The Silk Road is a bundle of trade routes, “currents that pass near the network of oases”, knotted at Samarkand and running from Jotenim to the Mediterranean. Transformed Drow weave with it “the spider web that joins the worlds”.
| Type | Trade routes |
| Spanish entry | Ruta de la Seda |
Route
Its length is given as 5,000, 6,000 and 10,000 km; it is counted in days of travel, and “all of Mongolia must be crossed”. Its oases are knotted at Samarkand, an intermediate point. The Gobi and the Taklamakan lie along it; it crosses the Himalaya and links mountains, mountain villages and steppe, so trade and kinship travel together: “I do the silk routes, yes, I visit the family.” Jotenim lies “at the end of a kind of silk road”.
Goods
Silk comes from the mulberry tree, where the worm is raised. Abaddon “dresses in silks, perhaps brought from afar”. The route carries silk, “but it is not only silk”.
Rules
- Distance: no one travels it in one stretch; survival in the deserts depends on the oases.
- Intermediation: Muslims stand between producer and Mediterranean. “The only Christians who have any of it, because they dealt with the Muslims, are the Venetians.” At the Mediterranean end, permits replace oases.
- Contract: access is awarded. “There is a very strong trading place that has just been vacated… Demand for a place where one can get the silk road.” These contracts set Mediterranean trade profits.
The web between worlds
“They make the spider web that joins the worlds, with the Silk Road”: the route connects planes as well as regions, and some of its threads, it is said, do not touch land.
Conflicting accounts
A sea itinerary appears in the same records: Genoa, Sicily, open sea with coastal stops, the Holy Land, “not direct”. It is read as the Silk Road’s Mediterranean leg, its sea alternative, or an unrelated route.
Open questions
- Where the eastern end begins, who produces the silk, where the mulberries grow.
- What else the route carries.
- No prices are recorded: silk, a place on the route, caravans, intermediaries.
- Where the vacated trading place is, and how its contract is awarded.
- The caravans’ animals, size and escorts.
- How the web joins the worlds, and Jotenim’s role.