I sat staring at Vizan, amazed and unbelieving. The old hag I had spent so many nights naked with—a vision unattainable and inviolable? Impossible! Ludicrous!

“There were so many suitors, and all so anguished in their yearning, that the tender-hearted Shams could not or would not choose from among them, and thus blight the lives of all the rest. Neither could her father the Shah, for a long time, choose for her; he was so besieged by so many, each imploring more eloquently, each pressing upon him more precious gifts. That tumult of courtship went on literally for years. Any other maiden would have fretted at the passing of her springtime, and she not yet wed. But Shams only grew the more rose-beautiful and willow-graceful and clover-sweet as the time went on.”

I still sat and stared at him, but my skepticism was slowly giving way to wonder. My lover had been all that? So exquisitely desirable to this man and to other men in that long-gone time, so exquisitely memorable that she was not yet forgotten, by this one at least, even now at the approaching end of his life?

Uncle Mafio went to speak, and got to coughing, but at last cleared his throat and asked, “What was the outcome of that crowded courtship?”

“Oh, it had to come to a conclusion at last. Her father the Shah—with her approval, I trust—finally chose for her the Shahzade of Shiraz. He and Shams were wed, and the whole Persian Empire—all but the rejected suitors—celebrated with joyous holiday. However, for a long time the marriage had no issue. I strongly suspect that the bridegroom was so overwhelmed by his good fortune, and by the pure beauty of his bride, that it was a long time before he could perform the consummation. It was not until after his father died, and he had succeeded as Shah in Shiraz, and Shams was thirty or older, that she gave birth to their only child, and then only a daughter. She was also handsome, so I have heard, but nothing like her mother. That was Zahd, who is now Shahryar of Baghdad, and I think has a nearly grown daughter of her own.”

“Yes,” I said faintly.

Vizan went on, “Had it not been for those events I have recounted—had the Princess Shams chosen otherwise—I might still be …” He poked at the fire again, but it was now only embers fast fading. “Ah, well. I was inspired to go away into the wilderness, and to seek. And I sought, and I found the true religion, and these my wandering brethren, and with them a new life. I think I have lived it well, and have been a good Christian. I have some small hope of Heaven … and in Heaven, who knows … ?”

His voice seemed to fail him. He said no more, not even a good-night, and got up from among us and walked away—wafting his smell of sheep wool and sheep dip and sheep manure—and disappeared into his much-weathered, many-patched little tent. No, I never did take him to be the Prete Zuane of the legends.

When my father and uncle had also gone to roll into their blankets, I sat on by the darkening embers of the fire, thinking, trying to reconcile in my mind the derelict old grandmother and she who was the Princess Sunlight, unsurpassable in beauty. I was confused. If Vizan saw her now, would he see the aged and ugly crone, or the glorious maiden she once had been? And I, should I keep on feeling disgust because, in her old age, hardly even recognizable as female, she still felt feminine hungers? Or should I pity her for the deceit she had to employ now to slake them, when once she could have had any prince for the beckoning?

To look at it another way, should I congratulate myself and delight in the knowledge that I had enjoyed the Princess Sunlight for whom a whole generation of men had yearned in vain? But, trying to think along that line, I found myself wrenching present time into past time, and past into present, and confronting even more insubstantial questions—I was led to wonder: does immortality reside in memory?—and with such deep metaphysic my mind was incapable of grappling.

My mind still is, as most minds are. But I know one thing now which I did not then. I know it from my own experience and knowledge of myself. A man stays always the same age, somewhere down inside himself. Only the outside of him grows older—his wrapping of body, and its integument, which is the whole world. Inwardly he attains to a certain age, and stays there throughout his whole remaining life. That perpetual inner age may vary, I suppose, with different individuals. But in general I suspect that it gets fixed at early maturity, when the mind has reached adult awareness and acuity, but has not yet been calloused by habit and disillusion; when the body is newly full-grown and feeling the fires of life, but not yet any of life’s ashes. The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that he is still a youth of eighteen or twenty.

And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved. I am sure there is not anywhere a woman of advanced age who has not inside her a maiden of tender years. I believe that the Princess Shams, even when I knew her, could see in her glass the radiant eyes and rose lips and willow grace that her suitor Vizan still could see, more than half a century after parting from her, and could smell the fragrance of clover after rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth.

THE GREAT SALT

1

KASHAN was the last city we came to in the habitable green part of Persia; eastward beyond it lay the empty wasteland called the Dasht-e-Kavir, or Great Salt Desert. On the day before we arrived in that city, the slave Nostril said:

“Observe, my masters, the pack camel has begun to limp. I believe he has suffered a stone bruise. Unless it is relieved, that could cause us bad trouble when we get into the desert.”

“You are the camel-puller,” said my uncle. “What is your professional advice?”

“The cure is simple enough, Master Mafio. A few days of rest for the animal. Three days should do it.”

“Very well,” said my father. “We will put up in Kashan, and we can make use of the delay. Replenish our traveling rations. Get our clothes cleaned, and so on.”

During the journey from Baghdad to this point, Nostril had behaved so efficiently and submissively that we had quite forgotten his penchant for devilry. But soon I, at least, had reason to suspect that the slave had deliberately inflicted the camel’s minor injury just to provide himself with a holiday.

Kashan’s foremost industry (and the source of the city’s name) has for centuries been the manufacture of kashi, or what we would call mosaic, those artfully glazed tiles which are used throughout Islam for the decoration of masjid temples, palaces and other fine buildings. The kashi manufacture is done inside enclosed workshops, but Kashan’s second most valuable article of commerce was more immediately visible to us as we rode into the city: its beautiful boys and young men.

While the girls and women to be seen on the streets—as well as could be seen through their chador veils—were of the usual mix, ranging from plain to pretty, with here and there one really worth noticing, all the young males were of strikingly handsome face and physique and bearing. I do not know why that should have been so. Kashan’s climate and foods and water did not differ from those we had encountered elsewhere in Persia, and I could see nothing extraordinary in those local folk who were of an age to be mothers and fathers. So I have no least idea why their male offspring should have been so superior to the boys and young men of other localities—but they undeniably were.