Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [40]
Here, on the roof of the world, the Polo company encountered a plateau, an astonishing Shangri-la created by these geologic forces. Marco’s appreciative portrait of this changeless scene remains accurate today: “When one is in that high place, then he finds a large plain between two mountains in which is very beautiful pasture and a great lake from which runs a very beautiful river, both good and large.” Even more remarkably, “Up there in that plain is the best and fattest pasture of the world that can be found; for a thin horse or ox or any thin beast (let it be as thin as you please) put there to graze grows very fat in ten days.” He writes of “multitudes of wild sheep,” distinguished by enormous horns, “some quite six palms long,” from which shepherds made bowls and other vessels, as well as fencing to pen in other animals. Yet nature was not as peaceful as it seemed in the Pamir. By night, wolves descended from the slopes to “eat up and kill many of those sheep.”
For twelve days the travelers rode through this savage paradise, finding neither “dwelling nor inn, but in the course of the road it is desert and nothing is found there to eat.” They suffered from the rapidly increasing cold and thinning air. Their campfires, starved for oxygen, were dull and stunted, scarcely sufficient to cook their meals.
At the plain’s end, they followed the trail for another forty days through mountain valleys and slopes, their way marked by piles of animal bones left by previous travelers. As before, their isolation was complete: “Not in all these forty days’ marches is there dwelling nor inn, nor even food, but the travelers are obliged to carry that which they need with them.” There was no caravansary to offer security for the lonely travelers, nor even the evanescent companionship of the road.
WHEN MARCO at last encountered humanity in the form of mountain dwellers, their primitive state only increased his apprehensiveness. “They are idolaters, even more unfathomable than Muslims,” he writes, “and very savage, and they live by nothing but the chase of animals.” As evidence of their savagery, they wore only animal skins—they were “a mighty cruel and evil people.” Despite the cold and the altitude, the little Polo company picked up the pace, and hurried past without incident.
THE WORST hardships of the Pamir abated by the time the Polo company reached the thriving oasis town of Khotan, an important stop on the Silk Road, at the edge of the Taklimakan Desert in western China. The region was forbidding in the extreme. The name Taklimakan was said to mean “Desert of Death” or “Place of No Return,” and temperatures varied as much as 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the course of a day. By this point, a bewildered and parched Marco may have thought he was in the middle of nowhere, and in a sense he was correct; Khotan is farther from the ocean than nearly any other place in the world.
Although nominally loyal to Kublai Khan, Khotan had once been a center of Buddhism, and the lingering Buddhist presence here afforded Marco his first serious exposure to the spiritual system and philosophy that at first repelled him, then intrigued him, and finally won his admiration. The ancestors of the inhabitants were Persian or Indic immigrants from the west and Chinese from the east, who had settled in a fertile strip of land along a river flowing north from the Kunlun Mountains. China conquered Khotan in AD 73; it was succeeded soon after by the Kushana empire from the west, and later on by Tibetan forces. Under Tibetan influence, Buddhism arrived from the East via the Silk Road and flourished here, and temples populated by tens of thousands of Buddhist monks abounded