Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [37]
MARCO AND COMPANY spent three days riding their camels through a wasteland with “no dwelling nor food nor drink for the wayfarer except water; but grass enough for horses.” Finally, with the greatest relief, they reached Badakhshan, a “large province,” Marco writes, populated with Muslims, a “very great and broad realm which for length lasts quite twelve days’ marches.” The kings of Badakhshan, Marco believed, descended directly from Alexander the Great “and from his wife who was the daughter of Darius the Great who was lord of the great realm of Persia.”
The Badakhshan that greeted Marco Polo was, like the Badakhshan of today, a lush oasis in the desert. To come upon it after weeks on dusty, twisting trails was to encounter a haven promising ease and delight for the exhausted wayfarer. As Marco immediately noticed, the city owed its wealth and notoriety more to its rubies than to legends of Alexander. The rubies, he explains, “are produced in the rocks of great mountains, and when they wish to dig them they are gotten with great trouble, for they make great caverns in the mountains with very great expense and trouble to find them, and go far underground as in these parts here they do who dig the veins of gold and silver.” The king, according to Marco, dug for the gems himself, kept the most precious specimens, and killed anyone who dared to mine them without permission. “The king,” Marco says, “does this for his own honor that the balasci [rubies] may be dear and of great value everywhere as they are, for if he let other men dig them and carry them through the world so many of them would be taken away that all the world would be full of them and they would not be so dear nor of so great value, so that the king would make little or no gain.” The same principles applied to the sapphires in these mountains, as well as “ultramarine azure” (lapis lazuli), silver, copper, gold, and lead. Although Marco does not say so, it is likely that his father and uncle bargained for the gems with the king’s representatives, trading gold or stones that they brought with them for rubies and sapphires, which they concealed by sewing into the folds of their cloaks, keeping them close at all times, day or night. Camels needed water and grass to survive, while merchants such as the Polos needed gems to thrive.
Marco’s youthful imagination was caught by the sturdy horses of the area, who cantered over the stones without the protection of horseshoes. “They go in the mountains and on bad roads always, and do not hurt their feet, and the men gallop with them over the mountain slopes where other animals could not gallop,” he marvels, “nor would they dare to gallop there.” Marco reports with satisfaction a story that long ago in this region all horses were “born with a horn, with a mark, on the forehead like Bucephalus”—Alexander the Great’s famous mount—“because mares had conceived from that very horse. But afterwards the whole breed of them was destroyed. And the breed of them was only in the power of an uncle of the king, and when he refused to allow the king to have any of them, he was put to death by him; and the wife out of spite for the death of the husband destroyed the said breed, and so it is lost.”
In this region, Marco saw hawks and falcons above, and fields covered with grain underfoot, all dwarfed by steep, rugged mountains concealing towns that resembled fortresses.
AMID THIS spectacular setting, something peculiar befell the young Marco, about which he dropped only the slenderest of hints. “When he was in those parts he remained sick for about a year,” he says of himself, “and when he was advised to go up to the mountain”—by whom he does not say—“he was well again.” Those few words suggest an ordeal.
It is unlikely that he contracted malaria, as is often assumed, since there are no mosquitoes at that high altitude to carry the parasite. Instead, he may have suffered from the effects of syphilis, or severe emotional problems. But more likely, he had tuberculosis. The disease was