The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 45
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I had never in my life been transported by any conveyance other than water craft. So my father bridled and saddled my mare for me, and made me watch the procedure, telling me that I should have to do that job myself thereafter. Then he showed me how to mount, and the proper side of the animal from which to do it. I imitated his demonstration. I put my left foot into the stirrup, bounced briefly on my right foot, bounded high with enthusiasm, swung my right leg over, came down with a smack astride the hard seat, and gave a wild ululation of pain. Each of us was, as instructed by the Ostikan, wearing one of the leather cods of musk tied so that it hung under our crotch, and it was that that I thumped down on—and I thought for an agonized and writhing few minutes that it had cost me my own personal cod.
My father and uncle abruptly turned away, their shoulders shaking, to attend to their own mounts. I gradually recovered, and rearranged the musk pouch so it would not again endanger my vitals. Realizing that I was for the first time perched atop an animal, I rather wished that I had commenced with one not so tall, an ass perhaps, for I seemed to be teetering very high and insecurely far above the ground away down there. But I stayed in the saddle while my father and uncle also mounted, and each of them took the lead rope of one of the two extra horses, on which we had loaded all our packs and traveling gear. We rode out of the yard and toward the river, just as the day was breaking.
At the bank, we turned upriver toward the cleft in the hills where it came from inland. Very soon the troubled city of Suvediye was behind us, and then so were the ruins of earlier Suvediyes, and we were in the Orontes valley. It was a lovely warm morning, and the valley was lush with vegetation—green orchards of fruit trees separating extensive fields of spring-sown barley, now golden ripe for harvesting. Even that early in the day, the women workers were out and cutting the grain. We could see only a few of them, bent over their knives, but we knew that many were working there, from the multitudinous clicking noise. Because in Armeniya all the field hands are female, and because barley stalks are coarse and rough and injurious to their skin, the women wore wooden tubes on their fingers while they worked. In their numbers and their busyness, those fingers made a pervasive rattle that could have been mistaken for a fire crackling through the grain.
When we got beyond the cultivated lands, the valley was still verdant and colorful and full of life. There were the vast, spreading, dark-green plane trees, called hereabouts chinar trees, of welcome deep shade; and vividly green tiger-thistles; and the bountiful, silver-leaved, thorny trees called zizafun, from which a traveler can pluck the plumlike golden jujube fruit, good to eat whether fresh or dried. There were herds of goats munching the tiger-thistles; and on every goatherd’s’ mud hut there was the scraggly rooftop nest of a stork; and there were whole nations of pigeons, in every flock as many of them as in all of Venice; and there were the golden eagles, almost always on the wing, because they are so clumsy and vulnerable when they light, having to run and struggle and beat their pinions for a long way before they can get aloft again.
In the East, an overland journey is called by the Farsi word karwan. We were on one of the principal east—west karwan routes, so at easy intervals of about every sixth farsakh—which is to say about every fifteen miles—there stood one of the stopping places called a karwansarai. Although we rode leisurely, not pushing ourselves or our horses, we could always depend on finding, about sundown, one of those places on the Orontes riverside.
I do not remember the first of them very well, for that night I was mainly occupied with my own discomfort. During our first day on the trail we had not made our horses move faster than a walking gait, and I had thought I was enjoying a comfortable ride, and I several times dismounted and mounted again without noticing that the ride was affecting me in the least. However, at the karwansarai, when I finally got down from the saddle for the night, I found that I was sore and suffering. My backside hurt as if it had been thrashed, the inner sides of my legs were chafed and burning, the thews inside my thighs were so stretched and aching that I felt as if I would forever after walk bowlegged. But the discomfort gradually ebbed, and in a few days I could ride my horse at a walk and at intermittent canters and gallops—or even at the trot, which is the roughest gait—all the day long, if necessary, without feeling any ill effect. That was a pleasing development, except that, no longer being intent on my own misery, I could take more notice of the miseries of putting up each night at a karwansarai.
It is a sort of combination inn for traveling people and stable or corral for their animals, though the accommodations for men and animals are not, in their comfort and cleanliness, easily distinguishable. No doubt that is because each such establishment must be of a size and readiness to receive and provide for a hundred times more people and beasts than we comprised. On several nights, indeed, we shared a karwansarai with a veritable throng of merchants, Arabs or Persians, traveling in karwan with countless horses, mules, asses, camels and dromedaries, all heavy laden, hungry, thirsty and sleepy. Nevertheless, I would as soon eat the dry fodder stocked for the animals as the meals set before the humans, and rather sleep in the stable straw than on one of the webbed-rope affairs called a bed.
The first two or three such places we came to had signboards identifying each as a “Christian rest house.” They were run by Armeniyan monks, and were filthy and verminous and smelly, but the meals at least had the virtue of variety in their composition. Farther eastward, each karwansarai was run by Arabs and bore a signboard announcing, “Here, the true and pure religion.” Those establishments were a trifle cleaner and better kept, but the Muslim meals were monotonously unvarying—mutton, rice, a bread the exact size and shape and texture and taste of a wicker chair seat, and weak, warm, much-watered sharbats for drink.
Only a few days out of Suvediye, we came to the riverside town of Antakya. When one is making a journey across country, any community appearing on the horizon ahead is a welcome sight, and even a beautiful one from a distance. But that beauty lent by distance is all too often dispelled by closer approach. Antakya was, like every other town in those regions, ugly and dirty and dull and swarming with beggars. But it had the one distinction of having given its name to the surrounding land: Antioch, as it is called in the Bible. In other times, when the region was a part of Alexander’s empire, that land was called Syria. At the time of our passing through, it was an adjunct of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, or what still remained of that kingdom, which has since fallen entirely under the rule of the Mamluk Saracens. Anyway, I tried to look at Antakya and all of Antioch, or Syria, as Alexander might have regarded it, for I was mightily excited to be traveling one of the karwan trails that Alexander the Great once had trodden.
There at Antakya, the Orontes River bends due south. So we left it at that point and kept on bearing east, to another and much larger town, but also a dreary one—Haleb, called Aleppo by Westerners. We stayed the night in a karwansarai there and, because the landlord strongly advised that we would ride more comfortably if we changed our traveling costume, we bought from him Arab garments for each of us. When we left Aleppo, and for a long time afterward, we wore the full garb, from kaffiyah headcloth to the baggy leg coverings. That costume really is more comfortable for a man riding horseback than a tight Venetian tunic and hose. And from a distance at least, we looked like three of the nomad Arabs who call themselves the empty-landers, or bedawin.
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