Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  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 the Beagle. 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.