Though we had put into Srihalam of necessity, for water and other supplies, our captains and crews and Lady Kukachin and her retinue and I and my father were not a bit reluctant to tarry there for a while. My father even did some trading—the name Place of Gems being descriptive as well as poetic—and acquired some sapphires of a fineness we had never seen elsewhere, including some immense, deep-blue stones with starlike rays coruscating in their depths. I did not engage in any business, but merely wandered about to see the sights. Those included some ancient cities, deserted and abandoned to the jungle, but still displaying a beauty of architecture and adornment that made me wonder if these people of Srihalam could be the remnants of the admirable race that had inhabited India before the Hindus, and had built the temples which the Hindus now pretended were their own.
Our ship’s captain and I, glad to be stretching our legs after so long on shipboard, spent a couple of days climbing all the way to the shrine at the top of a mountain peak where, as I had once been told by a pongyi in Ava, the Buddha had left his footprint. I should say that Buddhists call it the imprint of the Buddha. Hindu pilgrims aver that it is the print of their god Siva, and Muslim pilgrims insist that it was made by Adam, and some Christian visitors have surmised that it must have been done by San Tommaso or Prete Zuàne, and my Han companion gave it as his opinion that it had been put there by Pan-ku, the Han ancestor of all mankind. I am no Buddhist, but I am inclined to think that the oblong indentation in the rock there—nearly as long and as broad as I am—must have been done by the Buddha, because I have seen his tooth and I know him to have been a giant, and I have never personally beheld any evidence pertaining to the other claimants.
To be honest, I was less interested in the footprint than in a story told to us by the shrine’s attendant bhikku (as a pongyi was called in Srihalam). He said the island was rich in gems because the Buddha had spent time there, and had wept for the wickedness of the world, and each of his holy tears had congealed into a ruby, an emerald or a sapphire. But, said the bhikku, those gems could not just be picked up from the ground. They had all washed into valleys in the interior of the island, and those chasms were unapproachable because they teemed and squirmed with venomous snakes. So the islanders had had to contrive an ingenious method for harvesting the precious stones.
In the mountain crags about the valleys nested eagles which preyed on the serpents. So the islanders would sneak at night among those crags and throw cuts of raw meat down into the chasms, and when the meat hit the ground down there, some few gems would stick to it. Next day, the foraging eagles would pick up and eat the meat in preference to the snakes. Then, whenever an eagle was absent from its nest, a man could climb up there and finger through the bird’s droppings and pick out the undigested rubies, sapphires and emeralds. I not only thought that an ingenious method of mining, I also thought it must be the origin of all the legends about the monster rukh bird, which allegedly snatches up and flies off with even bigger meats, includings persons and elephants. When I got back to our ship, I told my father he ought to treasure his newly acquired sapphires for more than their inherent value—for their having been got for him by the fabled rukh.
We might have stayed on longer yet in Srihalam, but one day the Lady Kukachin remarked, rather wistfully, “We have been journeying for a whole year now, and the captain tells me that we are only about two-thirds of the way to our destination.”
I knew the lady well enough by this time to know that she was not being sordidly greedy for her entitlement as Ilkhatun of Persia. She merely was eager to meet her betrothed and marry him. She was, after all, a year older now and still a spinster.
So we called an end to our tarrying, and pushed off from the pleasant island. We sailed northward, close along the western coast of India, and made the best time possible, for none of us had any desire to visit or explore any part of that land. We put in to shore only when our water barrels absolutely had to be replenished—at a fair-sized port called Quilon, and at a river-mouth port called Mangalore, where we had to anchor far offshore of the delta flats, and at a settlement scattered over seven pimples of land called the Bombay islets, and at a dismal fishing village called Kurrachi.
Kurrachi at least had good fresh water, and we made sure our tanks were topped full, because from that point we were sailing directly west again, and for some two thousand li—or I should say, now that I was back again where Persian measurements were used, about three hundred farsakhs—we were skirting the dry, dun-colored, baking, thirsty desert coast of the empty land called Baluchistan. The view of that sere coastline was only occasionally enlivened by two things peculiar to it. All year round, a south wind blows from the sea into Baluchistan, so wherever we saw a tree it was always grown in a contorted arc, bending inland, like an arm beckoning us to come ashore. The other peculiarity of that coast was its mud volcanoes: dumpy cone-shaped hills of dried mud, every so often spewing a gush of new, wet mud from the top, to slither down and slowly bake and await a new gush and a new layer. It was a most uninviting land.
But, following that drear shore, we did at last enter the Strait of Hormuz, and that led us to the city of that name, and once again I was in Persia. Hormuz was a very big and bustling city, so populous that some of its residential quarters were spilling from the mainland city center over to the islands offshore. It was also Persia’s busiest port, a forest of masts and spars, a tumult of noise and a medley of smells, most of them not nice. The ships tied up or coming and going were, of course, mostly Arab qurqurs and falukahs and dhaos, the biggest of them looking like dinghis and praus alongside our massive vessels. No doubt an occasional trading chuan had been seen here before, but surely never such a fleet as we now brought into the harbor roads. As soon as a pilot boat had fussily led us to anchorage, we were surrounded by the skiffs and scows and barges of every kind of vendor, guide, pimp and waterfront beggar, all of them screeching solicitations. And what appeared to be the entire remainder of the population of Hormuz was collected along the dockside, gawking and jabbering excitedly. However, among that mob we could see nothing like what we had expected—a resplendent gathering of nobles to welcome their new Ilkhatun-to-be.
“Curious,” muttered my father. “Surely the word of our coming raced ahead of us along the coast. And the Ilkhan Arghun must by now have been getting mightily impatient and eager.”
So, while he turned to the daunting job of commanding the debarkation of all our company and our gear, I hailed a karaji ferry skiff and, fending off the solicitors, was the first to go ashore. I accosted an intelligent-looking citizen and made inquiry. Then I immediately had myself rowed back to our ship, to tell my father and the envoy Uladai and the anxious-eyed Kukachin:
“You may wish to postpone the debarkation until we have held conference. I am sorry to be the one to bring this news, but the Ilkhan Arghun died of an illness, many months ago.”
The Lady Kukachin burst into tears, as sincerely as if the man had been her long-wedded and much-loved husband, instead of just a name to her. As the lady’s maids helped her away to her suite of cabins, and my father thoughtfully chewed on a corner of his beard, Uladai said, “Vakh! I will wager that Arghun died at the very moment my fellow envoys Koja and Apushka perished in Jawa. We should have suspected something dire.”
“We could not have done much about it, if we had,” said my father. “The question is: what do we do now about Kukachin?”