Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [25]
In Persia, he beheld evidence of the region’s intense geologic activity. Here, active faults and volcanoes had created some of the most calamitous events on the planet. The Polo company sought safer surroundings in the pleasant town of Rudbar, high in the Alborz Mountains in northwest Persia. Rudbar served as a merchants’ gathering place and offered lush pasture for livestock. The picturesque grazing herds inspired Marco to exercise the powers of description that would eventually win him fame. “Let me tell you first about the oxen,” he writes. “They are of great size and pure white like snow. Their hair is short and smooth because of the heat. Their horns are thick and stumpy and not pointed. Between their shoulders they have a round hump fully two palms in height. They are the loveliest things in the world to look at. When you want to load them, they lie down like camels; then, when they are loaded, they stand up and carry their loads very well, because they are exceedingly strong. There are also sheep as big as asses, with tails so thick and plump that they weigh a good thirty pounds. Fine, fat beasts they are, and good eating.”
JUST AS MARCO was beginning to feel at home in the Persian mountains, he stiffened at the mention of the Karaunas, “bands of marauders who infest the country.” The Karaunas preyed on the plump, grazing herds. More terrifying still, they were reputed to be adept at performing a diabolic enchantment that turned day into night over a distance as far as a man could ride during the space of seven days. “They know this country very well,” Marco says. “When they have brought on the darkness, they ride side by side, sometimes as many as ten thousand of them together,…so that they overspread the region they mean to rob. Nothing they find in the open country, neither man nor beast nor goods, can escape capture.”
The Polo company fled to the seaport of Hormuz, but not before they had several close encounters with these predators. “I assure you,” Marco’s account states with emphasis, “that Master Marco himself narrowly evaded capture by these robbers in the darkness they had made. He”—that is, Marco—“escaped to a town called Kamasal; but not before many of his companions were taken captive and sold [as slaves], and some put to death.”
Of this dangerous episode, Marco says nothing more. Events at their next stop outweighed all else.
HORMUZ ENJOYED a reputation as a prosperous haven on the Persian Gulf. Here the Polos expected to travel aboard one of the port’s many sailing vessels to a destination in India, and then proceed to China. Marco remarks on the “excellent harbor” and confidently notes that “merchants come here by ship from India, bringing all sorts of spices and precious stones and pearls and cloths of silk and gold and elephants’ tusks and many other wares. In this city they sell them to others, who distribute them to various customers through the length and breadth of the world. It is a great center of commerce, with many cities and towns subordinate to it.”
For the wandering Polo company, the sight of so much water after months in the desert evoked memories of Venice and the Adriatic Sea, but on closer inspection, Hormuz was not quite the gem it had seemed from afar. For one thing, “If a merchant dies here, the king confiscates all his possessions.” The climate also presented a hazard to unwary travelers. Wind from the