Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [162]
To sleep safely amid such peril, he relied on the inhabitants’ clever apparatus. “The men have their very light bed of canes so contrived that while they are inside, when they wish to sleep they draw themselves up with cords near to the ceiling and tie themselves there. They do this indeed for the sake of escaping the tarantulas that bite much and fleas and other insects, and also for the sake of catching the air to do away with the heat that reigns in those parts.”
Travelers such as Marco also employed their suspended beds to safeguard their valuables. “When men are traveling in the night and may wish to sleep (for on account of the lower heat they make their journey by night rather than by day), if they have a bag of pearls or other treasure they will put the bag of pearls under the head and sleep there, nor does anyone ever lose anything by theft or otherwise. And if he does lose [it], it is made good to him immediately provided that he has slept on the street.” If he has not slept on the street, “evil is presumed against him, for the government says, ‘Why didst thou sleep off the street unless because thou hadst proposed to rob others?’ Then he is punished, and the loss is not returned to him.”
AFRICA
Zanzibar.
“A very exceedingly great and noble island,” Marco declares. “It is two thousand miles around.”
For once, he had strayed into a territory with an abbreviated history. The island’s first inhabitants apparently had emigrated from the African mainland and reassembled in small villages reminiscent of those in Africa. Soon they were confronted with Arab traders, who may have been aware of the island even before it was settled. Skillful and courageous sailors, the traders caught the monsoon winds to speed them across the Indian Ocean, and they found a makeshift harbor where the town of Zanzibar now stands. Eventually they settled there, as well, and interbred with the African emigrants. Not long before Marco’s arrival, the emerging Zanzibar community established a ruler, the Jumbe. Although he was neither a great warrior nor bold leader, he helped to give the island a semblance of political unity.
Despite oft-repeated claims that the first European to visit Zanzibar was Vasco da Gama in 1499, Marco, according to his account, set foot on the island about 205 years before the Portuguese navigator sailed into its harbor. If true, Marco was the first European to do so—or at least the first to write about Zanzibar. Marco’s account captures Zanzibar in its precolonial state, as a primitive and isolated island capable of startling even the experienced Venetian traveler.
Once there, he feels as if he has entered another world, a very menacing one. The men are all “very large and stout,” so much so that if they were as tall as they are stout, they would “seem without doubt to be giants.” Nevertheless, he says, they are “immensely strong, for they carry a load for four other men who are not of the island. And this is no wonder, for I tell you that [each one] eats food for five men of another country.” These superhumans “are all black and go naked except that they are covered in their natural parts”—much to his relief—“for they have them very large and ugly and horrible to see.” Even their hair takes him aback, “so curly and black like pepper that it could hardly be made to stretch out with water.” And their faces startle him to the point of trauma: “They have so great a mouth and the nose so flat and turned upward the forehead, and beards, and nostrils so thick that it is wonderful. They have large ears, thick lips, turned outward, and eyes so large and so bloodshot and so red that they are a very horrible thing to see; for whoever should see them in another country would say of them that they were devils.”
The women of this land strike Marco as repulsive, “a very ugly thing to see,” he states. “They have great mouths and large eyes and large, thick, and short noses. They have breasts four times as large as other ordinary women, which adds to the ugliness. They are black as a mulberry and of great stature.