beginning to end. The ice was seventeen spans thick. Horses, mules, donkeys, and carts used it like a road and it did not move—it did not even creak. It stayed like this for three months. We thought the country we were visiting was an «infernally cold»10 portal to the depths of Hell. When snow fell, it was accompanied by a wild, howling blizzard.
11 When people here want to honor each other and be generous they say, “Come to my house so we can talk, for I have a good fire burning.” This is their custom for expressing genuine generosity and affability. God the exalted has been kind to them by making firewood plentiful and very cheap: a cart load of ṭāgh wood costs only two local dirhams, and their carts can hold about three thousand raṭls. Normally, their beggars do not stand outside at the door but go into the house, sit for a while, and get warm by the fire. Then they say, “Bakand” meaning “bread.”
12 We were in al-Jurjāniyyah for a long time: several days of Rajab and all of Shaʿban, Ramadan, and Shawwal.11 We stayed there so long because the cold was so severe. Indeed, I was told that two men had driven twelve camels to transport a load of firewood from a particular forest but had forgotten to take their flint and tinderbox and passed the night without a fire. In the morning it was so cold that they had frozen to death, as had their camels. The weather was so cold that you could wander round the markets and through the streets and not meet anyone. I would leave the baths, and, by the time I got home, I would look at my beard and see a block of ice. I would have to thaw it at the fire. I would sleep inside a chamber, inside another chamber,12 with a Turkish yurt of animal skins inside it, and would be smothered in cloaks and pelts, and even then my cheek would sometimes freeze and stick to the pillow. I noticed containers wrapped in sheepskins, to stop them shattering and breaking, but this did them no good at all. I even saw the ground open up into great rifts and mighty, ancient trees split in two because of the cold.
13 Halfway into Shawwal of 309 [February, 922], the season began to change and the Jayḥūn melted. We set about acquiring the items we needed for our journey. We purchased Turkish camels, constructed the camel-skin rafts for crossing all the rivers we had to cross in the realm of the Turks, and packed provisions of bread, millet, and cured meat to last three months. The locals who knew us told us in no uncertain terms to wear proper clothing outdoors and to wear a lot of it. They gave us a terrifying description of the cold and impressed upon us the need to take the matter very, very seriously. But when we experienced it ourselves, it was so much worse than what they had described, even though we each wore a tunic, a caftan, a sheepskin, a horse blanket, and a burnoose with only our eyes showing, a pair of trousers, another pair of lined trousers, leggings, and a pair of animal skin boots with yet another pair on top of them. Mounted on our camels, we wore so many heavy clothes we couldn’t move. The jurist, the instructor, and the retainers who had left the City of Peace with us stayed behind, too scared to enter the realm of the Turks. I pushed on with the envoy, his brother-in-law, and the two soldiers, Takīn and Bārs.13
14 On the day we planned to set off, I said to them, “The king’s 14 man accompanies you. He knows everything. And you carry the letters of the caliph. They must surely mention the four thousand musayyabī dinars intended for the king. You will be at the court of a non-Arab king, and he will demand that you pay this sum.” “Don’t worry about it,” they replied, “he will not ask us for them.” “He will demand that you produce them. I know it,” I warned. But they paid no heed. The caravan was ready to depart, so we hired a guide called Falūs, an inhabitant of al-Jurjāniyyah. We trusted in almighty God, putting our fate in His hands.
15 We left al-Jurjāniyyah on Monday, the second of Dhu l-Qaʿdah, 309 [Monday, March 4, 922], and stopped at an outpost called Zamjān, the Gate of the Turks. The following morning we traveled as far as a stopping post called Jīt. The snow had fallen so heavily that it came up to the camels’ knees. We had to stay there two days. Then we kept a straight course and plunged deep into the realm of the Turks through a barren, mountainless desert. We met no one. We crossed for ten days. Our bodies suffered terrible injuries. We were exhausted. The cold was biting, the snowstorms never-ending. It made the cold of Khwārazm seem like summertime. We forgot all about our previous sufferings and were ready to give up the ghost.
16 One day, the cold was unusually biting. Takīn was traveling beside me, talking in Turkic to a Turk at his side. He laughed and said, “This Turk wants to know, ‘What does our Lord want from us? He is killing us with this cold. If we knew what He wanted, then we could just give it to Him.’” “Tell him,” I replied, “that He wants you to declare ‘There is no god but God.’” “Well, if we knew Him, we’d do it,” he said with a laugh.14
17 We came to a place where there was a huge quantity of ṭāgh wood and stopped. The members of the caravan lit fires and got them going. They took their clothes off and dried them by the fires.15 Then we departed, traveling as quickly and with as much energy as we could manage, from midnight until the midday or afternoon prayer, when we would stop for a rest. After fifteen nights of this,16 we came to a huge rocky mountain. Springs of water ran down it and gathered to form a lake at its foot.
The Ghuzziyyah
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