Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [132]
Another day passed, and the swells reached nine feet in height.
Three days after the telltale swells began to appear on the ocean’s surface, the first obvious signs of an approaching storm could be seen. As the swells increased in size and velocity, cirrus clouds gradually filled the sky. The wind, thus far calm and unremarkable, picked up slightly. An experienced sailor would have known that a typhoon was approaching and taken evasive measures, but the Mongols had no plan for responding to the warning signs, if they even noticed them. Within hours, the wind was driving the swells at an even greater rate, and the sky had darkened perceptibly. Whitecaps proliferated, as did streaks of foam on the water’s churning surface. The wind was now thirty or forty knots strong; merely standing in the open was difficult. The clouds sank lower and darkened as the wind surpassed sixty knots, sending branches and loose objects flying and signaling the arrival of a full-blown typhoon. Every wave that crashed into the shore carried unusual force and destroyed all barriers to its progress. Low-lying land began to flood. Despite the dire conditions, the storm had yet to reach the peak of its violence.
Nearly four days after the first swells appeared, the wind speed approached a hundred miles an hour—more than eighty knots—and relentless rain formed stinging horizontal needles. Surging seas submerged high-tide marks on land. Not a soul could stand outdoors unassisted. Wind uprooted trees and bushes and hurled them through the air. At sea, the wind sliced off the tops of waves, and a white spray covered the water’s boiling surface. As the eye of the storm approached, the horizontal sheets of rain became even heavier. Flooding increased, and the wind exceeded ninety knots. Along the shore, fifteen-foot-high waves crashed against the rocks. When the eye arrived, the winds slackened, at first imperceptibly, later markedly. The sky brightened, and it seemed that the storm, impossibly strong only minutes before, had played itself out. The air turned warm and humid, and unnaturally calm. The sun was visible, and glistening white clouds formed a circular wall around the storm’s eye: a sinister impersonation of tranquility. And then, ever so slightly, the wind picked up, and walls of clouds swept into view, heralding the return of the storm, as awful as before.
Those caught in the storm barely noticed when it began a slow retreat. A half day after the eye passed overhead, the wind, still over sixty knots, slowly abated, and the ocean, once ready to overflow the land entirely, returned to its customary levels.
A full day after the eye had passed, the clouds began to break up, and the high waters, retreating from land, exposed the damage they had wrought. Small whitecaps and massive waves still dappled the water’s surface as the sea began to give up its dead. Within hours, the cirrus clouds dissipated, the sky cleared for real, and the sun shone with unaccustomed brilliance. But the air remained unsettled, imbued with pungent brine, the stink of rotting vegetation torn from the sea floor, and bloated floating carcasses.
The typhoon cycle had ended, while somewhere in the western Pacific, new typhoons were breeding.
THE WINDS BLEW so long and hard, says Marco, that “a great part of those of the army of the Great Khan could not bear it.” The Mongols soon decided to flee the typhoon for their lives. “If they did not leave,” Marco explains, “all their ships would be broken up.” They quickly gave up any idea of conquest, even of hamlets. “Then they all went into their ships and left the island and put out to sea so that not one of their men remained on land.”
Four miles off Çipingu, “the force of the wind began to increase, and the multitude of the ships was so great that a large quantity of them was broken up with one another; but the ships that were not crushed by others but were scattered about the sea escaped shipwreck.” Some ships sought refuge on “another island, not too large and uninhabited,” only to be “driven