Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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“I do not know what the Mishna is, Master Shi,” grumbled the Prince, “but I will convey your sentiments to my Royal Father.” He turned to me. “I will convey you, too, Marco. He had already sent me looking for you when I heard the thunder of your—accomplishment. I am glad I do not have to carry you to him in a spoon. Come along.”

“Marco,” said the Khakhan without preamble, “I must send a messenger to the Orlok Bayan in Yun-nan, to apprise him of the latest developments here, and I think you have earned the honor of being that messenger. A missive is now being written for you to take to him. It explains about the Minister Pao and suggests some measures that Bayan may take, now that the Yi are deprived of their secret ally in our midst. Give Bayan my letter, then attend upon him until the war is won, and then you will have the honor of bringing me the word that Yun-nan at last is ours.”

“You are sending me to war, Sire?” I said, not quite sure that I was eager to go. “I have had no experience of war.”

“Then you should have. Every man should engage in at least one war in his lifetime—else how can he say that he has savored all the experiences which life offers a man?”

“I was not thinking of life, Sire, so much as death.” And I laughed, but not with much merriment.

“Every man dies,” Kubilai said, rather stiffly. “Some deaths are at least less ignominious than others. Would you prefer to die like a clerk, dwindling and wilting into the boneyard of a secured old age?”

“I am not afraid, Sire. But what if the war drags on for a long time? Or never is won?”

Even more stiffly, he said, “It is better to fight in a losing cause than to have to confess to your grandchildren that you never fought at all. Vakh!”

Prince Chingkim spoke up. “I can assure you, Royal Father, that this Marco Polo would never dodge any confrontation imaginable. He is, however, at the moment a trifle shaken by a recent calamity.” He went on to tell Kubilai about the accidental—he stressed accidental—devastation of my menage.

“Ah, so you are bereft of women servants and the services of women,” the Khakhan said sympathetically. “Well, you will be traveling too rapidly on the road to Yun-nan to have need of servants, and you will be too fatigued each night to yearn for anything more than sleep. When you get there, of course, you will do your share of the pillage and rape. Take slaves to serve you, take women to service you. Behave like a Mongol born.”

“Yes, Sire,” I said submissively.

He leaned back and sighed, as if he missed the good old days, and murmured in reminiscence:

“My esteemed grandfather Chinghiz, it is said, was born clutching a clot of blood in his tiny fist, from which the shaman foretold for him a sanguinary career. He lived up to the prophecy. And I can still remember him telling us, his grandsons, ‘Boys, a man can have no greater pleasure than to slay his enemies, and then, besmeared and reeking with their blood, to rape their chaste wives and virgin daughters. There is no more delightful sensation than to spurt your jing-ye into a woman or a girl-child who is weeping and struggling and loathing you and cursing you.’ So spake Chinghiz Khan, the Immortal of Mongols.”

“I will bear it in mind, Sire.”

He sat forward again and said, “No doubt you have arrangements to make before your departure. But make them as expeditiously as possible. I have already sent advance riders to ready your route. If, on’your way along it, you can sketch for me maps of that route—as you and your uncles did of the Silk Road—I shall be grateful and your reward will be handsome. Also, if in your travels you should catch up to the fugitive Minister Pao, I give you leave to slay him, and your reward for that would also be handsome. Now go and prepare for the journey. I will have fast horses and a trustworthy escort ready when you are.”

Well, I thought, as I went to my chambers, this would at least put me out of reach of my court adversaries—the Wali Achmad, the Lady Chao, the Fondler Ping, whoever else that whisperer might have been. Better to fall in open warfare than to someone sneaking up behind me.

The Court Architect was in my suite, making measurements and muttering to himself and snapping orders to a team of workmen, who were commencing the replacement of the vanished walls and roof. Happily, I had kept most of my personal possessions and valuables in my bedroom, which had been unravaged. Nostril was in there, burning incense to clear the air. I bade him lay out a traveling wardrobe for me and to make a light pack of other necessities. Then I gathered up all the journal notes I had written and accumulated since leaving Venice, and carried them to my father’s chambers.

He looked a little surprised when I dropped the pile on a table beside him, for it was an unprepossessing mound of smudged and wrinkled and mildewed papers of all different sizes.

“I would be obliged, Father, if you would send these to Uncle Marco, the next time you entrust some shipment of goods to the Silk Road horse post, and ask him to send them on to Venice for safekeeping by Maregna Fiordelisa. The notes may be of interest to some future cosmographer, if he can decipher them and arrange them in order. I had intended to do that myself—someday—but I am bidden to a mission from which I may not return.”

“Indeed? What mission?”

I told him, and with dramatic somberness, so I was taken aback when he said, “I envy you, doing something I have never done. You should appreciate the opportunity Kubilai is giving you. Da novèlo tuto xe belo. Not many white men have watched the Mongols make war—and lived to remember it.”

“I only hope I do,” I said. “But survival is not my sole consideration. There are other things I had rather be doing. And I am sure that there are more profitable things I could be doing.”

“Now, now, Marco. To a good hunger there is no bad bread.”

“Are you suggesting, Father, that I should enjoywasting my time in a war?”

He said reprovingly, “It is true that you were trained for trade, and you come from a merchant lineage. But you must not look at everything with a tradesman’s eye, always asking yourself, ‘What is this good for? What is this worth?’ Leave that grubby philosophy to the tradesmen who never step beyond their shop doors. You have ventured out to the farthest edge of the world. It would be a pity if you take home only profit, and not at least a little of poetry.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I turned a profit yesterday. May I borrow one of your maidservants for an errand?”

I sent her to fetch from the slave quarters the Turki woman called Mar-Janah, formerly the possession of the Lady Chao Ku-an.

“Mar-Janah?” my father repeated, as the servant departed. “And a Turki … ?”

“Yes, you know of her,” I said. “We have spoken of her before.” And I told him the whole story, of which he had so long ago heard only a part of the beginning.

“What a wondrously intricate web!” he exclaimed. “And to have been at last unraveled! God does not always pay His debts just on Sundays.” Then, as I had done on first seeing her, he widened his eyes when the lovely woman came smiling into the chamber, and I introduced him to her.

“My Mistress Chao did not seem pleased about it,” she said shyly to me, “but she tells me that I am now your property, Master Marco.”

“Only briefly,” I said, taking the paper of title from my purse and holding it out to her. “You are your own property again, as you should be, and I will hear you call no one Master any more.”

With a tremulous hand she accepted the paper, and with her other hand she brushed tears from her long eyelashes, and she seemed to have trouble finding words to speak.

“Now,” I went on, “I doubt not that the Princess Mar-Janah of Cappadocia could take her pick of men from this court or any other. But if Your Highness still has her heart set on Nost—on Ali Babar, he awaits you in my chambers down the hall.”

She started to kneel in ko-tou, but I caught her hands, raised her, turned her to the door, said, “Go to him,” and she went.

My father approvingly followed her with his gaze, then asked me, “You will not wish to take Nostril with you to Yun-nan?”

“No. He has waited twenty years or more for that woman. Let them be married as soon as can be. Will you tend to those arrangements, Father?”

“Yes. And I will give Nostril his own certificate of title as a wedding present. I mean Ali Babar. I suppose we ought to accustom ourselves to addressing him more respectfully, now that he will be a freeman and consort to a princess.”

“Before he is entirely free, I had better go and make sure he has packed for me properly. So I will say goodbye now, Father, in case I do not see you or Uncle Mafio before I leave.”

“Goodbye, Marco, and let me take back what I said before. I was wrong. You may nevermake a proper tradesman. You just now gave away a valuable slave for no payment at all.”

“But, Father, I got her free of payment.”

“What better way to turn a clear profit? Yet you did not. You did not even set her free with fanfare and fine words and noble gesticulations, letting her kiss and slobber over your hands, while a numerous audience applauded your liberality and a palace scribe recorded the scene for posterity.”

Mistaking the tenor of his words, I said in some exasperation, “To quote one of your own adages, Father: one minute you are lighting torches and the next you are counting candle wicks.”

“It is poor business to give things away, and worse business to get not even praise for doing so. Clearly you know the value of nothing—except perhaps a human being or two. I despair of you as a tradesman. I have hope of you as a poet. Goodbye, Marco, my son, and come back safe.”

I got to see Mar-Janah one more time. The next morning, she and Nostril-now-Ali came to wish me “salaam aleikum” before my departure, and to thank me again for having helped to bring them together. They had risen early, to make sure of catching me—and evidently had got up from a shared bed, for they were disheveled and sleepy-eyed. But they were also smiling and blithesome, and, when they tried to describe to me their rapturous reunion, they were quite rapturously and absurdly inarticulate.

He began, “It was almost as if—”

“No, it wasas if—” said she.

“Yes, it was indeedas if—” he said. “All the twenty years since we last knew each other—it was as if they, well—”

“Come, come,” I said, laughing at the foolish locutions. “Neither of you used to be such an inept teller of tales.”

Mar-Janah laughed too, and finally said what was meant: “The twenty intervening years might never have been.”

“She still thinks me handsome!” exclaimed Nostril. “And she is more beautiful than ever!”

“We are as giddy as two youngsters in first love,” she said.

“I am happy for you,” I said. Though they were both perhaps forty-five years old, and though I still could not help feeling that a love affair between persons nearly old enough to be my parents was a quaint and risible thing, I added, “I wish you joy forever, young lovers.”

I went then to call on the Khakhan, to collect his letter for the Orlok Bayan—and found that he already had visitors: the Court Firemaster, whom I had seen only the day before, the Court Astronomer and the Court Goldsmith, whom I had not seen for quite some time. They all three looked curiously bloodshot, but their red eyes gleamed with something like excitement.

Kubilai said, “These gentlemen courtiers wish you to carry to Yun-nan something of theirs also.”

“We have been up all night, Marco,” said the Firemaster Shi. “Now that you have devised a way to make the flaming powder transportable, we are eager to see it employed in combat. I have spent the night wetting quantities of it and drying it into cakes and then pulverizing it into pellets.”

“Et voila, I have been making new containers for it,” said the Goldsmith Boucher, displaying a shiny brass ball, about the size of his head. “Master Shi told us how you destroyed half the palace with just a stoneware pot.”

“It was not half the palace,” I protested. “It was only—”

“Qu’importe?” he said impatiently. “If a mere lidded pot could do that, we reckoned that an even stouter confinement of the powder should make it trebly powerful. We decided on brass.”

“And I worked out, by comparison with the planetary orbs,” said the Astronomer Jamal-ud-Din, “that a globular container would be best. It can be most accurately and farthest thrown by hand or by catapult, or can even be rolled among the enemy, and its shape—inshallah!—will most effectually disperse its destructive forces in all directions.”

“So I made balls like this, in sections of two hemispheres,” said Master Boucher. “Master Shi filled them with the powder pellets, and then I brazed them together. Nothing but their internal force will ever break them apart. But when it does—les diables sont déchaînés!”

“You and the Orlok Bayan,” said Master Shi, “will be the first to put the huo-yao to practical use in field warfare. We made a dozen of the balls. Take them with you and let Bayan use them as he will, and they ought to work without fail.”

“So it sounds,” I said. “But how do the warriors ignite them?”

“You see this string like a wick sticking out? It was inserted before the halves were brazed together. It is actually of cotton twisted around a core of the huo-yao itself. Only touch a spark to it—a smoldering stick of incense will serve—and it will give a long count of ten before the spark reaches the charge inside.”

“Then they cannot discharge accidentally? I am disinclined to devastate some innocent karwansarai before I even get there.”

“No fear,” said Master Shi. “Just please do not let any women play with them.” He added drily, “It is not for nothing that my people’s morning thanksgiving prayer contains the words ‘Blessed art Thou, 0 Lord our God, Who hath not made me a woman.’”

“Is that a fact?” said the Master Jamal, sounding interested. “Our Quran says likewise, in the fourth sura: ‘Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which Allah has gifted the one above the other.’”

I decided the old men must be lightheaded from lack of sleep, to be starting a discussion of the demerits of women, so I cut it short by saying, “I will gladly take the things, then, if the Khan Kubilai is in favor.”

The Khakhan made a gesture of assent, and the three courtiers hurried off to load the dozen balls onto my train’s pack horses. When they had gone, Kubilai said to me:

“Here is the letter to Bayan, sealed and chained for carrying safely about your neck, under your clothes. Here also is my yellow-paper letter of authority, as you have seen your uncles carry. But you should not often have to show it, for I am giving you also this more visible pai-tzu. You have only to wear it on your chest or hung on your saddle, and at sight of it anyone in this realm will do you ko-tou and accord you every hospitality and service.”

The pai-tzu was a tablet or plaque, as broad as my hand and nearly as long as my forearm, made of ivory with an inset silver ring for hanging it by, and inlaid gold lettering, in the Mongol alphabet, instructing all men to welcome and obey me, under pain of the Khakhan’s displeasure.

“Also,” Kubilai went on, “since you may have to sign vouchers of expenses, or messages, or other documents, I had the Court Yinmaster engrave this personal yin for you.”

It was a small block of smooth stone, a soft gray in color with blood-red veinings through it, about an inch square and a finger-length long, rounded at one end for comfortable holding in the hand. The squared-off front end of it was intricately incised, and Kubilai showed me how to stamp that end on an inked pad of cloth and then onto any paper that required my signature. I never would have recognized the imprint it made—as beingmy signature, I mean—but it looked nicely impressive, and I commented admiringly on the fineness of the work.

“It is a good yin, and it will last forever,” said the Khakhan. “I had the Yinmaster Liu Shen-dao make it of the marble which the Han call chicken-blood stone. As to the fineness of the engraving, that Master Liu is so expert that he can inscribe an entire prayer on a single human hair.”

And so I left Khanbalik for Yun-nan, carrying, besides my own pack and clothes and other necessities, the twelve brass balls of flaming powder, the sealed letter to the Orlok Bayan, my own letter of authority and the confirming pai-tzu plaque—and my very own personal yin, with which I could leave my name stamped, if I chose, all across Kithai. This is what my name looks like, in the Han characters, for I still have the little stone yin:

I was not sure, when I set out to war, how long I would last. But, as the Khan Kubilai had said, my yin could last forever, and so might my name.

TO-BHOT

1

IT was a long journey from Khanbalik to the Orlok Bayan’s site of operations, nearly as many li as from Khanbalik to Kashgar, but my two escorts and I rode light and fast. We carried only essential traveling gear—no food or cookware or bedding—and the heaviest items, the powder-charged brass balls, were divided among our three extra horses. Those were also fleet steeds, not the usual trudging pack animals, so all six horses were capable of proceeding at the Mongols’ war-march pace of canter and walk and canter. Whenever any horse began to show signs of wearying, we had only to pause at the nearest of the Road Minister’s horse posts and demand six fresh ones.

I had not known what Kubilai had meant when he said that he had already sent advance riders to “ready the route.” But I learned that that was an arrangement made whenever the Khakhan or any of his important emissaries made a long cross-country journey. Those riders went ahead to announce the journeyer’s imminent approach, and every Wang of every province, every prefect of every prefecture, even the elders of every least village, were expected to prepare for the passing-through. So there were always comfortable beds waiting in the best possible accommodations, good cooks waiting to prepare the best available fare, even new wells dug if necessary to supply sweet water in arid regions. That is why we were enabled to carry only the lightest of packs. Every night, too, there were women supplied for our enjoyment, but, as Kubilai had also said, I was too fatigued and saddle sore to make use of them. Instead, I spent each night’s short interval between table and bed in scribbling down on paper what details and landmarks I had noticed during that day’s travel.

We rode in a southwestering arc from Khanbalik, and I cannot remember how many villages, towns and cities we passed through or spent a night in, but only two of them were of estimable size. One was Xian, which the War Minister Chao had pointed out to me on his great map and told me had once been the capital city of the First Emperor of these lands. Xian had dwindled considerably in the centuries since, and, though still a busy and prosperous crossroads city, possessed none of the finery of an imperial capital. The other big city was Cheng-du—in what was called the Red Basin country, because the earth there is not yellow, as in most of the rest of Kithai. Cheng-du was the capital city of the province called Si-chuan, and its Wang inhabited a palace city-within-a-city almost as grand as that of Khanbalik. The Wang Mangalai, another of Kubilai’s sons, would gladly have had me stay a long time as his honored guest, and I was much tempted to rest there for a least a while. But, mindful of my mission, I made my excuses, and of course Mangalai accepted them, and I spent only a single night in his company.

From Cheng-du, my escorts and I turned directly west—into the mountainous border country where the Kithai province of Si-chuan and the Sung province of Yun-nan and the land of To-Bhot all mingled together—and our pace slowed as we began a long climb that soon became a steep climb. The mountains were not so sky-reaching as, for instance, the Pai-Mir of High Tartary. These had much more forest growth on them and no snow, and even in deep winter, I was told, the snow never clung to them for long, except on their very tops. But these mountains, if less high than others I had seen, were much more vertical in their general configuration. Except for the wooded slopes, they were mostly monstrous slabs set on end, separated by narrow, deep, dark ravines. But at least they were solid mountains; we did not have to dodge any avalanches, and I did not ever hear any of them booming roundabout. The country was called by its inhabitants the Land of the Four Rivers, those four streams being locally named the N’mai, the Nu, the Lan-kang and the Jin-sha. But those waters, said the natives, broadened and deepened as they flowed out of the mountains, to become the four greatest rivers of that part of the world, better known by their downstream names of Irawadi, Sal-win, Me-kong and Yang-tze. The first three of those, when they got beyond Yun-nan Province, ran southward or southeastward into the tropical lands called Champa. The fourth would become that Yang-tze of which I have earlier spoken—the Tremendous River—which runs eastward clear to the Sea of Kithai.

But I and my escorts were crossing those rivers far upstream of where they became only four—in the highlands where the rivers began as a multitude of tributary streams. There were so many that they did not all have names, but none was contemptible on that account. Every single stream was a rushing white water which, through the ages, had worn its own individual channel through the mountains, and every single channel was a slab-sided gorge that might have been cleft by the downward slash of some jinni’s giant shimshir sword. The only way along and across those precipitous gashes in the mountains was by way of what the local people proudly called their Pillar Road.

Calling it a road at all was a considerable exaggeration, but it did stand on pillars—or, more accurately, corbels—logs driven and wedged into cracks and crannies in the cliffsides, and planks laid across them, and layers of earth and straw piled on. It could better have been called the Shelf Road. Or even better, the Blind Road, because I traveled most of it with my eyes shut, trusting in the surefootedness and imperturbability of my horse, and hoping it was shod with the never-slip shoes made of the “Marco’s sheep” horn. To open my eyes and look up, down, ahead, behind or sideways made me equally giddy. Glancing upward or downward gave much the same sight: two walls of gray rock converging with distance to a narrow, bright, green-edged crack—up there the sky between two fringes of trees, down yonder the water that looked like a moss-lined brook, but was really a rushing river between two belts of forest. Ahead or behind was the vertiginous view of the Pillar Road shelf that looked too fragile to bear its own weight, never mind a horse and rider, or a train of them. Looking to one side, I would see the cliff that brushed my stirrup and seemed to threaten to give me a sudden shove. Looking the other way, I would see the farther cliff, which appeared to stand so close that I was tempted to reach out and touch it—and to lean was to risk toppling from my saddle and falling forever.

The only thing more dizzying than following the Pillar Road along the cliffsides was the crossing from one side of a gorge to the other, on what the mountain folk, without exaggeration, called the Limp Bridges. Those were made of planks and thick ropes of twisted cane strips, and they swayed in the winds that blew ceaselessly through the mountains, and they swayed worse when a man stepped out onto them, and they swayed even worse when he led his horse out behind him, and during those crossings I think even the horses shut their eyes.

Though Kubilai’s advance riders had made sure that all the mountain inhabitants expected the arrival of me and my escorts, and we got the best hospitality those people could give us, it was not exactly of royal quality. Only occasionally did we come to a place in the mountains flat and habitable enough to support even a meager village of woodcutters’ huts. More often we spent the night in a cliff niche where the road was built wide enough for travelers going in opposite directions to edge past each other. At those places there was a group of rough men stationed, waiting to receive us, having erected a yak-hair tent for us to sleep in, and having brought some meat or killed a mountain sheep or goat to cook for us over an open camp fire.

I well remember the first time we stopped in such a place, when the day was just darkening to dusk. The three mountain men awaiting us made salutations and ko-tou and—since we could not converse; they knew no Mongol, and spoke some tongue which was not even Han—they immediately set about making our evening meal. They built up a good fire, and spitted some cutlets of musk deer over it, and hung a pot of water to heat. I noticed that the men had made the fire of wooden branches—which must have required much labor of clambering up and down the steep ravine sides to collect—but also had a small pile of pieces of zhu-gan cane lying beside it. The dusk had deepened to full darkness by the time the food was ready, and, while two of the men served us, the other tossed one of those bits of cane onto the fire.

The deer meat was better than the usual mountain fare of mutton or goat, but the accompaniments were ghastly. The meat was handed to me in a hunk, for me to hold while I tore at it with my teeth. The only implement provided me was a shallow wooden bowl, into which one of the servers poured hot green cha. But I had taken only a couple of sips before the other server politely took it from me, to add to it. He held a platter of yak butter, all stuck about with hairs and lint and road dust, and grooved by the fingers of those who had dug at it previously, and with his own black fingernails raked off a lump and dropped it into my cha to melt. The dirty yak butter would have been repellent enough, but then he opened a filthy cloth sack and poured into the cha bowl something that looked like sawdust.

“Tsampa,” he said.

When I only peered at the mess with disgust and bewilderment, he demonstrated what was to be done with it. He stuck his grimy fingers into my bowl and worked the sawdust and butter together until it became a paste, then a doughy lump when it had absorbed all the cha in the bowl. Then, before I could move to prevent it, he pinched off a wad of that tepid, dirty dough and poked it into my mouth.

“Tsampa,” he said again, and chewed and swallowed as if to show me how.

I could now taste—apart from the bitter green cha and the rancid, cheesy yak butter—that the apparent sawdust was really barley meal. But I do not know if I would voluntarily have swallowed the wad, except that I was abruptly startled into doing so. The camp fire gave a sudden, tremendous bang!and threw up a constellation of sparks into the darkness—and I gulped my tsampa and leaped to my feet, and so did my two escorts, while the noise echoed and reechoed from all the mountains around. Two things went through my mind in that instant. One was the dreadful thought that one of the charged brass balls had somehow fallen into the fire. The other was a recollection of words once heard: “Expect me when you least expect me.”

But the mountain men were laughing at our surprise, and making gestures to calm us and explain what had happened. They held up one of the pieces of zhu-gan cane and pointed to the fire and jumped about and bared their teeth and growled. They made it clear enough. The mountains were full of tigers and wolves. To keep them off, it was their practice to toss into the camp fire every so often a joint of zhu-gan. The heat evidently made its inner juices seethe until the steam burst the cane apart—quite like a charge of the flaming powder—with that enormous noise. I had no doubt that it would keep predators at bay; it had made me swallow the awful stuff called tsampa.

Later on, I got so I could eat tsampa, never with enjoyment, but at least without violent repugnance. A man’s body requires other nourishment than meat and cha, and barley was the only domestic vegetable grown in those highlands. Tsampa was cheap and easily transportable and sustaining, if nothing else, and could be made a trifle more appetizing by the addition of sugar or salt or vinegar or the fermented bean sauce. I never got as fond of it as were the natives, who, after making the dough at mealtime, would tuck balls of the stuff inside their clothes and wearthe tsampa all night and next day, so it got salted by their sweat, and they would pluck out a bit whenever they felt like having a snack.

I also got better acquainted with the zhu-gan cane. In Khanbalik, I had known it only as a graceful floral subject for painters like the Lady Chao and the Master of the Boneless Colors. But in these regions it was such a staple of life that I believe the people could not have existed without it. The zhu-gan grew wild, everywhere in the lowlands, from the Si-Chuan-Yun-nan border country southward throughout the tropics of Champa—where it was variously named in the various languages: banwu and mambu and other names—and everywhere it was used for many more purposes than frightening off tigers.

The zhu-gan would resemble any ordinary reed or cane, at least when it is young and only as thick as a finger, except that at intervals it has—very like a finger—nodes or knuckles along its length. Those mark little walls inside the cane, which interrupt its tubular length into separate compartments. For some uses—such as being thrown into a fire to burst—a single joint-length of the cane is employed, the wall intact at either end. For other purposes, the walls inside are punched through to make the cane a long tube. When the zhu-gan is no bigger around than a finger, it is easily cut with a knife. As it grows—and a single cane can get as tall and as big around as any tree—it must be laboriously sawed, for then it is almost as rigid as iron. But big or small, the zhu-gan is a beautiful plant, the cane part of it a golden color, the nodes sprouting withes with delicate green leaves at the ends; an immense clump of zhu-gan, all gold and green and catching the sun in its fronds, is a subject worthy of any painter.