Wise Man Of The West (Harvill Press Editions)

by Vincent Cronin

  In this plain they fell in with a hermit on pilgrimage. Goes spoke with him and learned of a neighbouring country called Kafiristan where Mohammedans were killed on sight. The hermit said the people were famous for their wine and offered Goes some from a goatskin round his neck. To his surprise the traveller found it made from grapes, whereas all the peoples of India drank wine of fermented cane-sugar, despising the other as too weak. For one hopeful moment Goes believed he had stumbled on a Christian sect, until the hermit told him that the Kafirs professed an ancient Iranian religion, one of the few to resist Islam’s conquest of central Asia.

  As the country grew more steeply mountainous, the caravan was provided with an escort of four hundred soldiers by the chieftain of Jalalabad. While animals and servants followed the valley, troops and merchants crowned the heights, keeping a watch for brigands, whose mode of attack was to roll down rocks on unwary travellers. Despite these precautions, they had to beat off several armed gangs before reaching Kabul, most western point of the journey. A large cosmopolitan town with two fortresses, it stood on high ground, seven thousand feet up, at the foot of bare and rocky mountains, commanding the continental passes through which had swept successive invasions of India by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and, in the previous century, Babur. Here the caravan dispersed, and, since travel alone meant certain death, Goes had to wait until a new company was formed in late summer before resuming his journey. During his stay he had the good fortune to meet a sister of Mohammed Khan, King of Kashgar. The queen was called Hajji Khanum, Lady who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, whence she was then returning. On the way she had been robbed by brigands and lacked money to complete her journey. Goes sold some of his lapis lazuli, lent her what she needed and in her company set out, after eight months in Kabul, on the next and most difficult stage of the journey. Of his companions two had already lost heart and deserted him, only Isaac remaining faithful.

  Crossing the almond and apricot groves of Kohistan the caravan halted at Charikar, a centre of iron-mines. Here Goes fell ill and became embroiled with the local governor, who, refusing to honour King Akbar’s letter of exemption, demanded duty on his merchandise. Goes was still feverish when, after three weeks’ halt, the caravan resumed its march through hills covered with pistachio bushes and juniper trees into the northern mountain tract of Hindu Kush, the Caucasus of Alexander’s historians. From the many dangerous defiles which traversed the range of peaks, some sixteen thousand feet high, they chose the Pass of Parwan, in turn approached by seven minor clefts known as the Haft-bachah, or seven young ones. Through these, now working a vein of quartz along the rock face, now sheltering for days at a time from storms thunderous with avalanche, now worming a path into the very core of the mountains, now zig-zagging up thinly watered gorges, with the whole giant range astraddle their shoulders, they emerged into a world of black and white, compact in the forms of a grotesque primeval geometry. Here they could travel only by night, when the snow had caked and its glitter been thrown to the stars, laying down strips of cloth across the ice to steady their ponies, lurching crassly behind through insidious moraine and the dripping snouts of glaciers. Still they climbed, light-headed and leaden-footed, spun from the twisting path by lariats of mist, seeing in the piled cumulus no end to their journey. And always there rose a further ridge of snow spread-eagled between jagged quoins.

  They crossed the pass by night, prancing in triumph above the tumbled stars, and pitched their felt tents beyond the northern escarpment. Next day they began the slow descent through graduated levels of life, pine-clad heights, hog-tracks, coveys of partridges and finally the mud hovels of Badakhshan, a well-watered country of glens and green turf, whose rubies were prized by the princesses of three continents. They found the eastern, more mountainous part of the kingdom in revolt against its ruler, the Khan of Samarkand and Bokhara, who claimed descent from Alexander, and at Teskan a local chieftain halted the caravan lest the insurgents, who were dismounted, gain possession of their four hundred ponies. The captain of the caravan protested and during the ensuing controversy a column of rebels attacked. The chieftain and inhabitants abandoned Teskan, leaving the merchants to their fate. Making a circular rampart of their baggage, they prepared to defend themselves, but the rebels, blond, blue-eyed highlanders like Flemings, soon broke their lines and rounded them up in the empty town. Only a last-minute message threatening retaliation by the Khan’s army saved the whole company of merchants from massacre. The rebels contented themselves with plundering their captives’ baggage.

  Scarcely had they resumed their march when Goes, riding a little apart from the column, was again attacked, this time by four bandits. Outnumbered and outarmed, he had recourse to a trick. Pulling the richly embroidered turban from his head, he flung it behind him; while the brigands stopped to dispute its possession, Goes put spurs to his horse and escaped.

  For eight days they trod a precipitous tight-rope path sheer above the upper waters of the Oxus, spurting a way, like the torrent, through tourniquets of rock. In this country of chasms and precipices roamed the Kirghiz, a predatory tribe swarthy and rough-hewn as totems, who twice launched an attack, seized the best beasts of the caravan and again reverted to rock. The merchants escaped their raids only by entering a more complete desolation, winding a trail up the Ak–tash River, past the last clumps of red willows, towards the plateau of the Pamirs, a hundred-mile bulwark, between twelve and fifteen thousand feet high, separating eastern and western Asia. They began to suffer from headaches and bleeding; with galloping pulses went a dragging step; words became a prodigious effort, as though intruders too must conform to the universal quiet. Against mountain-sickness Goes was taught by more experienced companions to eat dried apricots and rub his animals’ mouths with garlic. On the last stage, dragging their ponies and yaks, many of which slipped or succumbed, they heaved themselves up by hand and foot over outflung eaves of the plateau known throughout central Asia as the Roof of the World.

  They had negotiated the rock-bound coast: this was the sea. To the grey horizon stretched a silent, frozen waste of waves, formed by earth impregnated with salt and covered with loose shale. On slopes bare of snow a trail of skulls, bones and droppings marked their path, while roots and dung served as fuel for fire that yielded a pale, flickering heat. The steppe was unrelieved by any of the fertile valleys which had so far softened their journey. Surrounding peaks, among the highest mountains of the world, seemed mere hills, so high was the plain, and lakes seldom seen and never named were frozen to a depth of two and a half feet. The only living creatures were occasional lynx and sheep grown thin in a vain search for vegetation.

  For six weeks they traversed a wilderness of dull continuous grey, a cloud world which even nomad shepherds feared to storm. At Tash-kurghan, a shifting collection of kirghas, they halted for two days to rest their beasts, before entering the Chichiklik Pass, a high almost level plateau shut in by mountains and swept by continual ice-storms. Unladen yaks were pulled and driven ahead through the soft snow to beat down a track along which for six days the travellers battled in face of a glacial north wind. Many were swallowed up by drifts; others fell victim to frost-bite and exposure before the survivors emerged on the eastern edge of the Pamirs, whence they could look across to the barren transverse ridges hiding the Turkestan plain and Yarkand, their destination.

  The descent proved longer and even more difficult than the climb. They had to cross and recross the Tangi-tar, or narrow gorge, disputing with a swollen torrent the only passage between precipitous rock. On one of these traverses Isaac was swept away by a sudden fall of flood water. He would have been drowned had not Goes rushed ahead and at the next gorge, as though from a wild beast’s foaming jaws, wrested the limp bleeding body of his friend. Binding up his wounds and lighting a fire, Goes tried to coax the Armenian back to life. For eight hours Isaac lay unconscious and not until next day could they rejoin the caravan, which had continued the twisting descent. So many animals died on
this stage of the journey—the Christians alone lost six—that when they reached the foothills Goes was despatched to Yarkand to send back ponies and provisions.

  A descent of thirteen thousand feet had merely changed the form of desolation, from glacial salt to parched desert and the broad wastes of rubble beds, from grey gravel to yellowish-red waves of drift sand. Only after two days’ march did water and life surge from the same spring, in an oasis of green fields along carefully irrigated terraces, shaded by white poplars and mulberry trees. As the river widened, mud huts became more highly organised, matching their vivid Khotan carpets with a profusion of flowers; the stare gave way to curt monosyllables, and soon to gentle phrases of welcome.

  Yarkand, which Goes reached in November 1603, thirteen months after leaving Agra, was a town of dark sinuous alleys linked to golden bazaars, of low houses with terraced roofs, surmounted by balconies of lattice work, linked to heaven by the shrill minarets of a hundred mosques. To Goes’s extreme joy, the people had heard tell of Cathay—it lay several months’ journey eastwards; to his despair, caravans were allowed to enter the country only at certain fixed times and the next would not leave for a year. He was condemned to twelve profitless months, a traveller whose halts exceeded his stages.

  Renting a house, the islander who had been born within sound of Atlantic breakers now took root, for twelve months, in Central Asia, where water, precious as jade, was kept in large stone basins and used many times over, for bathing, washing and drinking. Its central position between Khotan, the Ladakh range, the Oxus valley and Cathay had made Yarkand a rich trading centre. The bulk of its people were Turki, some fair-complexioned, many with the swollen neck of goitre, nearly all tame and lazy and unfaithful to their wives, enjoying nothing so much as music and song. They farmed in desultory fashion and some hunted on the nearby slopes, setting giant golden eagles to swoop on game. Their only discipline, here at the furthest reach of Islam, was the call to prayer. Five times a day, like iron granules under a magnet, they were called to align themselves south-west towards another minareted town in another desert. Every Friday, after an official had trudged the dusty streets recalling the duties of that day, twelve men armed with thonged whips strode out of the chief mosque and drove the recalcitrant to public prayer.

  Goes made no attempt to hide his religion. The people of Yarkand called him an Armenian Roume, for, after thirteen centuries, they still identified men from that region with Roman neighbours of the Parthian Empire. One day he was summoned by the ruler of Kashgar, the Sultan Mohammed, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, in the presence of his mullahs and theologians. Asked what faith he professed, whether that of Moses, or of David, or of Mohammed, and in what direction he turned his face in prayer, Goes replied that the faith he professed was that of Jesus, whom they called Isai, and that it did not matter to what quarter he turned in prayer, for God was everywhere. His answer caused bewilderment. The theologians began to dispute the matter and although forced to admit the truth of his last statement tried to convert him. They could not understand how an intelligent man could profess any religion but their own. Elsewhere Goes was treated less civilly, several times barely escaping with his life from the scimitars of fanatics determined to make him invoke the name of Mohammed. The mode of his struggle was the same, whether on the Pamirs or at Yarkand: to resist assimilation, by snow, sand or multitudinous Islam.

  Among the travellers in the cosmopolitan town was a merchant from Moscow who Goes had sometimes seen make the sign of the cross. One day the Russian came to him gesturing urgently in obvious distress. He led the Portuguese to his house, where his small son lay seriously ill, and signalled that Goes should try to help the boy. Goes thought he wanted a new medicine—but no, it appeared the patient was beyond that—so he laid his breviary on the boy’s head, hung a cross round his neck and prayed by his bedside. He heard no more about the matter until three days later the Russian, his son bounding beside, came to the house with smiles and gifts of gratitude.

  Another acquaintance was a Tibetan king, captured three years previously and then lying in Yarkand prison. Goes visited him and found that the king’s physician spoke Persian. Eagerly Goes questioned him about his religion and learned that their chief Father, whom the physician called Cumgao, wore a mitre on his head and a robe like a chasuble; that the people observed a fast of forty days, taking neither wine nor meat; that they possessed a sacred book called the Kanjur (Goes associated the word with the Latin evangelium); that their priests did not marry; that they believed in a day of judgment and in eight hells and three paradises. Goes noted down all these facts with enthusiasm: he thought it possible Tibet practised a variant of Christianity.

  More direct evidence of a lost sect was offered by fans, paper, porcelain, and paintings from Cathay which Goes examined in Yarkand. One of the paintings depicted a man wearing a biretta on which was set what appeared to be a crucifix, while another figure stood before him with hands crossed. This Goes believed to be the portrait of a Christian bishop. He also saw painted on porcelain what looked like a Franciscan monk, wearing a long beard and tonsured hair.

  At the invitation of the queen whom he had helped at Kabul, Goes visited her palace at Khotan, ten days’ journey south-east across the desert, famous throughout Asia for its jade. An inferior variety was mined in blocks from the neighbouring mountains, the best fished from the bed of the Khotan river. The Turkis, believing jade to be crystallised moonlight, noted the stretches where the moon was most brilliantly reflected and dived there during the day. Goes watched the heavy, cold stone being procured and dispatched: vermilion, jet black, green and dusty grey. The queen paid her debt with the most highly prized varieties: white jade with rose-red specks and green veined with gold.

  In the autumn of 1604 the caravan for Cathay began to take shape. The profitable position of captain was farmed out by the king to the highest bidder; that year it went to a certain Agi Afis for two hundred sacks of musk. Goes paid Agi Afis for the privilege of being numbered among the seventy-two merchants permitted to enter Cathay subject to his authority. He collected eleven horses for himself, Isaac and their merchandise, the remains of their lapis lazuli having been bartered for jade which, they were told, commanded a high price in Cathay.

  One night in mid-November provisions were finally packed, water-skins filled to the brim and several hundred beasts enriched against their will with a load of valuable stone. The stars their only map, the caravan filed through the eastern gate of Yarkand into a wilderness bare as the Pamirs. Their route lay across the Takla Makan desert, an elliptic arena surrounded except at the north-east confines by tiers of mountains rising to 18,000 feet. They passed ancient towns choked to death by wind-swept dunes, their only memorial an eroded stump of mulberry jutting like coral from a sea of lapped and furrowed sand. Here only water mattered—and trees, symbol of water—giving a name to the oases where the caravan halted: Tallik, place of willows; Ming-jigda, the thousand white poplars; Chilan, the jujube tree, and a dozen others. At the small town of Ak–Su Goes won the favour of the twelve-year-old Khan with sweets, candied fruit and the performance of a Portuguese folia he had not danced for sixteen years: price of exemption from a severe levy. At Kucha, on the other hand, he was fined and chastised for refusing to observe the rites of Ramadan. After a month’s halt there, still hugging the mountains, the caravan passed Ugen, Sarik-Abdal, Bugur, Eshme and Shorchuk: Goes told the names like beads of the Sorrowful Mystery, each with its particular cross: unfaithful servants, nights of frost, ponies that fell lame, sandstorms and unquenchable thirst. Only at Kara-shahr, which lay beside a lake, did the desert tamarisk and saxaul give way to deep-rooted turf and branches bowed with fruit. Here the captain decided on a long halt, hoping to collect a full complement of merchants and so increase his profit. Goes, impatient at this further delay, was already planning to continue the journey alone when a group of Mohammedans on their way back from Cathay arrived in Kara-shahr. Goes questioned them and was astonished
to discover that some had lived at the Castle of Barbarians with the missionaries. They told Goes how the Europeans had presented the Emperor with clocks, a clavichord, paintings and other marvels; were treated respectfully by all the dignitaries of the capital; and—rumour had become accepted fact—that they were often admitted to converse with the Emperor. They described the appearance of the Europeans but could not tell their names. As proof of their story one of the merchants produced a piece of paper covered with Portuguese writing, which he claimed had been written by one of the Westerners. He had rescued the curious rounded script from the sweepings of the room to take back home.

  Goes had little doubt that somehow Cathay and China were one, that the great community of Christians was a myth. He had only one desire, to complete a fruitless journey as quickly as possible, to reach Peking and Ricci, and return to India. Despite the opposition of Agi Afis he obtained a passport from the local ruler and set off with Isaac and a handful of other merchants who were making for Hami. In mid-October 1605 they arrived at this large and fertile oasis, famed for white-fleshed melons and open-handed hospitality: as Marco Polo had noted, it was customary for a host to leave his house and jasmine-scented wife to any traveller who expressed the wish. Goes remained a month in the town, while its fields of maize and sorghum were being harvested, resting his horses before setting out on the last and most barren stage of the journey.