Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [39]
The fat-bottomed sheep climbing the mountains may have inspired women in the area to exaggerate their physiques. “They do this to show that they have large hips to become beautiful, because in that region their men delight in fat women, and she who appears more stout below the waist seems to them more beautiful,” and not only that, but “more glorious among other women.” Marco’s exploration of the erotic is making only its second appearance here, as he languishes in the aftermath of his illness. He is still timid compared with all that he will later set down.
MARCO SHIFTED HIS gaze from these oddly appealing women to the arduous trail ahead. There was a twelve-day-long trek upriver, past lively villages populated with Muslims, Nestorian Christians, and Buddhists who had come this way on the Silk Road. Eventually the Polo company, with its camels and donkeys, reached another, and lesser, province that Marco called Vocan, which was “subject to the rule of the lord of Badakhshan.” After a brief stopover, the party ascended the steep trail again, “almost always going up through mountains, and one rises so much that the top of those mountains is the highest place, or one of the highest, in the whole world.” For once, Marco did not exaggerate. His party was ascending the Terak Pass, through the Pamir, the traditional dividing line between East and West, heading toward the farthest and wildest western border of China.
In Turkic, pamir indicates high-altitude rolling grasslands. The Pamir highlands were passable only during cool, dry summers. In season, the Pamir offered pleasant, expansive meadows, unlike anything in Western Europe. Trees were a rarity, as were rivers, but runoff from glaciers provided water. The region’s sunlight was harsh and seemingly gray, barely filtered by the thin atmosphere. Simply breathing posed a great hardship for the wayfarers; they were traversing a region that came to be known as “the roof of the world,” fourteen thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by the highest mountain peaks on earth—Mount Everest among them. The extreme altitude’s thin atmosphere made cooking, or even boiling water, inordinately difficult. Marco could not calculate the altitude of the Pamir, but he noticed that “flying birds there are none because of the high place and intense cold, and because they could have nothing to eat there.”
For the Polos’ determined little band, the trek through the Pamir required stamina and patience to venture where not even birds would go. They were not the first to test their strength against these ancient mountain passes. Nomads had traversed this harsh landscape for centuries, and along this trail Kublai Khan’s grandfather, Genghis Khan, once led his Mongol troops on their murderous conquests.
The trek through the Pamir took the Polo company across some of the most extraordinary geologic formations on the planet. The Pamir forms a quadrangle about 150 miles long on each side, marked by snow-capped peaks. The highest mountain ranges in the world radiate from the Pamir: the Hindu Kush extends to the northwest, the Tian Shan—“Celestial Mountains”—system to the northeast, the Karakorum and Himalaya ranges to the southeast.
The region started to emerge about forty million years ago when the Indian subcontinent collided with Eurasia, a notable instance of plate tectonics—the movement, occasionally violent, of the geologic plates that form Earth’s crust, or lithosphere. In the case of the Pamir, the deformation caused by the immense collision spread all the way to the interior