Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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The command was obviously given just to get me out of the way while they did what they did next. And it took me quite a while to comply, for the karwansarai was old, and must have had a long succession of owners, each of whom had built and added on new portions. The main building was a warren of hallways and rooms and closets and nooks, and there were also stables and sheds and sheep pens and other outbuildings. But the old man, evidently having felt secure in his drugs and deceits, had not taken much trouble to hide his possessions. To judge from the armory of weapons and provisions, he hadbeen, if not the veritable Old Man, at least a main supplier of the Mulahidat.

I first selected the best two woolen blankets from the considerable stock of traveling gear. Then I searched among the weapons and, though I could not find any straight swords of the type we Venetians were accustomed to, I picked out the shiniest and sharpest of the local sort. This was a broad and curved blade—more of a saber, since it was sharp only on the outcurved edge—called the shimshir, which means “silent lion.” I took three of them, one for each of us, and belts with loops from which to hang them. I could have further enriched our purses, for Beauty had secreted a small fortune in the form of bags of dried banj, bricks of compacted banj, and flagons of oil of banj. But I left all that where it was.

The dawn was breaking outdoors when I brought my acquisitions to the main room, where we had dined the night before. My father was preparing a breakfast meal at the brazier, and being most carefully selective of the ingredients. Just as I entered the room, I heard a series of noises from the yard outside: a long, rustling whistle, a loud klop!and a screeching yell of kya!Then my uncle came in from that yard, still naked, his skin spattered with blood spots, his beard smelling of smoke, and he saying with satisfaction:

“That was the last of the old devil, and it went as he wished. I have burned his garments and the blankets, and dispersed the ashes. We can depart as soon as we have dressed and eaten.”

I realized, of course, that Beauty of Faith’s Moon had been given no laying-out, but an extremely un-Muslim obsequy, and that made me curious as to what Uncle Mafìo meant by “went as he wished.” I asked him, and he chuckled and said:

“The last of him went flying southward. Toward Mecca.”

BAGHDAD

1

WE kept on downstream along the Furat, still southeastward, now traversing a particularly unappealing stretch of country where the river had cut its channel through solid basalt rock—a land bleak and black and barren even of grass, pigeons and eagles—but we were not pursued by the Misguided Ones or anyone else. And gradually, as if in celebration of our deliverance from danger, the countryside became more pleasant and hospitable. The terrain began perceptibly to rise up on either side of the river, until it was flowing through a wide and verdant valley. There were orchards and forests, pastures and farms, flowers and fruits. But the orchards were as shaggy and untended as the native forests, the farms as overgrown and weedy as the fields of wild flowers. The land’s owners had all gone away, and the only people we met in that valley were nomad families of bedawin shepherds, the landless and rootless roamers, roaming in that valley as they roamed in the grasslands. There were nowhere any settled folk, nobody working to keep the once domesticated land from reverting to wilderness.

“It is the doing of the Mongols,” said my father. “When the Ilkhan Hulagu—that is to say, the Lesser Khan Hulagu, brother to our friend Kubilai—when he swept through this land and overthrew the Persian Empire, most of the Persians fled or fell before him, and the survivors have not yet returned to rework their lands. But the nomad Arabs and Kurdi are like the grass on which they live and in search of which they wander. The bedawin bend uncaringly before any wind that blows—whether it be a gentle breeze or the fierce simùm—but they rebound as does the grass. To the nomads it matters not who rules the land, and it never will matter to them until the end of time, as long as the land itself remains.”

I turned in my saddle, looking at the land all about us, the richest, most fertile, most promising land we had yet seen in our journey, and I asked, “Who does rule Persia now?”

“When Hulagu died, his son Abagha succeeded as Ilkhan, and he has established a new capital in the northern city of Maragheh instead of in Baghdad. Although the Persian Empire is now a part of the Mongol Khanate, it is still divided into Shahnates, as before, for convenience of administration. But each Shah is subordinate to the Ilkhan Abagha, just as Abagha is subordinate to the Khakhan Kubilai.”

I was impressed. I knew we were yet many months of hard travel distant from the court city of that Khakhan Kubilai. But already, here in the western reaches of Persia, alreadywe were within the borders of the domain of that far distant Khan. In school, I had bent my most admiring and enthusiastic study on The Book of Alexander,so I knew that Persia was once a part of that conqueror’s empire, and his empire was so extensive as to earn him the sobriquet of “the Great.” But the lands won and held by that Macedonian comprised a mere fragment of the world, compared to the immensities conquered by Chinghiz Khan, and further enlarged by his conqueror sons, and still further enlarged by his conqueror grandsons, into the unimaginably immense Mongol Empire over which the grandson Kubilai now reigned as Khan of All Khans.

I believe that not the ancient Pharaones nor the ambitious Alexander nor the avaricious Caesars could have dreamed that so much world existed, so they could hardly have dreamed of acquiring it. As for all the later Western rulers, their ambitions and acquisitions have been even more paltry. Alongside the Mongol Empire, the entire continent called Europe seems merely a small and crowded peninsula, and all its nations, like those of the Levant, only so many peevishly self-important little provinces. From the eminence on which the Khakhan sits enthroned, my native Republic of Venice, proud of its glory and grandeur, must appear as trivial as the Suvediye cranny of the Ostikan Hampig. If the history keepers will continue to dignify Alexander as the Great, surely they ought to acknowledge Kubilai as the immeasurably Greater. That is not for me to say. But what I can say is that, on my entrance into Persia, I was thrilled to realize that I, mere Marco Polo, was setting foot in the most far-flung empire ever ruled by one man in all the years in which the world of men has existed.

“When we get to Baghdad,” my father went on, “we will show to the current Shah, whoever he may be, the letter we carry from Kubilai. And the Shah will have to make us welcome, as accredited ambassadors of his overlord.”

So we proceeded on down the Furat, watching the valley get ever more marked with the traces of civilization, for hereabouts it was crisscrossed by many irrigation canals branching off the river. However, the towering wooden wheels in the canals were not being turned by men or animals or any other agency; they stood still, the clay jugs around their rims not lifting and pouring any water. In the widest and most verdant part of that valley, the Furat makes its nearest approach to the other great south-running river of that country, the Dijlah, sometimes called Tigris, which is supposedly one of the other rivers of the Garden of Eden. If that is so, then the land between the two rivers would presumably be the site of that biblical garden. And if thatis so, then the garden, when we saw it, was as empty of resident men and women as it was immediately after the expulsion of Adam and Eve.

In that vicinity, we turned our horses eastward from the Furat and rode the intervening ten farsakhs to the Dijlah, and crossed that river on the bridge there—made of empty boat hulls supporting a plank roadway —to Baghdad on the eastern bank.

The city’s population, like that of the surrounding countryside, had been grievously diminished during Hulagu’s siege and capture of it. But in the fifteen or so ensuing years, much of its populace had returned and repaired what damage it had suffered. City merchants, it seems, are more resilient than country farmers. Like the primitive bedawin, civilized tradesmen seem to recover quickly from the prostrations of disaster. In the case of Baghdad, that may have been because so many of its merchants were not passive and fatalistic Muslims, but irrepressibly energetic Jews and Christians—some of them having come originally from Venice and even more of them from Genoa.

Or perhaps Baghdad recovered because it is such a necessary city, at an important crossroads of trade. Besides being a western terminus of the Silk Road which comes overland, it is a northern terminus of the sea route from the Indies. The city is not itself on the seaside, of course, but its Dijlah River bears a heavy traffic of large river boats, sailing downstream with the current or being poled upriver against it, going to and coming from Basra in the south, on the Persian Gulf, where the seagoing Arab ships make landfall. Anyway, whatever the beneficent reason, Baghdad was, when we arrived there, what it had been before the Mongols came: a rich and vital and busy trading center.

It was as beautiful as it was busy. Of the Eastern cities I had seen so far, Baghdad was the most reminiscent of my native Venice. Its Dijlah waterfront was as thronged and tumultuous and littered and odorous as the Riva of Venice, though the vessels to be seen here—all of them built and manned by Arabs—were nowise comparable to ours. They were alarmingly shoddy craft to be entrusted to the water, built entirely without pegs or nails or iron fastenings of any fashion, their hull planking instead stitchedtogether by ropes of some coarse fiber. Their seams and interstices were not plugged watertight with pitch, but with a sort of lard made from fish oil. Even the biggest of those boats had only a single steering oar, and it was not very manipulable since it was firmly hinged at mid-stern. Another deplorable thing about those Arab boats was the unfastidious way their cargoes were stored. After filling the hold with a load of, as it may be, all foodstuffs—dates and fruits and grains and such—the Arab boatmen might then crowd the deck above the hold with a herd of livestock. That frequently consisted of fine Arabian horses, and they are beauteous beasts, but they evacuate themselves as often and as hugely as any other horses, and their droppings would dribble and seep between the planks onto the cargo of edibles belowdecks.

Baghdad is not, like Venice, interlaced with canals, but its streets are constantly sprinkled with water to lay the dust, so they have a humid fragrance reminiscent to me of canals. And the city has a great many open squares equivalent to Venice’s piazze. Some are bazàr marketplaces, but most are public gardens, for the Persians are passionately fond of gardens. (I learned there that the Farsi word meaning garden, pairi-daeza, became our Bible’s word Paradise.) Those public gardens have benches for passersby to rest on, and streamlets running through, and many birds in residence, and trees and shrubs and perfumed plants and luminous Sowers—roses especially, for the Persians are passionately fond of roses. (They call any and every flower a gul, though that Farsi word means specifically a rose.) Likewise, the palaces of noble families and the larger houses of rich merchant families are built around private gardens as big as the public ones, and as full of roses and birds, and as nearly like earthly Paradises.

I suppose I had got it into my head that the words Muslim and Arab were interchangeable, and therefore that any Muslim community must be indistinguishable—in matters of filth and vermin and beggars and stench—from the Arab cities, towns and villages I had passed through. I was agreeably surprised to find that the Persians, although their religion is Islam, are more inclined to keep their buildings and streets and garments and persons clean. That, with the abundance of flowers everywhere, and a comparative fewness of beggars, made Baghdad a most pleasant and even nice-smelling city—except, of necessity, around the waterfront and the bazàr markets.

Although much of Baghdad’s architecture was of course peculiarly Eastern, even that was not entirely exotic to my Western eyes. I saw a great deal of that lacy filigree “arabesco” stonework which Venice has also adopted for some of its building fronts. Baghdad being still a Muslim city, even after its absorption into the Khanate—for the Mongols, unlike most conquerors, do not anywhere impose any change of religion —it was studded with those great Muslim masjid temples of worship. But their immense domes were not much different from the domes of San Marco and the other churches of Venice. Their slender manarat towers were not too dissimilar to the campanili of Venice, only being generally round instead of square in cross-section, and having little balconies at their tops, from which the muedhdhin beadles shouted at intervals to announce the hours of prayer.

Those muedhdhin in Baghdad, incidentally, were all blind men. I inquired whether that was a necessary qualification for the post, something demanded by Islam, and was told it was not. Blind men were engaged as the prayer-calling beadles for two pragmatic reasons. Being unfit for most other employments, they could not demand much pay for the work. And they could not take sinful advantage of their literally high position: they could not look down to ogle any decent woman who ascended to her rooftop to doff her veil—or more of her coverings—for a private sunbath.

In their interiors, the masjid temples differ notably from our Christian churches. In none of them, anywhere, is there ever to be found any statue or painting or other recognizable image. Though Islam recognizes, I think, as many angels and saints and prophets as Christianity does, it will allow no representation of them, or of any other creature alive or which ever has lived. Muslims believe that their Allah, like our Lord God, created all things living. But, unlike us Christians, they maintain that all creation, even in paint or wood or stone imitation of life, must be forever reserved to Allah. Their Quran warns them that on Judgment Day any maker of any such image will be commanded to bring that image to life; if the maker cannot do that, and of course he cannot, he will be damned to Hell for his presumption in having made it. Therefore, although a Muslim masjid—or palace or home—is always rich in decoration, those decorations are never pictures of anything; they consist only of patterns and colors and intricate arabeschi. Sometimes, though, the patterns are discernible as being woven of the Arabic fish-worm letters and spelling out some phrase or verse from the Quran.

(I learned these several uncommonly odd things about Islam—and I learned many other uncommonly odd things besides—because, during my stay in Baghdad, I acquired first one and then another uncommonly odd teacher, and I will tell of them in their turn.)

I was particularly taken with one form of decoration I saw in the interior rooms of every public and private building in Baghdad. I should say that I first saw it there, but afterward I saw it in other palaces, homes and temples throughout Persia and throughout much of the rest of the East. I should think it might be advantageously adopted by any people anywhere which loves a garden, and what people does not love a garden?

What it is, is a way to bring a garden indoors,though never having to tend or weed or water it. Called in Persia a qali, it is a sort of carpet or tapicierie made to lie on a floor or hang on a wall, but it is unlike any such work we know in the West. The qali is colored in all the colors of a bounteous garden, and its figures form the shapes of multitudes of flowers, vines, trellises, leaves—everything to be found in a garden—all disposed in pleasing designs and arrangements. (In keeping with the Quran’s ban on images, however, a Persian qali is made so that the flowers are not recognizable as any known existing flowers.) At first sight of a qali, I thought the garden must be painted or embroidered upon it. But, on examination, I found that all that intricacy was woven into it.I marveled that any tapicier could contrive such a fanciful thing with mere warp and weft of dyed yarns, and it was some while before I learned the marvelous manner in which it is done.

But I have already got ahead of my chronicle.

We three led our five horses across the wobbling and undulating boat bridge which spanned the Dijlah River. At the Baghdad waterfront, teeming with men of all complexions and costumes and languages, we accosted the first one we saw wearing Western clothes. He was a Genoan, but I should remark that, out East, all Westerners get along convivially enough—even Genoans and Venetians, albeit they are rivals in trade and even though their home republics may be embroiled in one of their frequent sea wars. The Genoan merchant amiably told us the name of the incumbent Shah—he gave it as “Shahinshah Zaman Mirza” —and directed us to the palace “in the Karkh quarter, which is the exclusively royal quarter of the city.”

We rode thither, and found the palace in a gated garden, and made ourselves known to the guards at the gate. Those guards wore helmets that seemed to be of solid gold—but could not have been, or their weight would have been intolerable—and, even if only of plated wood or leather, were objects of great value. They were also objects of interest, being fashioned to give their wearers a wealth of curly golden hair and side whiskers. One of the guards went inside the gate and through the garden to the palace. When he returned and beckoned to us, another guard took charge of our horses, and we entered.

We were led to a chamber richly hung and carpeted with brilliant qali, where the Shahinshah half-sat and half-reclined on a heap of daiwan cushions of equally vivid colors and fine fabrics. He himself was not gaudily garbed; from tulband to slippers, his dress was a uniform pale brown. That is the Persian color of mourning, and the Shah always wore pale brown now in mourning for his lost empire. We were somewhat surprised—this being a Muslim household—to see that a woman occupied another heap of pillows beside him, and there were also two other females in the room. We made the proper bows of salaam and, still bowed down, my father greeted the Shahinshah in the Farsi tongue, then raised up upon his two hands the letter of Kubilai Khan. The Shah took it and read aloud its salutation:

“‘Most Serene, most Puissant, most High, Noble, Illustrious, Honorable, Wise and Prudent Emperors, Ilkhani, Shahi, Kings, Lords, Princes, Dukes, Earls, Barons and Knights, as also Magistrates, Officers, Justicians and Regents of all good cities and places, whether ecclesiastic or secular, who shall see these patents or hear them read …’”

When he had perused the whole thing, the Shahinshah bade us welcome, addressing each of us as “Mirza Polo.” That was a little confusing, as I had understood Mirza to be one of hisnames. But I gradually gathered that he was using the word as a respectful honorific, as the Arabs use Sheikh. And eventually I realized that Mirza before a name means only what Messer does in Venice; when it is appended after the name, it signifies royalty. The Shah’s name was actually and simply Zaman, and his full title of Shahinshah meant Shah of All Shahs, and he introduced the lady beside him as his Royal First Wife, or Shahryar, by the name of Zahd.

That was very nearly all he got to say that day, because, once she was introduced into the conversation, the Shahryar Zahd proved to be effusively and endlessly talkative. First interrupting, then overriding her husband, she gave us her own welcome to Persia and to Baghdad and to the palace, and she sent our accompanying guard back to the gate, and she hammered a little gong at her side to summon a palace maggiordomo whom she told us was called a wazir, and she instructed the wazir to prepare quarters for us in the palace and assign palace servants to us, and she introduced us to the other two females in the room: one her mother, the other the eldest daughter of herself and the Shah Zaman, and she informed us that she herself, Zahd Mirza, was a direct descendant of the fabled Balkis, Queen of Sabaea—and, of course, so were her mother and daughter—and she reminded us that the famous encounter of Queen Balkis with the Padshah Solaiman was recorded in the annals of Islam as well as those of Judaism and Christianity (which remark enabled me to recognize the biblical Queen of Sheba and King Solomon), and she further informed us that the Sabaean Queen Balkis herself was a jinniyeh, descended from a demon named Eblis, who was chief jinni of all the demon jinn, and furthermore …

“Tell us, Mirza Polo,” the Shah said, almost desperately, to my father, “something of your journey thus far.”

My father obligingly began an account of our travels, but he had not even got us out of the Venice lagoon when the Shahryar Zahd pounced in with a lyrical description of some pieces of Murano glass she had recently bought from a Venetian merchant in downtown Baghdad, and that reminded her of an old but little-known Persian tale of a glassblower who, once upon a time, fashioned a horse of blown glass and persuaded a jinni to make some magic by which the horse was enabled to fly like a bird, and …

The tale was interesting enough, but unbelievable, so I let my attention wander to the other two females in the room. The women’s very presence in a meeting of men—not to mention the Shahryar’s unquenchable garrulity—was evidence that the Persians did not shield and sequester and stifle their womenfolk as most other Muslims do. Each woman’s eyes were visible above a mere half-veil of chador, which was diaphanous anyway and did not conceal her nose and mouth and chin. On their upper bodies they wore blouse and waistcoat, and on their lower limbs the voluminous pai-jamah. However, those garments were not thick and many-layered as on Arab women, but gossamer light and translucent, so the shapes of their bodies could be easily discerned and appreciated.

I gave only one look at the aged grandmother: wrinkled, bony, hunched, almost bald, toothlessly champing her granulated lips, her eyes red and gummy, her withered paps flapping against slatted ribs. One look at the crone was enough for me. But her daughter, the Shahryar Zahd Mirza, was an exceptionally handsome woman, anyway when she was not talking, and herdaughter was a superbly beautiful and shapely girl about my own age. She was the Crown Princess or Shahzrad, and named Magas, which means Moth, and subtitled with the royal Mirza. I have neglected to say that the Persians are not, like Arabs, of dark and muddy complexion. Though they all have blue-black hair, and the men wear blue-black beards like Uncle Mafìo’s, their skin is as fair as any Venetian’s, and many have eyes of lighter color than brown. The Shahzrad Magas Mirza was at that moment taking my measure with eyes of emerald green.

“Speaking of horses,” said the Shah, seizing on the tail of the flying-horse tale, before his wife could be reminded of some other story. “You gentlemen should consider trading your horses for camels before you leave Baghdad. Eastward of here you must cross the Dasht-e-Kavir, a vast and terrible desert. Horses cannot endure the—”

“The Mongols’ horses did,” his wife sharply contradicted him. “A Mongol goes everywhere on a horse, and no Mongol would ever bestride a camel. I will tell you how they despise and mistreat camels. While they were besieging this city, the Mongols captured a herd of camels somewhere, and they loaded them with bales of dry grass, and set that hay afire, and stampeded the poor beasts into our streets. The camels, their own fur and humps of fat burning as well, ran mad in agony and could not be caught. So they careered up and down our streets, setting fire to much of Baghdad, before the flames ate into them and reached their vitals, and they collapsed and died.”

“Or,” said the Shah to us, when the Shahryar paused to take a breath, “your journey could be much shortened if you went part way by sea. You might wish to go southeast from here, to Basra—or even farther down the Gulf, to Hormuz—and take passage on some ship sailing to India.”

“In Hormuz,” said the Shahryar Zahd, “every man has only a thumb and the two outer fingers on his right hand. I will tell you why. That seaport city has for ages treasured its importance and its independence, so its every adult male citizen has always been trained as an archer to defend it. When the Mongols under the Ilkhan Hulagu laid seige to Hormuz, the Ilkhan made an offer to the city fathers. Hulagu said he would let Hormuz stand, and retain its independence, and keep its citizen archers, if only the city fathers would lend him those bowmen for long enough to help him conquer Baghdad. Then, he promised, he would let the men come home to Hormuz and be its staunch defense again. The city fathers agreed to that proposal, and all its men—however reluctantly—joined Hulagu in his siege of this city, and fought well for him, and eventually our beloved Baghdad fell.”

She and the Shah both sighed deeply.

“Well,” she went on, “Hulagu had been so impressed by the valor and prowess of the Hormuz men that he then sent them to bed with all the young Mongol women who always accompany the Mongol armies. Hulagu wished to add the potency of the Hormuz seed to the Mongol birthlines, you see. After a few nights of that enforced cohabitation, when Hulagu presumed his females had been sufficiently impregnated, he kept his promise and freed the archers to go home to Hormuz. But before he let them depart, he had every man’s two bowstring fingers amputated. In effect, Hulagu took the fruit from the trees and then felled the trees. Those mutilated men could make no defense of Hormuz at all, and of course that city soon became, like our dear defeated Baghdad, a possession of the Mongol Khanate.”

“My dear,” said the Shah, looking flustered. “These gentlemen are emissaries of that Khanate. The letter they showed me is a ferman from the Khakhan Kubilai himself. I very much doubt that they are amused to hear tales of the Mongols’—er—misbehavior.”

“Oh, you can freely say atrocities,Shah Zaman,” my uncle boomed heartily. “We are still Venetians, not adoptive Mongols nor apologists for them.”

“Then I should tell you,” said the Shahryar, again leaning eagerly forward, “the ghastly way Hulagu treated our Qalif al-Mustasim Billah, the holiest man of Islam.” The Shah breathed another sigh, and fixed his gaze on a remote corner of the room. “As perhaps you know, Mirza Polo, Baghdad was to Islam what Rome is to Christianity. And the Qalif of Baghdad was to Muslims what your Pope is to you Christians. So, when Hulagu laid siege here, it was to the Qalif Mustasim that he proposed surrender terms, not to the Shah Zaman.” She flicked a disparaging glance at her husband. “Hulagu offered to lift the siege if the Qalif acceded to certain demands, among them the handing over of much gold. The Qalif refused, saying, ‘Our gold sustains our Holy Islam.’ And the reigning Shah did not overrule that decision.”

“How could I?” that Shah said weakly, as if it was an argument much argued previously. “The spiritual leader outranks the temporal.”

His wife went implacably on. “Baghdad might have withstood the Mongols and their Hormuz allies, but it could not withstand the hunger imposed by a siege. Our people ate everything edible, even the city rats, but the people got weaker and weaker, and many died and the rest could fight no longer. When the city inevitably fell, Hulagu imprisoned the Qalif Mustasim in solitary confinement, and let him get even hungrier. At last the holy old man had to beg for food. Hulagu with his ówn hands gave him a plate full of gold coins, and the Qalif whimpered, ‘No man can eat gold.’ And Hulagu said, ‘You called it sustenance when I asked for it. Did it sustain your holy city? Pray, then, that it will sustain you.’ And he had the gold melted, and he poured that glowing-hot liquid metal down the old man’s throat, killing him horribly. Mustasim was the last of the Qalifate, which had endured for more than five hundred years, and Baghdad is no longer the capital either of Persia or of Islam.”

We dutifully shook our heads in commiseration, which encouraged the Shahryar to add:

“As an illustration of how low the Shahnate has been brought: this my husband, Shah Zaman, who was once Shahinshah of all the Empire of Persia, is now a pigeon keeper and cherry picker!”

“My dear … ,” said the Shah.

“It is true. One of the lesser Khans—somewhere to the eastward; we have never even met this Ilkhan—has a taste for ripe cherries. He is also a fancier of pigeons, and his pigeons are trained always to fly home to him from wherever they may be transported. So there are now some hundred of those feathered rats in a dovecote behind the palace stables, and for each there is a tiny silken bag. My Emperor husband has instructions. Next summer when our orchards ripen, we are to pick the cherries, put one or two of them into each of those little bags, fasten the bags to the legs of the pigeons and let the birds free. Like the rukh bird carrying off men and lions and princesses, the pigeons will carry our cherries to the waiting Ilkhan. If we do not pay that humiliating tribute, he will doubtless come rampaging from out of the east and lay our city waste again.”

“My dear, I am sure the gentlemen are now weary of—of traveling hither,” said the Shah, sounding weary himself. He struck the gong to summon the wazir once more, and said to us, “You will wish to rest and refresh yourselves. Then, if you will do me the honor, we will foregather again at the evening meal.”