my thoughts in order not to let him see that I had not understood.
Nothing incites an ordinary man to devotion like being an accomplice in a desire related to women. When Omar Ali understood that I was interested in a woman and that he was to be my confidant, he was entirely acquired.
The orders I gave him consisted of having armed guards placed at all the doors of the apartments I occupied. Those guards were not to let anyone pass.
“But if….”
“I said anyone.”
The minister Aboul Fazi and Khan Khanan were, without being named, tacitly included in that prohibition. I knew how that would upset the palace, but hashish distances thoughts as it does objects and deforms their real value—with the result that as soon as I had given that order it retreated in my memory and quickly came to seem infinitely distant. Sometimes distant and sometimes imperious was the thought of the rose-bush and the woman who had been able to place it on a window in a house belonging to the Portuguese. Surely, the woman whose voice I had heard could not have anything in common with the one of whom I dreamed? What
could the sister of the Viceroy of Portuguese India, the powerful Aryas de Saldanna, be doing in a semi-ruined house in the city of Ahmednagar?
I interrogated Omar Ali and this is what I learned.
Several years before, Portuguese merchants from Goa had been installed in the half-destroyed ancient palace before which I had arrived. Monks had joined them. The old Queen Tchand Bibi, who professed a rigorous Mohammedanism, had given them the order to leave. When Mourad’s troops had besieged the city, fanatical Muslims had taken advantage of it to pillage the house and the trading post that had been installed here, but Mourad’s victory, which had presumed the same tolerance as his father, had brought back the Portuguese.
Recently, an important individual had arrived, with litters, an escort, horses and carts charged with bales, who was said to be an envoy of the Viceroy of Goa. Omar Ali remembered his name: Juan de Barbosa. He had come to the palace and made a great noise here. He complained and made promises by turns. He wanted to be received by Mourad in person. But he expressed himself in Portuguese and no one had understood very well what he was saying. “I’m a Barbosa,” he repeated incessantly, putting his fist on his hip in an imperious manner. It seemed, however, that he had magnificent gifts for the son of the Emperor Akbar. But he had come on the unfortunate day when Mourad fell asleep on his ivory cane and it had broken, causing him to fall down the stairs.
A noble inhabitant of Ahmednagar who made frequent voyages to Goa and whom I summoned gave me some information about him. He was a debauched man doomed by debt and the damned soul of the Viceroy Aryas de Saldanna. He lived in Goa in usual luxury. Only a powerful motive could have made him submit to the discomfort of traveling. That motive was known. The Marquis de Barbosa talked recklessly and did not try to hide anything. He wanted to create narrow links between the Viceroy of Goa and the future Emperor of India, Sultan Mourad. He had no doubt that the Emperor Akbar was near death. He had that from a Jewish astrologer who was never mistaken in his predictions. He counted on announcing that news to the man who was presently only the governor of the Deccan but to whom the stars promised an imminent sovereignty. He counted on giving him the presents of his friend the Viceroy. And then he never failed to wink.
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