Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [105]
Although Marco participated eagerly in many local customs, there is no indication that he submitted to this ordeal.
VENTURING DEEPER into the jungle, toward what is now Vietnam, Marco found himself among tribes whose “valiant men of arms” wore only skimpy loincloths made from the bark of trees. The region was so alien that the prevalence of paper currency bearing the seal of the Great Khan came as a reassuring reminder to Marco that he was still in the Mongol Empire, and still enjoying the protection of his paiza.
Nothing else offered Marco much comfort in a land where lions were, rarely seen but often heard. It was so dangerous, he says, that no man could dare to sleep at night outside the house “for fear of them, for the lions would eat him immediately.” The lions were so rapacious that merchants (like Marco) were forced to sleep in simple craft on the river, and even then their safety could not be guaranteed, for if they were not far enough from shore, “the lions go to them, jumping into the water and swimming up to the boat.” Once there, “they take a man from it by force and go their way and eat him.” To prevent this horror, the merchants made every effort to “anchor in the middle of the river, which is very broad.”
To defend themselves against lion attacks, Marco explains, the merchants formed a symbiotic partnership with fierce “dogs”—actually wolves—“with the courage and strength to go and attack the lions.” The “dogs” fought in pairs, and they offered serious protection against the king of the jungle. Marco says that a man alone on horseback, armed with a bow and arrow, and with two such “dogs,” could kill a lion: “When it happens that they find a great lion, the dogs, which are brave and strong, as soon as they see the lion, run upon him very bravely, encouraged by the man, one in front and the other behind. And the lion turns toward the dogs, but the dogs are trained so well to protect themselves and so agile that the lion does not touch them; and the lion looks at the men and not the dogs. And so the lion goes flying. But the dogs, as soon as they see that the lion is going off, run behind him barking and howling, and bite him in the legs or in the tail, and the lion turns very fiercely and would kill them, but cannot catch them, because the dogs know well how to protect themselves…. The lion is much frightened by the great noise that the dogs make, and then he sets himself on the road, escaping the noise of the dogs, to go into some thicket, or to find some thick tree against which he can lean his back, to show his face to the dogs so that they cannot worry him from behind…. He goes off step by step—not by any means would herun—because the lion is not held by fear, so great is his pride and the extent of his spirit. While the lion is going off in this way by degrees, the dogs go biting him all the time behind, and the man with the bow shoots at him. When he feels himself bitten, the lion turns this way and that towards the dogs, but the dogs being able to draw back, the lion returns to pass on his way. When one sees this, he lays hand to his boy (for they are very good archers) and gives him some arrows, both one and two and more and so many that the lion is wounded with arrows and weakened by loss of blood that he falls dead before finding a refuge…. [Lions] cannot defend themselves against a man on horseback who has two good dogs.”
IT CAME as a relief to the wayfaring Marco to turn from the strain of lion hunting to the mechanics of harvesting salt, his stock-in-trade