Nick had never been to Istanbul. His journey around the world had begun in Britain, then taken him to America, then South America. In Brazil, he boarded a Dutch ship, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed to India. From there, he traveled through Burma, Siam, Southeast Asia, and Japan, making several transfers along the way before finally reaching China. In other words, he had never visited a Mediterranean city.
Or perhaps he had. He had been very young then, when his father took the whole family on a trip to Italy. That was when he fell in love with travel.
Great political ambitions did not give people a broad perspective. Commercial interests might spur people to take risks, but people were too busy with business to spare attention for anything else.
In all of East Zhejiang, only Ningbo had a mosque. Located beside Tianyi Pavilion, it was called Moon Lake Mosque. It had been built during the Kangxi era and had now fallen somewhat into disrepair.
The provincial graduate knew friends in Beijing who might be able to help, but he advised Nick to divide the book into several parts. That way, no one would know all the secrets contained within it.
Nick felt the provincial graduate was being needlessly cautious. The old man's story had been like tales of fox immortals and The Painted Skin—ghost stories and supernatural tales. Others might simply take it for a storybook.
Still, he followed the provincial graduate's advice. After copying out the entire book, he scrambled the order, divided it into several portions, placed them in envelopes, and had official messengers deliver them to Beijing.
If Chinese had evolved from pictographs and required analogy to understand the abstract concepts it conveyed, then Turkish was alphabetic, while Arabic belonged to the Semitic