Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [30]
CHAPTER FOUR
The Opium Eater
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree….
THE POLO COMPANY found the riches they sought in Taican (now the Afghan province of Talikan), where they encountered a precious commodity: salt. Mountains of salt, to be exact, “the best in the world,” and so hard that it took a great iron pick to pry it loose. Salt was a form of currency (Roman soldiers had been paid in salt), salt was preservation; salt was an engine of ancient and medieval economies. There was more to attract the Polos’ interest, for the region’s markets abounded in almonds, pistachios, and corn harvested from the alluring surrounding groves and fields. They were ready to get down to the business of trading.
Marco could not abide the people whom they encountered, “thieves and robbers and murderers” whose misdeeds were fueled by liquor. He reports: “They stay a great deal in taverns,” drinking fermented wine. Still, he was fascinated by their hunting prowess, which extended to the bloody chore of capturing porcupines: “When the hunters wish to catch them and set the very fierce large dogs upon them, the porcupines gather themselves all together and…shake themselves each with great fury and run and then throw the quills, which are lightly fastened on their backs,…at the dogs and men and wound them badly, very often in several places. Then the hunters go upon them and take them.”
Before long, Marco and his father and uncle were on their way once more.
NO ONE in the Polo company, or anyone else at that time, announced that he was going on the Silk Road; there was no such thing. Dealers trading in gems, spices, and silks and other fabrics traveled along a casual but ancient network of tracks, trails, and mountain passes snaking across Central Asia and China, encountering the occasional monk or missionary. The Silk Road as a distinct entity was not so christened until 1877, when Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen, a German geographer, conceived of the evocative but artificial image Seidenstrasse. Although the name suggests romance, luxury, and sensuality, the arduous experience of traveling the route was one of hardship and danger undertaken by those in search of wealth, conquest, or salvation.
Its tributaries extended from Central Asia—precisely where the “Silk Road” began would be impossible to say—to the eastern shore of China. Parts of the route ran south, deep into India. The Polo company entered near the westernmost reaches. Like other merchants, they traveled as part of a large caravan (in Persian, the word karvan meant “company”) and soon found themselves dependent on an extraordinary network of caravansaries—combination dormitories and stables catering to itinerant merchants. Often located near a stream, an oasis, or a village with a mosque, the caravansary gave an appearance of forbidding and secure massiveness, a sheer wall rising several stories above the ground, relieved by air holes near the bottom and small windows near the top. Travelers seeking entrance had to pass through a massive gate, which admitted them, camels and all, and was secured at night with iron chains. Within, they found a courtyard paved with flagstones on which dozens of exhausted camels and donkeys crouched around a central fountain ringed by a cloister, and beyond that area, storerooms and stables. In one corner of the quadrangular structure, a cooking fire burned, the food giving off pungent, mouthwatering aromas. A steward posted near the entrance supplied food and water, and kept order within. Stairways led to small, austere lodging rooms above the stables. Meanwhile, the travelers’ animals were tied up in the serai, or stables, below.
In Afghanistan, the caravansaries were known as robats—from an ancient term for rope to tie a horse. The Polos encountered robats throughout their travels along the Silk Road in Afghanistan; the structures were closely spaced, with a bit less than twenty miles (roughly a day’s journey) separating them. The distance was measured