Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [38]
In Marco’s day, Badakhshan was Afghanistan’s leading producer of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), and Afghanistan was, and remains, the leading opium producer in the world. The colorful fields through which he passed produced enormous quantities of poppies, but he would not have considered them flowers of evil. Their bright blossoms, gently swaying in the fresh breeze, looked harmless enough to a lad, as were many of their uses. Tiny black poppy seeds were used in cooking, imparting their nutty flavor to sweet pastries.
If he became an opium user for medical reasons, or simply to experience the drug’s effects, he would have begun by ingesting the poppy, and perhaps progressed to smoking it, or more precisely, its resin. (Injection did not exist at the time.) One explanation for the unusual length of time that he languished in Badakhshan could be that in the course of trying to recover from a febrile illness, he became dependent on opium, and had to detoxify—a protracted and agonizing process. The symptoms of withdrawal that he might have suffered include nausea, sweating, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, depression, loss of appetite, anxiety, and rapid changes in mood. He would have become edgier, moodier, more sensitive to light, and more highly suggestible. Where his father and uncle saw a road or a bridge or a storm, Marco might have seen evidence of impersonal cosmic forces at work, sweeping them toward an inchoate destiny.
Fortunately, the mountains of Afghanistan were supremely beneficial to his health. “On the tops of the mountains the air is so pure and the sojourn there so health-giving that if, while he lives in the cities and houses built on the plain and in the valleys near the mountains, a man catches fevers of any kind,…he immediately climbs the mountains and, resting there two or three days, the sickness is driven away,” Marco marvels.
There is a sound medical basis for his confidence. High altitude and fresh air have long been known as effective treatments for tuberculosis. The low-oxygen mountain air inhibits the growth of mycobacteria, including those that cause tuberculosis. And exposure to sunlight—abundant at high altitudes—increases the body’s vitamin D, which in turn destroys pathogens. In all, the mountains of Afghanistan were a mixed blessing, promoting Marco’s rapid recovery from tuberculosis (if that was his affliction) even while snaring the young man in the coils of addiction.
No matter what happened to Marco at Badakhshan, he departed a more seasoned traveler, able to cope with the hardships and dangers of life along the Silk Road.
CHAPTER FIVE
High Plains Drifters
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place!
THE DELAY at Badakhshan placed the Polo company a full year behind schedule; it was now 1273, they had been away for two years, and their journey east had only begun.
Once Marco recovered, they proceeded along the Silk Road to higher altitudes, surrounded by wild sheep—Ovis ammon. “They go sometimes in one flock four hundred, five hundred, six hundred,” he says. “And many of them are taken, but they never fail.” These gentle creatures later became known as “Marco Polo sheep,” and they were prized by the region’s capable if slightly desperate hunters. “They are very good archers,” he writes of the hunters, “and the greater part of them are dressed in skins of beasts because they have great dearth of other garments of cloth, for woolen garments are either quite impossible to be had there or are exceedingly dear.” For that reason, “the great ladies of this land and the gentle wear cloth.”
Women dressed in this manner caught