Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [27]
It has long been noted that camels possess a sixth sense for traversing the desert. In the third century AD, the Chinese writer Kuo P’u observed, “The camel is an unusual domestic animal; it carries a saddle of flesh on its back; swiftly it dashes over the shifting sands; it manifests its merit in dangerous places; it has secret understanding of springs and sources; subtle indeed is its knowledge!”
Marco, his father, and his uncle were acutely aware of their beasts of burden; the animals’ coarse, vital smell filled the nostrils of their masters. Atop their camels, the Polos did not so much stride as stagger. Yet a sturdy Bactrian camel can carry more than six hundred pounds, and under favorable conditions can cover thirty miles a day. For reliable transport across the desert, no other creature could match these characteristics.
After several days of strenuous travel atop their camels, the exhausted and thirsty travelers reached their first oasis.
SAPURGAN was the name of their salvation, “a town beautiful and great and fertile and of great plenty of all things needful for life.” There were stands of trees, perhaps poplars, their leaves bright and vivid in the desert air, and the region’s famous melons, tasting so ripe and sweet as to seem “the best in the world.” They sustained life year round, thanks to the preservation techniques Marco observed. “When they are dried they cut them in slices like threads or strips of leather,” he says, “and they become sweeter than honey.”
Still in the Persian mountains, Marco fell under the spell of another town, Tunocain. Entering early manhood, he was becoming acutely aware of women, and he dared to describe them with a robust appreciation and informality at odds with the accounts of pious miracles that Rustichello slipped into the account. The women of Tunocain caught his eye and, for the moment, engaged his heart; he calls them “the most beautiful in the world.” They were Muslim women, whose like he had previously dismissed as idolaters, but now he thought of them constantly. Even allowing for his penchant for overstatement, this revelation suggests that Marco’s experiences on the road were beginning to influence his assumptions about the world around him.
Near Tunocain, Marco took note of another shrine, the Dry Tree. Although he did not trouble to explain the tree’s significance to his audience, many knew that the Dry Tree appeared in Christian legends, and in Alexander romances, as an ancient, even immortal phenomenon possessing magical powers. Reverence for the Dry Tree, a startling apparition in this arid, mountainous area, seems to hark back to a primitive form of tree or nature worship. Marco describes the phenomenon with enough detail to suggest that he had actually seen it: “It is very large and thick, and its leaves are green on one side and white on the other, and it forms burrs like the burrs of chestnuts, but there is nothing inside them. They are not good to eat. Of its wood balsam is made. It is solid and very hard wood.” But he may have been relying on hearsay for his information.
AS MARCO LOST HIMSELF in a reverie of the region’s lore, his company advanced into the territory of the Assassins, who threatened powerful warlords and heads of state. Their notoriety had reached Western Europe as a result of a knife-wielding Assassin’s attack on Prince Edward (shortly to become King Edward I) in Jerusalem barely a year after the Polo company departed. Seriously wounded, Edward survived multiple stab wounds and fled home to England, but incidents such as these gave the Assassins a lasting mystique as a secretive fraternity of terrorists capable of striking when least expected. Marco and his collaborator realized that recounting tales of the Assassins would send a frisson of horror through their audience, and they played up the cult’s sinister mystique for all it was worth.
Relying on stories passed