Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [125]
MORE THAN ANY other feature of the City of Heaven, King Facfur’s castle epitomized Quinsai’s outsized scale and sophistication, but the landmark had lately fallen into decline, as Marco learned when he made the acquaintance of a “very rich merchant of Quinsai,…who was very old and had been an intimate friend of King Facfur and knew him all his life, and had seen the palace.” The merchant inspired Marco’s imagination with tales of the luxury palace. But having visited it, Marco relates that “the fine pavilions are still as they used to be, but the rooms of the girls are all gone to ruin and nothing else is seen but in traces. In the same way, the wall that encircled the woods and gardens is fallen to the ground and there are no longer either animals or trees.”
With the old merchant’s help, Marco resurrects for his readers “the most beautiful palace where King Facfur lived, whose predecessors had a space of country enclosed that was surrounded for ten miles with very high walls and divided into three parts.” Within the castle, guarded from the eyes of the world, were the king’s personal harem—“a thousand girls whom the king kept for his service”—who coexisted peacefully with the queen of the realm.
The girls of the harem, Marco says, entertained both king and queen with elaborate erotic games involving the animals and lake within the walls of the enclosure: “Sometimes he [the king] went with the queen and some of the girls for recreation about the lake on barges all covered with silk, and also to visit the temples of the idols.”
Later, the frolicking commenced: “The other two parts of the enclosure were laid out with woods, lakes, and most beautiful gardens planted with fruit trees, where were enclosed all sorts of animals, that is, roe-deer, fallow-deer, red-deer, hares, rabbits; and there the king went to enjoy himself with his damsels, some in carriages and some on horseback, and no man went in there. And he made the damsels run with dogs and give chase to these kinds of animals; and after they were tired, they went into the woods that faced one another above the lakes, and leaving the clothes there they came out of them naked and entered the water and set themselves to swim some on one side and some on the other, and the king stayed to watch them with the greatest delight.”
Amid his tale of sensual abandon, Marco conveys a strict warning: “Sometimes he [the king] had food carried into those woods that were thick and dense with very lofty trees, waited on by the damsels. And with this continual dalliance with women he grew up without knowing what arms might be—which in the end brought it about that through his cowardice and incompetence the Great Khan took all the state from him with the greatest shame and disgrace.”
The powerful moral was not lost on Marco, who took it as a cautionary tale for the people of Quinsai, whom he perceived as dangerously prone to self-indulgence. One day, he relates, “a fish was found lying on the dry land across the bed of the river that was something wonderful to see, for it was a hundred paces long, but the bulk by no means corresponded to its length. It was indeed all hairy, and many ate of it, and many of them died.” Marco claims to have seen the head of this giant, poisonous fish on display in a “certain temple of idols”—that is, a Buddhist temple. And the annals confirm the event, recording that a hundred-foot-long whale was indeed stranded in shallows of the Fu-ch’un River near Quinsai in 1282, followed soon after by another cetacean. The annals also show that foragers placed ladders against one of the stranded creatures, climbed onto its back, and butchered it for