Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [149]
Marco recorded these customs in horrifying detail, conveying the cannibals’ reverence, and perhaps fear, of the souls of the dead. “They eat and suck out also the marrow inside the bones, leaving no moisture or fat in them at all,” he goes on. “They do this because they do not wish any atom of him to remain, so that it may not decay. For they say that if there were to remain any substance in the bones, that it would make worms, and the worms would die at last for want of food…. After they have eaten him, they take the bones and put them in a casket of stone, and then they carry them and hang them in great caves of the mountains in such a place that no beast or other evil thing could touch them.”
Marco proclaims his revulsion: “This is a very evil way and bad custom, and so it is a very cruel and evil people.”
Fansur.
As he recounts his travels through Indonesia, Marco ceases to extol the grandeur of the Mongol Empire and concentrates on his preoccupation with food. By the time he arrived in the kingdom of Fansur—the word means “camphor”—he was so ravenous that he ignored the region’s celebrated natural resource in favor of bread made from the sago palm. Preparing it was simple enough: the locals opened the trunk of a mature sago and ground the pulp into a starchy substance that they washed, sieved, pulverized, and then baked into dense, nearly tasteless loaves that he claims were “very good to eat.” In fact, he says, “the bread of that flour is like barley bread and of that taste.”
He invites his readers to visualize him feasting at last: “I, Master Marco Polo who saw all this, tell you that we ourselves tried it sufficiently, for we often ate them [the loaves].” He became so enamored of sago flour that he gathered a supply to take with him on his travels. “I took some of this flour to Venice with me,” he confides, but it is difficult to imagine Venetians sharing his enthusiasm for it.
CEYLON
“Noble and good rubies are produced in this island,” Marco has heard. Even more enticing, “the king of this province has the most beautiful ruby in all the world.” Marco describes it with authority, because, he says, “I, Marco Polo, was one of the ambassadors and saw the said ruby with my eyes; and when that lord was holding it in his closed hand, it projected below and above the fist, which the lord put to his eyes and to his mouth.” Marco makes the ruby sound larger still: “It is about a large palm long and quite as thick as the arm of a man. And it is the most splendid thing in the world to see. It has no flaw in it. It is red like fire.”
Kublai Khan had declared that he must have it, and so, Marco reports, “the Great Khan sent his messengers to this king,…saying that he wished to buy this ruby, and that if he would give it to him, he would have the value of a city given him for it.” It would not be easy to obtain the ruby, for “the king of Seilan said that he would not give it for anything in the world, because he said that it belonged to his ancestors, and for this reason he couldn’t have it”—words that Kublai Khan could not tolerate or understand.
With stories such as these, Marco acknowledges that even Kublai Khan, the mightiest ruler in the world, was mortal, and, even more painful, was rapidly losing his powers.
INDIA AND THE GULF OF ADEN
Maabar.
Here, in “the noblest and most rich [province] in the world,” Marco felt that he was in his element, for once. He found himself among wealthy merchants trading for pearls, which could be found in the shallow waters just off the mainland. “In all this gulf there is no water more than ten or twelve paces deep, and in some places there is some that is not more than two paces. In this gulf the best pearls are taken,” he reports. Drawing on his experience with the precious commodity, Marco explains the process of harvesting and selling pearls, all of it little changed from the earliest accounts two thousand years before. “There will be