The Lost Book of Wonders

by Chad Brecher

  “Maybe he’s the monk Polo gave the map to.” Jonas tried to pull the laptop away from Alex. Alex gripped it tightly and heaved it from the man’s grip.

  “Unlikely. Fra. Mauro lived over one hundred years after the death of Marco Polo.”

  The room descended into silence. Clay huffed at being frustrated by another impasse. Nothing is easy with Polo, he thought.

  “Alex, why don’t we go to the Monastery of San Michele?” Ellie asked. “We know from Marco’s fourth book that the monk who acquired the map came from that monastery. There must be records, archives in the monastery, that may shed light on the members of the sect who may have been in the East at the time of Polo. It may take a lot of digging but it could lead to something.”

  “The only thing it would probably lead to is a dead end,” Alex replied.

  “That’s a bit harsh.” Ellie was taken aback.

  “Literally, a dead end. The monastery doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, the Island of San Michele often goes by a different name now — Cemetery Island. When Napoleon’s forces conquered Venice, he ordered that dead bodies from Venice be buried on the Island of San Michele. There’s not much more there than graves.”

  Ellie reached out and swung the laptop monitor shut with a snap. “Well, I can tell when we’ve hit a wall. But, if we’re looking for a map, I know just the right person to help us out and the good news is, she’s in London.”

  “I’m a bit wary of involving, how should I put it, another third party into this search. Bertrand Foucault was such a disappointment,” Clay protested.

  “Maryanne Hunter is no Bertrand Foucault. I can vouch for her discreetness and if I must be honest, I trust her more than I trust you.”

  “Ah, at least you’re honest.” Clay smiled.

  Through the curtains of the window in the study, Alex could see the driver standing beside the Rolls Royce. Jonas lingered by the side of the car, as Ellie slid into the back seat.

  “Here’s a little gift,” Clay said.

  Alex glanced over his shoulder and could see Clay standing by the door holding a brown leather satchel.

  “It was my father’s from the second World War. He was an intelligence officer for the U.S. Army. As a child I used to take it with me to school and brag to the other kids that my father used it to transport secret papers behind enemy lines. I’m not sure if it was close to being true but it was always greeted by awe by my peers. Well, anyway. We’ve lost your old bag, so here’s a new one. It’s the least I can do.”

  Alex reached out and accepted the satchel. The bag was constructed out of brown leather that was weathered and faded. Two sturdy straps were attached with nickel buckles to the bag.

  “And one thing more,” Clay muttered and walked over to the desk. He bent down and opened the lowest drawer and removed a transparent bag. Clay retrieved the leather bound book of The Description of the World and slid it into the bag. He ran his fingers across the top of the bag and sealed it. He clicked a button on the end of the bag. A sucking noise was emitted by a miniaturized device fastened to the bag. Alex watched as the air within bag was quickly evacuated, leaving the transparent coat to tightly hug the book.

  “It’s an archival storage bag. It’s guaranteed to protect what’s inside from the outside elements. If we are going to be adventuring, we do need to protect Polo’s original text.”

  Clay held up the book in its casing and brought it to Alex. Alex opened his bag and allowed Clay to place the book into it.

  “Thanks,” Alex said as he slipped the straps over his shoulder. He adjusted the buckles until the bag hung comfortably against his flank.

  The beep of a horn caused Clay to push aside the curtains and peer outside. He could see Jonas leaning into the driver’s side of the car as he honked the horn.

  Clay turned back and smiled at Alex.

  “It sounds like we are being summoned. Jonas can be so impatient.”

  61

  “Eleanor, it is so good to see you.” The gray-haired woman rose from her desk and warmly embraced Ellie. She broke off the hug and backed Ellie slightly away, still gripping her hands tightly. The woman studied Ellie and smiled. “Let me just look at you. I can see your father in you.”

  Ellie blushed and hugged the woman a second time. She had not been in Maryanne Hunter’s office at the Royal Society of Cartography since she was a child, but nothing had seemed to change, down to the African mask adorning the wall to the black-and-white photo of a younger Maryanne donning a parka at a base station at the foot of Mount Everest. The bookcases along the walls were filled to the brim with leather-bound volumes, and cylinders containing maps were piled high in the corners of the room. Ellie motioned to her three colleagues who had followed her into the office and introduced each in turn.

  “Maryanne, I would be lying to you if I told you I’ve come here on a social visit. The truth is that I…we need your help…and your discretion.”

  The elderly woman seemed initially surprised, but responded with a firm nod. “Yes, of course, dear. Anything for you. I do hope you are not in any trouble,” she said, glancing suspiciously at Jonas and then back at Ellie. Ellie doubted very much that Maryanne believed for a second that Jonas was a Yale doctoral candidate, but she did not question Ellie’s assertion.

  Ellie tried to deliver a comforting smile. “No trouble at all, really. We are, how shall I put it, in an academic bind of sorts. I think that if anyone can help us, it is you.

  “As you know, it is such binds that I love to unravel. But before we begin, tea anyone?”

  62

  Solomon Haasbroek leaned over Martin’s shoulder as he typed upon the keyboard. A long list of numbers ran across the screen. The muscles in his neck felt tense. His men were beginning to become distracted as their prey failed to resurface. Inaction is debilitating for a military unit, he thought as he reminisced on prior failed missions. Just when he was beginning to succumb to despair himself…a break. These amateurs were getting sloppy.

  Martin smiled and pointed at the screen. “There it is commander. Someone recently accessed Stone’s museum account and logged in under his name to this journal site.”

  Solomon bent down and examined the screen.

  “What was he looking at?”

  Martin clicked several more keys and brought up an article on Fra. Mauro from an academic journal.

  “This.”

  “Good. Let’s see if our patron has anything to say about this.” Solomon gave Martin a firm slap on the back.

  63

  Maryanne Hunter listened silently as Ellie explained that they were searching for a map that Marco Polo may have given to a Camaldolese monk during his travels to the East. Ellie had intentionally left out how they had come to acquire the knowledge of the existence of such a map. She was grateful that Maryanne sensed that this subject was off limits and did not press her for more information.

  “Well, that is an interesting request…a very interesting request indeed.” The elderly woman’s hands shook slightly as she brought a porcelain teacup to her lips and took a dainty sip. “Marco Polo never produced a map...” She placed the cup down on the saucer with a clang.

  Ellie could hear Clay suck in air through his pursed lips with disappointment. Maryanne gave a mischievous smile.

  “…that is, unless you believe in the legends.”

  “What legends?” Ellie inched her chair closer to Maryanne. The woman looked at each of her guests and nearly whispered to her audience like an elementary school teacher reading a ghost story aloud.

  “You’ll love this. Gather around. One of the greatest periods of cartography coincided with what is today known as the ‘Age of Exploration.’ It was a time of great curiosity in which the world beyond the Western boundaries appeared to be a vast and empty canvas — a tabula rasa waiting to be inked in once and for all. We, of course, know that the world outside the West was always there after all. It didn’t necessarily need to be discovered…it’s all a bit ethnocentric o
f us in the West to use the term ‘discover.’” Maryanne paused as if lost in her own thought and smiled with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to ignore some of the ranting of an old-fashioned liberal. During that time, explorers probed the coastlines and sketched out the promontories and gulfs, providing the pieces of the larger jigsaw puzzle. The ‘Age of Exploration’ was a dynamic time and owed a lot to the accomplishments of Marco Polo.

  “Polo, you see, was a true pioneer. His travels were primarily overland, fraught with danger from man and nature. His writings about the East helped fill in what was between the lines. One wonders whether Christopher Columbus would have ever contemplated sailing to China without the magical work of Marco Polo. We know today that Columbus prized more than anything his well-worn copy of Polo’s Description of the World.

  “In the world of cartography, however, Marco Polo is somewhat of an enigma — a frustrating mystery to those like me who study the history of map-making. He is one of the greatest travelers in history, yet there is no map of his voyages, nothing to hold in one’s hand, unroll, and say ‘this here is the world as Marco Polo saw it.’ He traveled through unfamiliar lands and undoubtedly used maps to navigate the terrain and yet none have survived to this day.”

  “What are these legends you speak of?” Ellie probed.

  Maryanne smiled and shook her head slightly. “That curiosity…so much like your dear father. I said that Marco Polo never produced a map. That is unless you believe Ramusio’s accounts, and unfortunately few have throughout history.”

  “Who’s Ramusio?” Ellie asked the question on everyone’s mind.

  “John Baptist Ramusio. He was the first person to serve as the unofficial biographer of Marco Polo. Mind you, he wrote approximately two centuries after the death of Polo. Facts have a tendency of being altered or lost entirely after such a long gap in time. Thus, much of the information provided in his biography of Marco Polo is circumspect, felt to be more fiction than fact. He has been discredited by a fair number of historians through the years. But Eleanor, as you know, I have a tendency to root for the underdog and have found it hard to completely dismiss Ramusio.

  “One of the things Ramusio wrote about was the legacy of Marco Polo. He wrote about the popularity of The Description of the World in Italy after Polo’s death and how the book was chained to Rialto Bridge in Venice so that the general populace could read from it. He also wrote about an interesting connection of Marco Polo to medieval cartography.”

  Maryanne rose form her chair and walked over to an old, gray metal file cabinet pushed against the wall. With a screech, she pulled out the top drawer and slipped on the glasses that were dangling from her neck. The four watched with interest as Maryanne’s head nearly disappeared into the drawer as she flipped through the files as if playing an ancient instrument. She would intermittently pause at a file and peer inside before moving on. After searching for several minutes, they could hear her utter ‘bloody good’ and pull a folder from the drawer. Maryanne returned to the desk and allowed the file to flip open, revealing a yellowed paper with faded black print from an old typewriter.

  “This is an excerpt from Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi:

  It remains for me to repeat certain things regarding this book that I heard repeatedly when young from the very learned and reverend Don Paolo Orlandino of Florence, a very good friend of mine and a fine cosmographer, who was Prior of the Camoldese monastery of Santo Michele on Murano near Venice and told me that he had heard these things from other friars in his monastery. And this regards how that fine illuminated world map on parchment, which can still be seen in a large cabinet alongside the choir of their monastery, was by one of the brothers of the monastery, who took great delight in the study of cosmography, diligently drawn and copied from a most beautiful and very old nautical map and a world map that had been brought from Cathay by the most honourable Messer Marco Polo and his father…it is clear that the said world map was undoubtedly drawn from that of Messer Marco Polo…

  “The Fra. Mauro map?” Alex asked. “Are you saying that Fra. Mauro copied a map from Marco Polo?”

  “I’m lost,” Jonas protested.

  Maryanne delicately slipped the yellowed paper back into the folder, closed it, and pushed it gently aside.

  “Fra. Mauro is arguably one of the most celebrated and influential medieval cartographers. His map of the world is a work of art. We know that he was a bit of a recluse, rarely leaving the walls of the monastery of San Michele. He was also a ravenous collector of information on the outside world — he was quite a character. Mauro was an avid reader of travel tales. He also had a passion for collecting maps, particularly those of sailors searching for routes to the East. He ultimately became a very accomplished cartographer — this without ever truly traveling himself. I have always felt that Fra. Mauro was a lost soul born far before his time. What he would have done with the internet!

  “Anyhow, in the early to mid-fifteenth century, King Alfonso V of Portugal commissioned Mauro to create a mappe mundi. The map was ultimately completed in 1459 but was destroyed before it could reach its destination. He was asked to create a second one but unfortunately died before he could complete it.

  Alex nearly stood up. “Could Polo’s map have been incorporated into Fra. Mauro’s map?”

  Maryanne shrugged. “We know that the monastery’s library had quite a collection of maps collected through the ages. It would be truly divine if it was still standing.”

  “How is this going to help us, man,” Clay moaned. “The first map was destroyed and the second wasn’t completed.”

  “Oh, I never said the map wasn’t completed. I said that Fra. Mauro never completed it. It was indeed finished. It just happened to be finished by another mapmaker.”

  “Who was this map-maker?” Ellie asked.

  “His name was Andrea Bianco.”

  “Who?” Alex prompted with raised eyebrows.

  “Andrea Bianco, a quite accomplished cartographer in his own right. Unlike Mauro he was a seasoned traveler, a Venetian sailor. He also had long familial ties to the monastery at San Michele that went back to the beginning of the order. I think I have an image of one of his works…” Maryanne disappeared beneath her desk. They could hear shuffling and the sound of a box moving against the hardwood floor. Suddenly they could see an old slide projector levitate into the air above the desk like a feat of legerdemain, held aloft by unseen hands. With a thud the projector was deposited onto the desk. Maryanne’s head popped up, her gray hair in disarray. “…right here.” She unzipped a case containing pages of slides housed in small plastic sleeves. They watched as she flipped on the slide projector. The machine shot out an antique yellow beam against the far wall, exposing a truly alarming amount of dust floating in her office. Jonas found himself reflexively coughing at the sight.

  “Let’s see…” Maryanne’s fingers marched across the sleeves like the legs of a spider before finally stopping. She brought the sleeve close to her eyes so she could make out the miniscule writing on the edge of the slide’s cardboard frame. “Oh, here it is! You’ll have to excuse the slides. I can be a bit old-fashioned and set in my ways. The students these days don’t know from slides. Everything is computers, computers.” The fan clicked on and Maryanne raised her voice to battle the noise from the machine. She rose to her feet and approached the projected image upon the wall.

  “This is a mappe mundi — a world map — created by Andrea Bianco from 1436.”

  The image was of a large circle of water. In the center was an irregularly shaped land mass with several waterways carved into the land like jagged cracks.

  “It’s relatively primitive when compared to the more elaborate Fra. Mauro map, but it’s got a lot of the basic elements.” Maryanne pointed to various portions of the map. “In this map, the Eastern world is positioned at the top of the map. In the upper left is Asia. The bottom left is Europe. To the right is Africa. Jerusalem is in the center. It’s got many Biblica
l references, as was common in medieval times.” She pointed to an irregular promontory at the top left of the landmass where a castle was etched in. “This is the Land of Gog and Magog. Separating the Land of Gog and Magog from the rest of the world is Alexander’s Wall.” Her fingers drifted to a peninsula extending nearly straight up from the top of the landmass. “No depiction of the Eastern World would be complete without an image of the Earthly Paradise with Adam and Eve, the Tree of Life, and the four rivers flowing from it.”

  Ellie squinted and could see two naked forms standing beside a tree. Next to the Earthly Paradise was a primitive sketch of a building.

  “What’s that next to the Garden of Eden?” Ellie asked.

  “What’s that, dear?”

  Ellie rose and pointed to the structure. Her finger cast a dark shadow across the image.

  “Oh that! That is an image of the Hospice of Saint Macarius. He was a monk who was warned by an angel at sword-point that the Garden of Eden was inaccessible to man. It has been taken by many to be Bianco’s warning that the Earthly Paradise was off limits to mankind.”

  Maryanne ejected the slide and placed it atop the projector. She removed a second slide from a sleeve and slipped it into the projector. Another map was projected onto the wall. Like the Bianco map, the world was depicted as a circle of water. There was an elaborate landmass of linked continents occupying much of the world. Waterways, lakes, and seas dotted the landmasses while gulfs and bays created jagged coastlines. Extensive notations filled the map, and images of castles and cities were painted upon the landmasses.

  “Now this is the Fra. Mauro map. It’s significantly more complex and elaborate. Unlike Bianco’s earlier map, the Eastern World is not at the top of the map but is at the bottom of the map, not unlike Arabic maps. It has China, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. There are annotations throughout the map that give a brief description of various locales throughout the world. It’s like a map-meets-book and as such one can see the fingerprint of Marco Polo on it.”