Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [26]
While in Hormuz, Marco was horrified to learn that the deadly wind had surprised no less than six thousand soldiers (five thousand on foot, the rest on horseback) in the desert and “stifled them all, so that not one survived to carry back the news to their lord.” Eventually, the “men of Hormuz” learned of the mass deaths and decided to bury the corpses to prevent infection, but “when they gripped them by the arms to drag them to the graves, they [the corpses] were so parched by the tremendous heat that the arms came loose from the trunk, so that they [the men] had to dig the graves beside the corpses and heave them in.”
The sailing vessels, when he finally inspected them, were a disappointment. “Their ships are very bad, and many of them founder, because they are not fastened with iron nails but stitched together with thread made of coconut husks,” Marco reports in dismay. Nor did their other features inspire much confidence. “The ships have one mast, one sail, and one rudder, and are not decked; when they have loaded them, they cover the cargo with skins, and on top of these they put the horses that they ship to India for sale.” The design was cause for concern; Marco preferred the security of two rudders, two masts, and proper decks. These stripped-down vessels seemed to ask for trouble at the first hint of foul weather. Worse, “They have no iron for nails; so they employ wooden pegs and stitch [them] with thread. This makes it very risky to sail in these ships. And,” Marco says, “you can take my word that many of them sink, because the Indian Ocean is very stormy.” As if all that were not bad enough, these leaky ships were not even caulked properly with pitch; instead, they were “anointed with a sort of fish oil.”
The Polo company had seen enough. They would not sail to India, after all. Earning their livelihood by making calculations, and accustomed to living by their wits, they decided the prospect was too dangerous.
They left Hormuz as quickly as they had come, and returned to Kerman, where they rethought their method for reaching China and the court of Kublai Khan. Rather than trust their lives to precarious water craft, they would move in accordance with the rhythm of the camel’s languorous gait along the ancient traders’ routes that have come to be known as the Silk Road.
AS THEIR CAMELS and donkeys headed into the wasteland, Marco apprehensively noted “a desert of sixty miles in which water to drink is sometimes not found.” The Polos were concerned both for themselves and for the beasts of burden on which their lives and fortunes depended. At one point, they spent three days without sighting water they could use. “What water there is,” Marco reports, “is brackish and green as meadow grass and so bitter that no one could bear to drink it.” It was not only unpleasant, it was downright dangerous: “Drink one drop of it and you void your bowels ten times over. It is the same with the salt that is made from it. If you eat one little granule, it produces violent diarrhea.” Driven mad with thirst, animals that drank the water suffered as terribly.
And so their caravan moved on. For transportation—indeed, for survival itself—the Polo company relied on the Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus), which had served travelers along the Silk Road since biblical times. Unlike the single-humped dromedary, common in North Africa, the Bactrian camel has two lopsided humps to store fat, a long neck, minimal ears, and massive teeth, some of them pointed. The animals come in as many colors as the desert itself, from dirty white to deep, gritty brown.
Camels are suited to desert crossings. Their broad cloven hoofs resist sinking into loose sand, and their large nostrils are lined with hairs and can close like valves to prevent the inhalation of flying sand. Bactrians are especially sturdy animals, accustomed to sleeping