CHAPTER FIVE
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place!
THE DELAY at Badakhshan placed the Polo company a full year behind schedule; it was now 1273, they had been away for two years, and their journey east had only begun.
Once Marco recovered, they proceeded along the Silk Road to higher altitudes, surrounded by wild sheep—Ovis ammon. “They go sometimes in one flock four hundred, five hundred, six hundred,” he says. “And many of them are taken, but they never fail.” These gentle creatures later became known as “Marco Polo sheep,” and they were prized by the region’s capable if slightly desperate hunters. “They are very good archers,” he writes of the hunters, “and the greater part of them are dressed in skins of beasts because they have great dearth of other garments of cloth, for woolen garments are either quite impossible to be had there or are exceedingly dear.” For that reason, “the great ladies of this land and the gentle wear cloth.”
Women dressed in this manner caught Marco’s attention, if not his fancy, and he offers a description based on a careful personal inspection: “They wear garments like trousers down to the feet like men such as I shall tell you, and make them of cotton and of very fine silk, with musk inside. And they put much cloth into their trousers. There are some ladies who put quite a hundred ells”—equivalent to three feet, nine inches—“of very fine stuff made of flax and of cotton cloth, wrapped about the body like swathing bands,…and make them pleated all round.”
The fat-bottomed sheep climbing the mountains may have inspired women in the area to exaggerate their physiques. “They do this to show that they have large hips to become beautiful, because in that region their men delight in fat women, and she who appears more stout below the waist seems to them more beautiful,” and not only that, but “more glorious among other women.” Marco’s exploration of the erotic is making only its second appearance here, as he languishes in the aftermath of his illness. He is still timid compared with all that he will later set down.
MARCO SHIFTED HIS gaze from these oddly appealing women to the arduous trail ahead. There was a twelve-day-long trek upriver, past lively villages populated with Muslims, Nestorian Christians, and Buddhists who had come this way on the Silk Road. Eventually the Polo company, with its camels and donkeys, reached another, and lesser, province that Marco called Vocan, which was “subject to the rule of the lord of Badakhshan.” After a brief stopover, the party ascended the steep trail again, “almost always going up through mountains, and one rises so much that the top of those mountains is the highest place, or one of the highest, in the whole world.” For once, Marco did not exaggerate. His party was ascending the Terak Pass, through the Pamir, the traditional dividing line between East and West, heading toward the farthest and wildest western border of China.
In Turkic, pamir indicates high-altitude rolling grasslands. The Pamir highlands were passable only during cool, dry summers. In season, the Pamir offered pleasant, expansive meadows, unlike anything in Western Europe. Trees were a rarity, as were rivers, but runoff from glaciers provided water. The region’s sunlight was harsh and seemingly gray, barely filtered by the thin atmosphere. Simply breathing posed a great hardship for the wayfarers; they were traversing a region that came to be known as “the roof of the world,” fourteen thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by the highest mountain peaks on earth—Mount Everest among them. The extreme altitude’s thin atmosphere made cooking, or even boiling water, inordinately difficult. Marco could not calculate the altitude of the Pamir, but he noticed that “flying birds there are none because of the high place and intense cold, and because they could have nothing to eat there.”
For the Polos’ determined little band, the trek through the Pamir required stamina and patience to venture where not even birds would go. They were not the first to test their strength against these ancient mountain passes. Nomads had traversed this harsh landscape for centuries, and along this trail Kublai Khan’s grandfather, Genghis Khan, once led his Mongol troops on their murderous conquests.
The trek through the Pamir took the Polo company across some of the most extraordinary geologic formations on the planet. The Pamir forms a quadrangle about 150 miles long on each side, marked by snow-capped peaks. The highest mountain ranges in the world radiate from the Pamir: the Hindu Kush extends to the northwest, the Tian Shan—“Celestial Mountains”—system to the northeast, the Karakorum and Himalaya ranges to the southeast.
The region started to emerge about forty million years ago when the Indian subcontinent collided with Eurasia, a notable instance of plate tectonics—the movement, occasionally violent, of the geologic plates that form Earth’s crust, or lithosphere. In the case of the Pamir, the deformation caused by the immense collision spread all the way to the interior of Eurasia, uplifting Tibet, and created a fault near the Mongolian border. (The collision and deformation continue to this day.) For geologists, the Pamir represents an unusual form of horizontal tectonism, in which colliding plates move sideways as well as up and down. In this case, the horizontal movement may have been caused by the plates’ cooling and shrinking over millions of years.
Here, on the roof of the world, the Polo company encountered a plateau, an astonishing Shangri-la created by these geologic forces. Marco’s appreciative portrait of this changeless scene remains accurate today: “When one is in that high place, then he finds a large plain between two mountains in which is very beautiful pasture and a great lake from which runs a very beautiful river, both good and large.” Even more remarkably, “Up there in that plain is the best and fattest pasture of the world that can be found; for a thin horse or ox or any thin beast (let it be as thin as you please) put there to graze grows very fat in ten days.” He writes of “multitudes of wild sheep,” distinguished by enormous horns, “some quite six palms long,” from which shepherds made bowls and other vessels, as well as fencing to pen in other animals. Yet nature was not as peaceful as it seemed in the Pamir. By night, wolves descended from the slopes to “eat up and kill many of those sheep.”
For twelve days the travelers rode through this savage paradise, finding neither “dwelling nor inn, but in the course of the road it is desert and nothing is found there to eat.” They suffered from the rapidly increasing cold and thinning air. Their campfires, starved for oxygen, were dull and stunted, scarcely sufficient to cook their meals.
At the plain’s end, they followed the trail for another forty days through mountain valleys and slopes, their way marked by piles of animal bones left by previous travelers. As before, their isolation was complete: “Not in all these forty days’ marches is there dwelling nor inn, nor even food, but the travelers are obliged to carry that which they need with them.” There was no caravansary to offer security for the lonely travelers, nor even the evanescent companionship of the road.
WHEN MARCO at last encountered humanity in the form of mountain dwellers, their primitive state only increased his apprehensiveness. “They are idolaters, even more unfathomable than Muslims,” he writes, “and very savage, and they live by nothing but the chase of animals.” As evidence of their savagery, they wore only animal skins—they were “a mighty cruel and evil people.” Despite the cold and the altitude, the little Polo company picked up the pace, and hurried past without incident.
THE WORST hardships of the Pamir abated by the time the Polo company reached the thriving oasis town of Khotan, an important stop on the Silk Road, at the edge of the Taklimakan Desert in western China. The region was forbidding in the extreme. The name Taklimakan was said to mean “Desert of Death” or “Place of No Return,” and temperatures varied as much as 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the course of a day. By this point, a bewildered and parched Marco may have thought he was in the middle of nowhere, and in a sense he was correct; Khotan is farther from the ocean than nearly any other place in the world.
Although nominally loyal to Kublai Khan, Khotan had once been a center of Buddhism, and the lingering Buddhist presence here afforded Marco his first serious exposure to the spiritual system and philosophy that at first repelled him, then intrigued him, and finally won his admiration. The ancestors of the inhabitants were Persian or Indic immigrants from the west and Chinese from the east, who had settled in a fertile strip of land along a river flowing north from the Kunlun Mountains. China conquered Khotan in AD 73; it was succeeded soon after by the Kushana empire from the west, and later on by Tibetan forces. Under Tibetan influence, Buddhism arrived from the East via the Silk Road and flourished here, and temples populated by tens of thousands of Buddhist monks abounded until AD 1000, when Islam abruptly dislodged the Buddhists from their ancient seat. Nevertheless, evidence of Buddhism’s profound impact on Khotan was all around, in the form of images of Buddha (“idols,” Marco calls them), and distant monasteries clinging to mountain overhangs.
If Marco had overcome his repugnance to “idolatry” and troubled to familiarize himself with Buddhism, he would have learned that the Buddha taught that life is experienced as suffering, brought about by one’s attachment to oneself and to people and objects, all of which are impermanent, and by the resultant craving, which nothing can satisfy. He would have heard that the Buddha said that all sentient beings, including animals and insects, are caught in a cycle of suffering, or samsara, and the results of their actions, or karma, simply create more attachment and more suffering. He would have heard that this cycle continues even after death, since Buddhism held that living creatures are reborn. He would have been relieved, then, to hear that there was a way to escape from the cycle of suffering and to achieve enlightenment, known as nirvana. Had he looked up to the monasteries in the mountains, he would have seen examples of men and women who had renounced their attachments and become monks and nuns, meditating and studying Buddhist scriptures night and day. A traveler like Marco would not have found this so strange, after all, and might have seen more than a little of himself in the Buddhists’ scheme of things; like them, he had given up his home, comforts, and possessions. Like them, he lived a life of danger and anxiety, of loneliness, of suffering from extreme heat and cold, from thirst, and from deprivation. His life was as empty as the trade route he traveled, his pleasures were fitful and his prospects unknowable, and his goal was distant and seemingly unattainable.
After the deprivations endured while traversing the roof of the world, Marco had learned to appreciate the luxuries that Khotan offered the traveler. The inhabitants, he says, are “noble”—especially in comparison to the odd creatures he had passed in the mountains—and the city itself is “noble,” as was the surrounding region. “It is fertile and it has abundance of all things needful for the life of man,” he says. “And there grows cotton enough, and flax and hemp, and oil, wheat, corn, and wine and the rest is as done rightly in our lands.” But then he adds smugly that the inhabitants “are not men of arms, but mean enough and very cowardly.” This meant that he felt relatively safe in their midst.
Having replenished their supplies in Khotan, Marco and his company, trying to make up for time lost in Badakhshan, set out once again for Kublai Khan’s court.
HEADING EAST, the Polo company faced more than four thousand miles of grassy plains interrupted by occasional mountain ranges. This terrain was known by its Russian name, the Steppe, and it was divided into two parts. The western Steppe extended from the Danube River to the Altai mountain range in Siberia; often described as a sea of grass, it was an area through which rivers and streams flowed freely. The open spaces of the western Steppe enabled caravans and horsemen to travel along the trails and roads that ran its length and breadth.
The eastern Steppe, extending into Mongolia, was drier and harsher. Grass for grazing was far more sparse, and free-flowing streams yielded to infrequent oases. Negotiating the rigors of the eastern Steppe required endurance and indifference to the elements from those who dared to venture into its expanse.
FIVE DAYS after leaving Khotan, the Polo company arrived in the province of Pem, inhabited by Muslims and enriched by a river “running through it where precious stones are found that one calls jasper and chalcedony”—all very interesting to note, but the inviting women of Pem made a much stronger impression on the young traveler: “When a woman has a husband, and it happens that he leaves her to go on a journey, and provided that he must stay away from twenty or thirty days upwards, the woman who stays home, as soon as her husband is set from home to go on a journey, takes another husband till his return.” And the men, on their journeys, took other wives. It was only a matter of time until Marco succumbed to the lure of the lonely women of the open spaces.
WHEREVER HE RAMBLED, people were on the move. In Ciarcian, the Mongols were plundering the region as they had since the days of Genghis Khan. “When it happens that an army of Tartars, as well friends and enemies, passes through the country of Ciarcian, if they are enemies they carry off all their goods, and if they are friends they kill and eat their cattle.” Those men who considered themselves enemies of the Mongols adapted to the onslaught by fleeing with their wives, children, animals, and possessions across the desert sands for two or three days “into other places where they knew that there was pasture to be found and good water.” There they could wait until the army passed. Marco’s description reveals some compassion for the uprooted villagers, but at the same time, their stratagems for survival struck him as pathetic and cowardly. Yet he had not come face to face with the Mongols himself, and could only guess at the terror their ruthlessness inspired.
The Polo company pushed on through five more days of desert, occasionally stopping at oases—some sweet, others “very bad”—until they reached Lop, a name synonymous with the edge of the unknown. An immense, dry, salt-encrusted lake bed covering extreme northwestern China, the wasteland was notorious for its special hazards, which seduced and misled even the most wary travelers.
“LOP IS A great city at the end of the desert, from which one enters into the very great desert which is called the Desert of Lop,” Marco records, noting that Kublai Khan’s rule extended even here. “All things needful for travelers who wish to cross the desert are made ready in this city,” he warns. “I tell you that those who wish to cross the great desert must rest in this town at the least a week to refresh themselves and their beasts. At the end of a week they must take food for a month for themselves and for their beasts, because they take so long to pass across that desert.”
The scale of the desert defied the imagination, but Marco tried to make his European audience, accustomed to a dense, compact landscape, comprehend something of its emptiness, reporting that crossing even the narrowest portion would require a month’s hard riding. Traversing its length was simply beyond human endurance and ingenuity: “Lengthwise it cannot be passed because of the great length of it, for it would be impossible to carry enough food…. One travels for a month of marches without finding any dwelling. It is all barren mountains and plains of sand and valleys, and nothing to eat is found there.” There was sweet water, it was true, “but no water that a sufficiently large company could take, but as much as is needed for quite fifty or a hundred men, but not yet with their beasts.” Fifty struck him as the largest number that could form a caravan, fifty hostages to heat and sandstorms and elusive water supplies. “You must always go a day and a night finding nothing before you find water to drink in this way. Moreover, I tell you that in three places in four one finds bitter and salt and evil water.” No livestock, he reports, nor birds, “because they would find nothing to eat here.”
Marco’s stark characterization of the Desert of Lop was entirely accurate. The region, at an altitude of slightly under three thousand feet, is nearly flat across its length and breadth. Underfoot, a mixture of fine yellow or yellow-gray gravel and clayey sand extends to the horizon in every direction. At times the windstorms the Polos encountered became so powerful that they swept the desert bare of sand, with the wind-borne granules blasting rocks below, and carving furrows as deep as twenty feet, creating a series of undulating dunes hypnotic to the traveler. Marco does not indicate the time of year they made their crossing, but if he and his party ventured into the desert in spring, the desert would have been, in the words of another visitor, “so heavily charged with dust as to be a veritable pall of desolation.” In this moon-scape, daily temperatures fluctuated wildly. Marco endured highs of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit by day and subfreezing temperatures at night.
Amid the desolation of the Desert of Lop, Marco found remarkable beauty and a palpable sense of the supernatural. Like a saint of ancient times, he went into the desert and he beheld visions, especially at night, when the senses are alert and fears multiply. “There dwell many spirits that make for the wayfarers great and wonderful illusions to make them perish,” he says. “For while any company of merchants or others is crossing the desert…, often it happens that they hear spirits malignant in the air, talking in a way that they seem to be their companions, for they call them sometimes by their names, and many times they make them, believing that they are some of them, follow those voices and go out of the right way so they are never reunited to their fellows and found, and news of them is never heard.”
Afraid of being taken for a mere fabulist, Marco emphasizes the veracity of his description: “Again I tell you that not only by night does this appear, but often even by day men hear these voices of spirits, and it often seems to you that you hear many instruments of music sounding in the air, and especially drums more than other instruments, and the clash of weapons.” At other times, the singing sands sounded like a “rush of people in another direction.” Distracted travelers chased after the illusion, hoping to catch up with “the march of the cavalcade,” only to find by day that they were hopelessly lost, tricked by spirits, “and many not knowing of these spirits come to an evil end.”
Travelers who braved this unnerving stretch of the Silk Road developed techniques to defeat the dangerous illusion: “Those who wish to pass that way and cross this desert must take very great care of themselves that they not be separated from their fellows for any reason, and that they go with great caution; they must hang bells on the necks of their horses and animals to hear them continually so that they may not sleep, and may not be able to wander.” Even in daylight precautions proved necessary: “Sometimes by day spirits come in the form of a company to see who has stayed behind and he goes off the way, and then they leave him to go alone in the desert and perish.” At other times, these spirits “put themselves in the form of an army and have come charging toward them, who, believing they were robbers, have taken flight and, having left the highway, no longer knowing how to find the way, for the desert stretches very wide, have perished miserably of hunger.”
To make sure that his readers understand that he is reporting fact, not legend, concerning the many deceptions wrought by the singing sands, Marco repeats, “They are wonderful things to hear and difficult to believe, which these spirits do; but indeed it is as is told, and much more wonderful.”
Although Marco’s account strains credulity, as if it were the result of too much sun and too little water, he was faithfully reporting a frequently observed phenomenon, “Singing Sands,” caused by the action of wind on dunes. The resulting hum has been likened variously to the strumming of a mysterious harp, or booming, or chanting, and has been detected throughout Mongolia; in China, where it was known as “booming sand” and even in Brazil. In the thirteenth century, the Chinese scholar Ma Duanlin said of this treacherous region: “You see nothing in any direction but the sky and the sands, without the slightest trace of a road, and travelers find nothing to guide them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of camels. During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds, sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing, and it has often happened that travelers going aside to see what these sounds may be, have strayed from their course and been entirely lost, for they were the voices of spirits and goblins”—just as Marco Polo describes. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin reported the same phenomenon in his account of the voyage of theBeagle. In the region around Rio de Janeiro could be found a hill known as El Bramador, “The Roarer” or “The Bellower.” “As far as I understood,” he wrote, “the hill was covered by sand, and the noise was produced only when people, by ascending it, put the sand in motion.”
Even today, the Singing Sands shift in the wind, sending out their hypnotic howl.
AT THE NORTHERN EDGE of central China, the Polo company emerged from the perilous Desert of Lop into the remote province of Tangut, known as the Western State. About a century earlier, the region had declared independence from China, and now owed allegiance to the distant Kublai Khan. Marco found evidence of Nestorian Christianity even here, but Buddhism, the official religion of the Tanguts, prevailed. It was, as Marco notes, a place of intense devotion, filled with “many abbeys and monasteries.”
For the first time, Marco took more than passing notice of the Buddhist “idols,” and despite his reflexive attempt to dismiss them, they made a lasting impression. Some images extended “ten paces.” They were fashioned variously of wood, earthenware, stone, or bronze, and, most impressively, they were “all covered with gold and very well worked and wonderfully.” He even found a few good words for the “idolaters”—that is, the Buddhists—who “live more decently than the others, for they keep themselves from…sensuality and other improprieties.” And yet, he notes, “if a woman invites them in love they can lie with her without sin, but if they first invite the woman they reckon it for sin. But I tell you that if they find any man who has lain with a woman unnaturally, they condemn him to death.”
The more Marco considered “idol” worship, the more analogies to Christianity he found: “They make the festivals of their idols at different times as we do of our saints, and they have something like the calendar where the feasts of their idols are arranged on fixed days.”
Entering deeper into the Buddhist ethos, he tried to explain the lunar calendar: “They have a moon calendar just as we have the monthly, and in this way they reckon the time of year. And they have certain moons when all the monks of the idolaters for anything in the world would not kill beasts nor flying birds, nor shed blood, for five consecutive days of the week, or four, or at least three, nor would they eat flesh that was killed in those five days, and they hold them in reverence as we Christians hold in reverence the Friday and the Sabbath, and other vigils.”
Later, he perceived still more similarities between Buddhist and Christian forms of observance. “You may know quite truly that all idols have their proper days dedicated to them, on which days they make solemnities and reverence and great feasts in their names every year, as our saints have in the special days.” Sacred and profane seemed to intermingle, indeed, to be interchangeable. It was all very baffling, and bracing, for the young Venetian.
MARCO’S DESCRIPTION of the size of Buddhist monasteries would leave Europeans in disbelief. Some establishments sheltered two thousand monks, “who serve the idols according to their custom, who dress more decently with more religious garments than all other men do.” The monks “wear the crown of the head shaved and the beard shaved,” he accurately notes, “beyond the fashion of laymen. They make the greatest feasts for their idols with greater singing and with greater light than were ever seen.”
Outside the monastery walls, anarchy reigned. “The lay people can take up to thirty wives,” Marco says. “He holds the first wife for the greatest and best. If he sees that any of his wives is old and is not good and that she does not please him he can well put her away and can take to wife the sister of the wife divorced, and do with her as he likes, and take another, if he wishes. Again, they take cousins for wives, and they are also allowed to take the wife of their father, except their mother, and also the wives of brothers or every other relation.” Pondering this alternative morality, he concludes in disgust, “They live in this way like animals with no law.”
In contrast to this sensual indulgence and anarchy was the life—“so very hard and rough”—led by the sensin, whom Marco calls “men of very great abstinence according to their custom.” They did everything in their power to avoid sensual indulgence in any form; even the food they ate was as bland as possible, “nothing but semolina and bran, that is, the husks that are left from wheat flour,” Polo learned. “They prepare it as we prepare it for swine; for they do take that semolina, that is, bran, and put it in hot water to make it soft and leave it to stay there some time till the whole head of grain is removed from the husk, and then they take it out and eat it washed like this without any substantial taste. And that is their food.” Nor did their self-discipline regarding food end there: “They fast many times a year”—a small loss, considering how restrictive their diet was—“and eat nothing in the world but bran and drink water, and stay much in prayer, so that is a hard life beyond measure.” No flicker of family life warmed this bleak existence of self-denial and spiritual devotion, for the monks “would not take a wife for anything in the world.” Even their clothes, black and blue, made of the “commonest and coarsest sackcloth,” seemed designed to inflict discomfort. As might be expected, they slept only on “very hard and cheap mats.”
“They lead a harder life than any men in the world,” Marco observes, more in despair than admiration.
AFTER CONTEMPLATING these instances of extreme self-denial, Marco considered the most repugnant practice of all: cremation. The custom, so alien to his sensibilities, paradoxically humanized its practitioners in his eyes; he realized that they fervently believed in the soul and in an afterlife. Having made this leap of imaginative identification, he entered into their spiritual life to the extent that he could. He noted the mourners’ absolute dependence on the calculations of astrologers and necromancers, who, he tells us, determined the time of cremation and burial according to the time of birth: “When the necromancer or astrologer has heard it, he makes his divination by diabolical arts and says to his kinsmen when he has done his arts and seen under what constellation, planet, and sign he was born, the day and the hour that the body must be burned.” The process could delay the burial for weeks, even months, during which time the deceased’s family had to keep the body in their home, “waiting for the planets to be propitious to them and not contrary, for they would never make burning till the diviners tell them that it is good to burn.”
To accommodate the astrologer’s—and the planets’—demands, family members constructed a painted coffin of thick boards, “well joined together,” placed the body inside it, and sealed the coffin with pitch and lime, covered it with silk, and fumigated it with camphor and other spices so that “the body does not stink at all to those of the house.” Each day that the body lay in residence, the family set out meals consisting of “bread and wine and flesh to eat and to drink just as if he were alive.” There was no way to rid the house of this demanding guest until the planets permitted; anyone who defied the astrologer’s ruling would “suffer great pain.”
The family lavished care even after the corpse was removed from the house: “The kinsmen of the dead have made a small house of canes or of rods with its porch, covered with the richest cloth of silk and gold according to their power, in the middle of the road. And when the dead is carried before this house so adorned they are stopped and the men of the house place the body on the ground at the foot of the pavilion, and lay wine and flesh enough on the ground before the dead, thinking that the spirit of the dead is somewhat refreshed and receives strength from it, since he must be present to see the body burned.”
Another custom, this one designed to guarantee the deceased’s status in the afterlife, caught Marco’s fancy. “When he is carried to the place where he must be burned,” he says, “his kinsmen have painted images of men and women cut out of sheets of paper”—another technological innovation—“made from the bark of trees, and have the names of the kinsmen written so that their bodies are burnt, and horses and camels and sheep and other animals; and papers likewise in the form of money as large as bezants”—the coin of Byzantium. “And they have all of these things thrown into the fire and burnt with the body, and say that in the other world the dead man will have with him as many slaves and maids and horses and coins, and as many beasts and as many sheep as they have paper ones burnt for love of him that they place before the body, and so he will live there in wealth and honor.”
BY THIS POINT in Marco Polo’s narrative, a subtle but significant shift in tone has taken place, as though Marco had seized the pen from Rustichello’s hand and begun to write down his adventures in his own words, rather than rely on an amanuensis. Until now, the narrator has engaged in a dutiful exercise in the pilgrimage genre. Henceforth, not even Rustichello’s hand would restrain Marco, who sensed a greater purpose and depth to his narrative and his experience—something more epic, comprehensive, and nuanced, on the order of Herodotus’s Histories, a compendium of vanished civilizations and fallen empires. Gradually, the Travels opened onto wider vistas in space and time suggested by the exhilarating landscapes spreading before him, as well as their enticing inhabitants.
The longer Marco spent among the people of Tangut, the more he cast off his shyness and prudery, and spoke freely about their lives, which in turn revealed his own sexual awakening. As his narrative continued, a new Marco Polo gradually emerged; he was less pious and self-effacing, and more eager to learn about and, by implication, participate in the unfamiliar but beguiling world all around him.
THE WOMEN of Kamul (now called Hami), which adjoined the province of Tangut, finally brought Marco out of himself. The people of the region as a whole struck him as wonderfully likeable children, freely sharing food and drink with “the wayfarers who pass that way.” The men, “greatly given to amusement,” passed their days in playing instruments and singing, in reading and writing, and in participating in “great bodily enjoyment,” especially with travelers such as the Polos. But it was the women who utterly captivated Marco.
“These people have such a custom,” he confides. “If a stranger comes to his house to lodge, [a man] is too much delighted at it, and receives him with great joy, and labors to do everything to please,” instructing his “daughters, sisters, and other relations to do all that the stranger wishes,” even to the point of leaving his house for several days while “the stranger stays with his wife in the house and does as he likes and lies with her in a bed just as if she were his wife, and they continue in great enjoyment. All the men of this city and province are thus cuckolded by their wives; but they are not the least ashamed of it. And the women are beautiful and vivacious and always ready to oblige.” And one more thing can be assumed: they were ready to oblige young Marco Polo, just coming into manhood.
Yes, he admits, it could be said that this licentious behavior dishonored the women and men of Kamul, “but I tell you that because of the general custom which is in all that province; and is very pleasing to their idols when they give so good a reception to wayfarers in need of rest.” Even more remarkable, the family unit remained intact: “All the women are very fair and gay and very wanton and most obedient to their husbands’ order, and greatly enjoy this custom.”
Although his description seems more fanciful than real, more ironic parable than reliable reportage, Marco is discussing a well-established custom of the region and an exception to “village endogamy,” in which the people of the same community intermarry to preserve assets and bloodlines. Endogamy brings with it the hazard of incest and birth defects. Exogamy, or marriage outside the clan, refreshes a depleted gene pool. If the outsiders were nomadic, as Marco suggests, the replenishing of the gene pool would be accomplished without challenging the existing order. Lonely wayfarers like him would deposit their seed and move on.
THERE WERE, however, repercussions from the world beyond the isolated hamlets through which Marco and the other travelers were passing. The reach of the bloodthirsty Mongols, about whom Marco had heard dire reports, extended even to this remote mountain region. He repeats a disturbing account of the behavior of the area’s former ruler, Möngke Khan, concerning exogamy, which in this part of the world took the form of inviting strangers to bed the wives of others.
As Marco reminds his readers, Möngke Khan, one of the grandchildren of Genghis Khan, had come to power in 1250, a little more than twenty years before Marco entered the lands controlled by the Mongols. During his brief reign, Möngke attempted to establish a reliable postal system, essential for the administration of a great empire. He restrained the military campaigns that had once wreaked havoc across thousands of miles of Steppe and mountainous regions alike. And he respected local customs. In the emerging Mongol society, women had more independence than their Western and Islamic counterparts. They served in the military, remaining hidden during combat but joining the fight if an emergency made that necessary. Under Möngke, all worshipped as they chose, and variations of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity flourished.
But the khan’s tolerance did not extend to the women of Kamul. The women’s lustful behavior occasioned opprobrium rather than the incredulity and mirth that Marco displayed. Once Möngke learned of it, he levied “great penalties to prevent it.” Wayfarers such as the Polos would have to stay in “public lodgings,” not private homes, to prevent the “shaming” of the householders’ wives.
Möngke had his way for three years, although the inhabitants of Kamul remained resentful. Matters worsened when their crops failed and sickness visited one household after another—misfortunes they took to mean they had to restore their customs if prosperity and health were to return. “They sent their ambassadors,” Marco reports, “who took a great and beautiful present and carry it to Möngke and pray him that so great a wrong with so great loss to them, and danger, should not be done.”
Möngke “joyfully” received the ambassadors of Kamul; he listened carefully to their plea and even appeared sympathetic to their plight. And then the khan spoke: “For my part I have done my duty; but since you wish your shame and contempt so much, then you may have it. Go and live according to your customs, and make your wives charitable gifts to travelers.” With that, Marco says, “he revoked the order.”
The ambassadors returned to Kamul “with the greatest joy of the whole people, and from that time till now they have always kept up and still keep up that custom.”
MARCO TOOK PAINS to describe Möngke Khan as a wise and compassionate ruler, but in the historical record the khan emerges as an emotional and brutal martinet.
On one occasion, Möngke decided to punish seventy officers who he believed had plotted against him. The method of execution was traditionally Mongol: forcing stones into their mouths. In 1252, he sat in judgment on another group of subversives. One princess in particular, Ogul Gaimish, incurred his wrath when she refused to declare her loyalty to him. He ordered her hands and legs to be sewn up in a leather bag. He then stripped her naked to cross-examine her while she protested that no man except for a king had ever seen her in that condition. He declared both Ogul Gaimish and her mother guilty of trying to kill him by means of magic spells. As soon as he had pronounced his judgment, he ordered the two women rolled up in rugs and drowned. He also directed that Ogul Gaimish’s two chief counselors be put to death.
SIXTEEN DAYS’ march from Kamul across a “little desert,” the Polo company came upon a natural wonder in the form of asbestos, which, like so much else in China, was scarcely known in the West. Nowadays, airborne asbestos fibers are notorious for their association with serious respiratory illness, including cancer, but in Marco’s day, fabrics woven of asbestos were held in high regard as the equal of gold and fit for the burial shrouds of Eastern kings. Following the convention of the era, Marco called the substance “salamander,” after the tiny, lizard-like animal that was supposedly impervious to fire. He immediately grasped the military implications of a fireproof material.
“In this mountain is found a good vein from which salamander is made that cannot be burnt if it is thrown into the fire,” he reports. The salamander is neither beast nor serpent, he explains, and “it is not true that those clothes are of the hair of an animal that lives in fire, as they say in our country.”
Marco tries to dispel the tenacious European belief that the salamander cloth had such a fantastic origin, explaining that he had become acquainted with a Turkish merchant named Çulficar, “who was very knowing in my judgment and trustworthy,” and who had for three years supervised production of salamander—or asbestos—from these mountainside mines for the khan himself. To demonstrate just how far asbestos was from being the byproduct of a supernatural creature, Marco furnishes a careful description of its manufacture. “When one has dug from the mountains some of that vein,” he writes, “it is twisted together and makes thread like wool. And therefore when one has this vein he has it dried in the sun, and then when it is dry has it pounded in a great copper mortar,” washed with water, “and only that thread like wool of which I told you stays on top of the water, and all the earth clinging there, which is worthless, falls off.” The resulting thread was spun into cloth and towels. “When the towels are made I tell you that they are not at all white, and they are brown when they are taken from the loom. But when they wish to make them white they put them in the fire and leave them to stay there a space of an hour, and when it is taken out the towel becomes very white, like snow.”
Expecting to be disbelieved, he insists, “I have seen it with my eyes put into the fire and come back very white.” No fire-dwelling serpent is involved, and all the popular tales to that effect are nothing but “lies and fables.” With such statements, Marco demonstrates that he could demolish old myths as readily as he generated new ones.
IN CAMPçIO, yet another ill-defined stop along the Silk Road, the Polo company rested once again. The usually expansive Marco furnishes only this cryptic note concerning the extended interlude: “Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco stayed about one year in this city for their business, which is not worth mentioning.”
By the time they mounted their camels and donkeys again, it was 1274, according to the Christian calendar. Marco was turning twenty. The Polos had been traveling the Sericulture Superhighway for three years, and they were still more than two thousand miles from their destination, the court of Kublai Khan.