Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [41]
If Marco had overcome his repugnance to “idolatry” and troubled to familiarize himself with Buddhism, he would have learned that the Buddha taught that life is experienced as suffering, brought about by one’s attachment to oneself and to people and objects, all of which are impermanent, and by the resultant craving, which nothing can satisfy. He would have heard that the Buddha said that all sentient beings, including animals and insects, are caught in a cycle of suffering, or samsara, and the results of their actions, or karma, simply create more attachment and more suffering. He would have heard that this cycle continues even after death, since Buddhism held that living creatures are reborn. He would have been relieved, then, to hear that there was a way to escape from the cycle of suffering and to achieve enlightenment, known as nirvana. Had he looked up to the monasteries in the mountains, he would have seen examples of men and women who had renounced their attachments and become monks and nuns, meditating and studying Buddhist scriptures night and day. A traveler like Marco would not have found this so strange, after all, and might have seen more than a little of himself in the Buddhists’ scheme of things; like them, he had given up his home, comforts, and possessions. Like them, he lived a life of danger and anxiety, of loneliness, of suffering from extreme heat and cold, from thirst, and from deprivation. His life was as empty as the trade route he traveled, his pleasures were fitful and his prospects unknowable, and his goal was distant and seemingly unattainable.
After the deprivations endured while traversing the roof of the world, Marco had learned to appreciate the luxuries that Khotan offered the traveler. The inhabitants, he says, are “noble”—especially in comparison to the odd creatures he had passed in the mountains—and the city itself is “noble,” as was the surrounding region. “It is fertile and it has abundance of all things needful for the life of man,” he says. “And there grows cotton enough, and flax and hemp, and oil, wheat, corn, and wine and the rest is as done rightly in our lands.” But then he adds smugly that the inhabitants “are not men of arms, but mean enough and very cowardly.” This meant that he felt relatively safe in their midst.
Having replenished their supplies in Khotan, Marco and his company, trying to make up for time lost in Badakhshan, set out once again for Kublai Khan’s court.
HEADING EAST, the Polo company faced more than four thousand miles of grassy plains interrupted by occasional mountain ranges. This terrain was known by its Russian name, the Steppe, and it was divided into two parts. The western Steppe extended from the Danube River to the Altai mountain range in Siberia; often described as a sea of grass, it was an area through which rivers and streams flowed freely. The open spaces of the western Steppe enabled caravans and horsemen to travel along the trails and roads that ran its length and breadth.
The eastern Steppe, extending into Mongolia, was drier and harsher. Grass for grazing was far more sparse, and free-flowing streams yielded to infrequent oases. Negotiating the rigors of the eastern Steppe required endurance and indifference to the elements from those who dared to venture into its expanse.
FIVE DAYS after leaving Khotan, the Polo company arrived in the province of Pem, inhabited by Muslims and enriched by a river “running through it where precious stones are found that one calls jasper and chalcedony”—all very interesting to note, but the inviting women of Pem made a much stronger impression on the young traveler: “When a woman has a husband, and it happens that he leaves her to go on a journey, and provided that he must stay away from twenty or thirty days upwards, the woman