Here they breathed the air of a completely different world: the costumes, the clothing, the colour of men’s skins. Even the animals were strange: monkeys, parrots, elephants . . . And cows, cows everywhere, roaming tranquilly down the streets. They were very peculiar-looking as well, with a strange hump like a camel’s on their backs, just behind their necks.
Daruma, followed by a group of his sailors, busied himself with buying provisions for the rest of the journey. As far as Metellus could understand, the boat would sail up the river for a stretch, taking advantage of the thrust of the monsoon. Then at a certain point, he didn’t know where exactly, it would be moored and they would continue on foot, with a caravan, to their final destination.
At a certain distance from the market, Balbus, Quadratus and the others noticed a small crowd thronging around a tree so big that its foliage could provide shade for an entire legion. From its branches hung true columns of vegetation, which were actually roots stretching towards the earth; once they reached the ground they were transformed into supplementary trunks for the boughs that had extended too far outwards. Metellus was even more amazed when he had made his way through the crowd and seen the reason for their gathering. Sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and a turban on his head was a bony man with wrinkly grey skin and a long beard, intent on meditating. He held his hands crossed between his knees with the palms turned up towards the sky. He was so immobile that he seemed a statue and Metellus was reminded of a legendary character of Greek culture, the philosopher Diogenes, a cynic who lived in a barrel and drank from a wooden bowl. This man must have been one of those gymnosophists mentioned in the histories of Alexander. Like the Indian master who had followed the Macedonian sovereign in his journey of return all the way to Persepolis, before having himself burned alive on a funeral pyre. Kalanos . . .
And that bony old man, just like Kalanos, showed that he had no fear of death: a deadly poisonous snake slithered over his belly and wound its way up to his neck, darting his little forked tongue at an inch from his face.
Metellus’s soldiers stood there open-mouthed as well.
‘This is truly a strange land,’ muttered Balbus.
‘That it is,’ commented Antoninus. ‘We’ll have lots to tell when we get back home.’
Rufus broke away from the rest of the group. ‘I’m going to take a look around the port. You never know . . . I might find a ship coming from our part of the world.’
‘Forget it,’ said Metellus. ‘They’ll be blocked here for six months until the wind changes. What’s more, we’ve given our word. I asked if any of you were against it, whether anyone wanted to turn back on his own. You answered that you all wanted to stay with me. And you will, by Hercules! I swear to you that you’ll stay!’
‘No one wants to back out, Commander,’ said Rufus. ‘I was just hoping to exchange a few words in Latin, that’s all. And to send a message home, maybe. You know, from mouth to mouth, one leg of a voyage to the next . . . It’s not certain that every one of us will make it back, after all. We’ve got a difficult task ahead of us – assaults, ambushes, battles, who knows? It’s not going to be plain sailing. So I was thinking, if I could at least manage to get a message through . . .’
‘We will make it, Rufus. All of us, together. We’ll celebrate to end all celebrations, we’ll look back on the dangers and the suffering that we lived through and have a good laugh. Men, it’s high time we got back to the boat: Daruma will be waiting for us.’
He cast a last look at the skeletal old man wrapped in the coils of his snake and then he set off, elbowing his way through the crowd.
THEY SAILED UP the Indus for a long stretch, and Metellus tried to recognize the places that Alexander had seen coming down the river in the other direction. Deepest India extended on the right, the India the Macedonian king had never seen. He wondered what Alexander must have felt, watching that fantastic landscape unfolding before his eyes from the railing of the royal ship, seeing the sun rise from that foggy horizon, from the dense foliage of those gigantic trees along with flocks of thousands of birds. He suffered, certainly: his insatiable spirit, thirsting for knowledge, must have suffered when he saw the horizon escaping from him, curving over the ends of the world, denied him by destiny.
Could he manage where Alexander had failed? With his tiny army, would he succeed in reaching the ends of the earth, the waveless Ocean? As they advanced, he noticed that the real world negated the claims of the Naturalis Historia and the De Mirabilibus, on which he had founded his knowledge of the far eastern lands, but the nature he saw was no less wonderful than the legend.
At night, when they drew up along some swampy bank, Metellus could hear the cries of unknown animals and sometimes even the muffled roar of a tiger in search of prey. The Taprobane sailors trembled at that sound and widened their eyes in fear. Even Metellus’s comrades glanced around apprehensively. Only Dan Qing seemed not to know fear. Sometimes, armed only with a knife, he would disembark and set off into the thick underbrush all alone. Metellus would often offer to accompany him, but Daruma dissuaded him. Evidently, a walk through the forest was not an appreciable danger for the prince; in any case, it was just one of his many unfathomable acts.
They saw elephants almost everywhere: the marvellous animals, considered such wild, wondrous creatures in the West that they were put on show in the amphitheatres, here were used as beasts of burden. They moved and lifted huge logs with their trunks or dragged heavy loads on carts or sleds.
Storms would often blow up and then the floodgates of the heavens would open. Walls of water beat down in front of the boat’s bow, while bolts of lightning lit up vast areas of land as if it were daytime, followed by fearsome explosions of thunder. Never in their lives had the Romans seen anything like it. The land on both banks was frequently flooded by the overflowing river and they saw Indian crocodiles lazily paddling through the muddy waters, or fighting over the carcass of some drowned farm animal, flogging the surface with their scaly tails and snapping their mighty jaws open and shut.
At times they would see enormous spotted serpents slithering along the tree branches that hung over the water, or furrowing the muddy quagmires extending beyond the banks, with sinuous, elegant movements. Daruma explained that those monsters were actually innocuous, while others were so poisonous that a man bitten would die in a few moments.
Terrifying, and almost always hostile, the nature they encountered was spellbinding. The men were filled with wonder at every new discovery.
At a certain point, the monsoon wind blew too strongly cross-wise and the men disembarked. Daruma sent the boat back to the port at the river mouth. They would continue on foot.
A month of hard marching followed, until they reached the confluence of the three great tributaries on the left side of the Indus: the Hyphasis, the Acesines and the Hydraotes. It was there that Alexander had built twelve altars to the Olympic gods to mark the outer limit of his eastward march. Metellus sent Daruma to ask after them, thinking it would be interesting to visit the site, but no one knew anything about them. More than five and a half centuries had passed since the adventure of the young Macedonian king and the Greek kingdom of Bactriana existed no longer. It had been wiped out by peoples whom the Chinese had driven away from their own borders.
Metellus spent long hours as they marched with Daruma learning the language of Dan Qing. Daruma had suggested that this would greatly improve relations and foster understanding. For the prince, speaking a foreign language, even one that he knew, was an intolerable humiliation. This, added to his inborn haughtiness as an aristocrat, created a practically insurmountable barrier.
‘I’m not doing it for him,’ insisted Metellus. ‘I’m curious about this language made up of monosyllables, so different from ours. I’ve always had a natural inclination for learning languages. In Edessa I was the only high officer who spoke an understandable Persian.’
‘It’s true,’ admitted Daruma, ‘you have a good ear, and are picki
ng it up very quickly.’ Deep down he wondered whether Metellus’s curiosity meant that this new world was finding a place in his heart; perhaps learning the language meant that he might stay on for a while. Or even forever.
One day, Metellus asked about the mountains they would be crossing, of which he had heard only vague rumours and conflicting descriptions.
‘The Indian Caucasus,’ replied Daruma. ‘You call them thus, because your Alexander once did. They are the tallest mountains on the earth. Their peaks rise to the house of the gods. Their slopes are covered by cascades of ice. In this season, the warm monsoon wind can set off disastrous avalanches: masses of snow, capable of burying a whole city, go flying down towards the valley with a roar of thunder, destroying entire forests, dragging along boulders as big as houses. As you ascend the mountainside, the air becomes thinner and breathing becomes more and more difficult, step by step, until the strain is intolerable.
‘I’ve heard that some people have insisted on climbing the flanks of these mountains up beyond every reasonable limit, and that the only distance they can cover in an entire day is one hundred steps.’
Metellus was relieved that his men could not understand what Daruma was saying, because it would have terrified them. They were excellent soldiers, exceptional combatants, but they were accustomed to fighting other human beings; the idea of taking on the forces of nature would have filled them with dread, and it troubled Metellus as well. Daruma’s calm attitude, which could come only from his long experience, was the one thing that helped to reassure him.
‘Are you telling me this to frighten me?’ Metellus asked him. ‘It’s usually the opposite: one usually tries to keep the difficulties hidden, so as not to alarm the men.’
‘You’ll decide how to speak to your soldiers. As far as I’m concerned, I prefer that you know what to expect. I don’t want to find myself in an emergency and have to deal with a panic-stricken escort.’
‘I imagine that you’ve already found yourself in the conditions you’ve described, perhaps more than once.’
‘Certainly.’
‘And you’ve come through safe and sound, seeing that you can talk about it.’
‘Obviously.’
‘So we’ll manage to make it through ourselves. We fear neither difficulty nor danger. We have our own high mountains, the Alps, and our legions cross them in any season.’
‘Good,’ replied Daruma. ‘That’s the response I expected from you.’
They proceeded in legs of about seven miles a day, stopping now and then in the villages to buy food and replenish their water supplies. Thus they became acquainted with marsh grain. It was much thinner than normal wheat but had a very similar colour. It was eaten boiled, accompanied by vegetables and fish, and they found it very tasty. The men wondered why, with all the cows they saw roaming everywhere, it was impossible to get a piece of beef, and they were told that cows were considered sacred in that land, and that killing them was a crime no less serious than killing a man. The fruit they ate partially compensated for this privation: there was such a wide variety, with flavours so delicious and so fragrant that the men consumed it in great quantities.
They kept their horses and camels at an easy walk. Dan Qing rode at their head on a black horse, silent most of the time, as always. At his side, a little behind him, Metellus was mounted on a sorrel. Then came the two centurions on foot, followed by three men on each side in single file, flanking the camels led by Daruma. Antoninus brought up the rear, with Rufus and his unfailing javelin.
They marched expediti, lightly armed and at a cadenced pace, as Sergius Balbus had ordered. Their armour was transported with the baggage of the caravan. The men wondered when it would be time to reassemble and wear it again in the line of duty.
The sky was almost always obscured by dense, low clouds, from which violent downpours would burst unexpectedly. The ground became slick with yellowish sludge run through with rivulets of dirty water, their clothing was sodden and the rain trickled down their backs, arms and legs on to the ground. The village inhabitants, sheltered under rattan lean-tos, watched with curiosity as they filed past, thinking that they must be in a great hurry if they couldn’t wait until it stopped raining.
One day the plains became rolling grasslands and their path steepened, heading up towards that ceiling of leaden clouds. The vegetation thinned out and began to change as well. The forest plants gave way to tree-like ferns and then to a kind of evergreen with a majestic bearing. Metellus was reminded of the cedar of Lebanon which he had often seen while visiting the Oriental provinces of the empire.
‘They are cedars, in fact,’ Daruma explained. ‘In our language they’re called deodara.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Tree of God,’ replied Daruma solemnly.
‘That’s strange,’ observed Metellus. ‘It almost sounds like Greek.’
‘You’re right,’ nodded Daruma. ‘In koinè it’s diosdendron.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘It will seem odd to you, but our language resembles Greek in many ways. Perhaps in ancient times, our peoples lived close to one another.’
‘The Judaeans say that at the beginning of time all men spoke the same language, but they committed the sin of arrogance, and their unforgiving God scattered and separated them so that their languages began to differ . . .’
They were so engrossed in their conversation they almost hadn’t noticed that the clouds had dropped so low that they had taken on the appearance of dense fog. The men advanced in silence through the thick mist, rather intimidated by the muffled atmosphere which seemed to swallow up every sound. But little by little the shroud of vapours was dispelled and then vanished completely; in the sudden, nearly blinding splendour of the sun the mountains appeared, their summits glittering with ice, their sharp peaks perforating the sky.
17
THE VISION OF THE towering mountain range left Metellus speechless. He could never have imagined such a spectacle, fascinating and dreadful at one and the same time. The mountains rose from a boundless high plain and the tallest peaks looked like crystal pinnacles, sparkling like diamonds. Some were encircled by clouds, while others stood out against a sky so deep blue that it might have been the midnight firmament. Metellus thought of the modest bulk of Mount Olympus, which had inspired the Greeks to imagine the abode of the gods there, and he couldn’t help but smile: how minuscule his own world seemed compared to these titanic manifestations of nature!
He understood why Alexander had identified the immense chain with the Caucasus and had imagined it as the scene of Prometheus’s eternal punishment. Metellus couldn’t take his eyes away from the sight of those lofty peaks, so tall they made him dizzy, and when he looked at his men he saw that their astonishment was even greater than his.
He heard Antoninus saying, ‘I’ll wager that a person who managed to climb up to the top of one of those mountains could see the confines of the earth on every side, and the current of the Ocean surrounding it.’
‘No one can climb that high. Anyone who has got even close has returned with terrible tales to tell. It is impossible to advance beyond a certain limit, if nothing else because the cold is so intense that it would kill anyone who was exposed to it, even for the briefest time,’ said Daruma, guessing at the possible intent behind Antoninus’s words. ‘But also because the air is so rarefied it becomes unbreathable.’
Their conversation did not last long, because all their energies were consumed by the uphill march, which left them light-headed and panting.
Metellus noticed that the natives were rather short, with very wide chests that must help them breathe more deeply. He also noticed several cube-shaped stone constructions, topped by a dome or sometimes a spire, along their route. They looked very old indeed. When they stopped to rest, he asked Daruma what they were.
‘In our language they’re called stupa,’ replied the merchant. ‘The first one was built to preserve the remains of one of our phil
osophers. He was a prophet, a miracle-worker – I don’t know the word for that in koinè. Later they simply became monuments to recall his preaching and his endeavours. His name was Siddhartha, but he has become known as Buddha, which means “the enlightened one”.
‘His word has reached China as well, and you will find his image in many places. Most monuments portray him in meditation, which is the way he achieved enlightenment.’
‘Does Dan Qing’s tao have something to do with the teachings of this philosopher?’
‘Yes, in part. The prince’s master is a man who believes profoundly in both philosophies: that of Buddha and that of the Chinese wise men Master Kong Fuzi and Master Lao Tze. You see, Commander, the path of illumination is . . .’
Metellus interrupted him with a sigh of ill-disguised impatience. ‘I fear it won’t be easy for me to follow you on this ground, Daruma. You ask too much of a simple soldier.’
Daruma smiled. ‘Don’t let it worry you. I couldn’t have gone on much further myself. I’m nothing but a merchant.’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ replied Metellus, ‘but we’ll still have quite some time to get to know each other. As far as philosophers and prophets are concerned, I’ve always avoided them like the plague.’
‘Why?’ asked Daruma. ‘Are you perhaps afraid to measure yourself up against someone whose thoughts have gone far beyond your own?’
‘That could be,’ replied the Roman, ‘but I’m a soldier. Men like me are given the task of creating enough security and enough peace inside a state so that even the philosophers can pursue their calling, so that the judges can administer justice, so that artists and poets can produce their work. To achieve this, we soldiers have to challenge and fight off people who don’t even have enough food to eat, people who don’t know how to build a house or till a field. They are primitive beings, animated by a savage desire to conquer . . . the same desire that animated our own forebears at the origins of the first republic.