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living alone had brought me any more fulfillment. I answered that the discontented were the least capable of living with only themselves, since the same goad that drove them to isolation would spoil their solitude as well. The true traveler left not to renounce but to seek. And while to be given a cold bath was not a merit in itself, to take one voluntarily might be.
    A month later my mother wrote that my sister had accepted the Count’s proposal, and that Vera was sorrowful she would not be able to realize her dream of a wedding in England. My mother’s tone was brisk. For the first time she referred to the Count as Mario. My sister herself wrote that she hoped to become a good friend to him, but also that she felt she’d wasted years in just learning how to live, knowledge that now was going to be locked away. She noted, apropos of another breakdown, that she was so wretched it pleased her to make everyone else wretched as well. And that what attractiveness she ever possessed had deserted her, and that I was now the beautiful one. And I’m disconcerted still by the potency of the thrill I experienced at my escape, amid all of my misery on her behalf. She wrote that our mother had taken her to Venice on holiday, and I read and reread the letter and castigated myself during my circumnavigations of the city, because this was how competitive I could be: once, at the age of eight, when my father had beaten me at chess, I became so enraged that I buried his white queen in the garden.
    The descent to the valley was hair-raising. It was as if the entire range on which we’d been perched was a giant breaking wave, and having ascended the gentle backslope, we next had to negotiate down the much steeper face. We made camp that night at its base and then for five days traversed untracked and seared reaches ofred, hardened earth. This country Ismail believed to be inhabited by heretics capable of eating, or at least sitting in, fire. He mentioned with some concern that he didn’t think they were Moslem at all.
    On the sixth day we encountered, just as Polo’s account recorded, a stepped and crooked valley rising to our left. The path of its dried riverbed the Italian called the Track of Thieves. As it narrowed, its walls radiated heat. We could feel our elevation. In the winter, Ismail speculated, a bitter wind must scour out this funnel. Aziz responded from ahead that winters in his village were so cold that even the wolves stayed home.
    Eventually we reached the willows and sanjid trees of the Badasht oasis, smaller than Polo described it, and had our bread and raisins by a stream while white-and-black magpies stalked to and fro before us. On either side the cliffs were so high we were untouched by the sun. When Ismail smeared his cheese on his lips as a kind of balm, I found myself longing for the minor relief of some mealtime companionship that didn’t involve spitting or mashing food with one’s fingers.
    We were joined in the late afternoon by a shepherd with crossed eyes and his two sons. They afforded us the standard greeting, polite without effusion, and for a time we sat in a circle in silence that in the East is good manners. Upon seeing the whiteness of my arms they pulled up their own sleeves in order to demonstrate the contrast. Finally the shepherd informed Ismail that they had never seen a European woman. Or man. They seemed pleased with us for having been brave enough to come among them.
    They laid out their meal before them and shared what they had with great hospitality. This meant less for them, and when I partook at their insistence, the father looked off downstream with a comfortable kind of sadness and the smaller boy’s eyes followed every mouthful I took.
    While the boys filled the family goatskin with water and Aziz gathered straw for the mules, the shepherd asked Ismail to explain my presence, glancing over every so often to see if my appearancecorroborated the outlandish