when the sea wasn’t rough, he spent a lot of time standing at the ship’s rail, dreaming of the foreign land which was the goal of his journey.
How, in his distant Scottish home, had he heard of this exotic place? Some time ago a wandering pedlar had called on McLennan. He had but one arm, and the smell on him of foreign parts, and while he showed his wares, he hinted he’d been to sea as a pirate, and dropped more hints of fabulous tales he could tell.
McLennan, not usually welcoming to strangers, paid the man to spend a few days with him, so that he could listen to his traveller’s tales, and his imagination had been inflamed by the sheer strangeness of what the pedlar described. Venturing to a place so outlandish would be like escaping his own world into another: a country on the other side of the world that was said to be more advanced than any nation in Europe, where lords – the equivalent in rank of McLennan – lived in incredible splendour, with scores of wives and servants, surrounded by priceless objects of unearthly beauty; where they spoke an indecipherable language, and wrote it in pictures; where the men had hair to their waists, and the women tiny feet no longer than a man’s finger, and where food never sampled in the west was eaten from dishes so fine you could see the light through them.
Of course everything the pedlar told him might be lies… But McLennan was determined not to die without seeing this place of wonders, if it truly existed.
The ship docked at last in Constantinople and McLennan disembarked, glad to feel the solid ground under his feet. Had he been less obsessed with the faraway country of his dreams, he would have lingered longer to explore the great Mohammedan mosques and magnificent palaces, roofed in gold and walled with beautiful painted tiles, and the crowded markets full of strange smells and stranger goods. But he’d heard the journey would take a year and cover ten thousand miles – and so there was no time to delay.
He soon learned there were inns called caravanserai where the traders gathered with their trade-goods so that they might travel together in greater safety. No one took this route alone. Here McLennan for the first time encountered the weird beast of burden called a gamal, bearing no more resemblance to a horse than that it had four legs and hair on its misshapen body. It was immensely tall with a hillock of flesh on its back, and its legs ended in big flat pads. It had foul breath and a temper worse than McLennan’s own, but it seemed that without these creatures no one could travel or transport goods over the terrain they had to cross.
So McLennan hired one, and took the advice of its owner – given during a visit to the market, in sign language – as to his likely needs on the journey ahead. He secretly hoped he would never be called upon to mount a gamal, as its height above ground, and its inhospitable hump, would surely make him as seasick as clinging to the poop deck of a ship on high seas.
Once again McLennan’s patience was tested. It took weeks for the caravan to assemble. But at last the party, consisting of about thirty men and as many gamal (or camels, as McLennan came to call them since he couldn’t pronounce the guttural language of his servant-guide) set off, the camels heavily loaded, the men on foot.
McLennan was lucky. There was a Portuguese trader among the men, a seasoned traveller called Afonso, who had made this journey once before and who spoke a little English. At first they could hardly understand each other, but Afonso was a talkative man; before a month of the journey had passed, they could converse, and better and better as the long days and longer nights passed.
The Portuguese spoke a great deal about his wife and children and to this McLennan deafened himself. He would sit by the campfire at night and stare into it and say nothing, trying not to listen, not to remember.
‘You have wife? Childs?’ Afonso kept asking.
McLennan clenched his teeth and made no answer.
‘You no find wife in Chi-na! No see womans there. Mans hide womans.’
‘Tell me about Chi-na, never mind the “womans”,’ McLennan growled.
He learned much about their destination, which the Chi-na men called the Middle Kingdom, thinking it the centre of the world. From this translation of its name came the nickname some travellers gave to its inhabitants – ‘Mi-Ki’.
‘Those Mi-Ki no like stranger,’ Afonso said. ‘Trader not all time behave well. Some cheat, some steal. Get drunk. Very bad. Now Mi-Ki think all mans from west bad. They call us devils from far—’
‘Foreign devils?’
‘Si. So best is, keep quiet, no drink, do trade, go home.’
‘I intend to stay,’ said McLennan. But Afonso didn’t believe him.
‘No one stay,’ he said.
‘Marco Polo did,’ thought McLennan. But he didn’t say it aloud. It might be just a rumour that the Venetian had become a member of some kingly court and stayed many years.
Another time, when McLennan had been regaling Afonso, as they trudged along the weary miles, with tales of his prowess in battle back in Scotland, the Portuguese gave him a sideways grin. ‘You like to fight?’
‘I like it well enough when I choose,’ McLennan answered.
‘Mi-Ki rule now by Mongol king call Kublai Khan. Most great ruler in all world.’
‘Aye, so I’ve heard.’
‘You like to fight Mongol? Then you show you great warrior!’
But McLennan knew when he was being mocked. He already understood that no one could beat the Mongols.
Nevertheless, through the hard journey across the wild desert regions of central Asia, McLennan began to dream of war and battle. Action. Action was what he had always needed and craved, ever since a night when he was held immobile, bound to a door that he had all but torn from its hinges in his frenzy.
The journey took many months. And if it wasn’t ten thousand miles, often during the long months of travel it seemed like it. By the time they at last crossed the western borders of Chi-na, the Scotsman had to admit that his strength and endurance had been tested to their limits.
As they travelled on through the endless scattered farmlands of the north, McLennan saw little wealth and splendour, but much poverty and hard struggle for survival. The peasants of this vast land tilled it in the sweat of their faces, even more than his own serfs, though he was surprised to see that in certain ways their farming methods were better. Their fields were carved somehow into small, flat, irregular steps that followed the curve of the hills, to make the most of the land.
The peasants mainly kept their distance, except for a few that approached them to sell food, or to trade (these received short shrift from the cameleers, who had bigger game afoot in the cities). But McLennan saw enough of them to be amazed. He himself came from a mongrel race, descended from Picts, Britons, Vikings, Norman French and, far back, there was Roman blood. Some Scots were dark, some blond, some red-headed like him. They were of many shapes and sizes and casts of feature. All these, he thought at first, might have sprung from one egg—the travellers all had straight black hair, sallow skin, and eyes
