Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [171]
The sleds, in particular, intrigued Marco, who may have heard about them in detail from a fellow merchant. “A sled,” he explains for an audience unfamiliar with the idea of travel across frozen wastes, “is a vehicle that has no wheels, but they are made of very light wood and flat and smoothed underneath, and they are raised at the ends in the way of a semicircle, in such a way that they go up over the ice and over the mud and over the mire.”
Marco familiarized himself with the details of dog handling to an uncanny degree. His account reads as if written by one who held the reins himself: “Those who conduct the sledges harness six dogs of those large ones…with yokes, two and two in proper order, to take those sledges. And these dogs, no one leads them but they go straight to the next post and draw the sledge very well both through the ice and through the mire. And so they go from one post to the other…. He who guards the post mounts on a sledge also, and has himself taken by the dogs, and he takes them by the straightest way and by the best. And when they are come to the next post that is at the end of the journey, they find there are also the dogs and the sledges and another guide ready to carry them forward for the second journey; and this is done because the dogs could not bear such labor as that for all the thirteen days’ journey; and so those that have brought them turn back. And so it goes through all these journeys, changing dogs, sledge, and guide at every stage…till the messengers of the lord are carried…to the mountains, and buy the skins, and return to their own land through the plain.”
Marco radiates enthusiasm for the trade, especially when he enumerates the skins in which the messengers deal—“little animals of great value,” he marvels, “from which they have great profit and great benefit; these are sables and ermines and squirrels and ercolins and black foxes and many other precious animals from which are made the dear skins.” Nevertheless, when he considers the conditions endured by merchant trappers in this harsh climate, Marco, the restless traveler and sensualist, turns away. “They have all their houses underground because of the great cold that is there, and they always live underground.” Equally damning is the Venetian’s last word on the subject: “They are not a beautiful people.” The prospect of being confined for months in a subterranean dwelling with them ended Marco’s daydreams about growing rich in the skin trade.
It was time for the lover of open spaces, sunlight, and intrigue to move on.
NEXT TO THE fur-trapping wastes, Marco located an even grimmer region, the Valley of Darkness, so called because of the dense mists obscuring the area, which he occasionally calls “the land of shadows.” Although he seems to be describing an allegorical domain, he believed he was depicting an actual place just beyond the Mongol sphere of influence—far indeed from the centers of power to which he has become accustomed during the previous two decades. Men here, he relates, “live like animals.”
Despite the inhospitable climate, a handful of Mongols ventured into the area, taking unusual precautions to guard their safety. They “come in on mares that have foals, and they leave the foals outside, and have them watched by keepers whom they set at the entry of that region, because the mares when they have made their journey go back to their children and by the perception and scent of the foals know the way better than the men know.” The only reason Marco finds for risking travel to the area is, inevitably, the prospect of trade in sable, ermine, “and many other dear skins.”