Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [42]
WHEREVER HE RAMBLED, people were on the move. In Ciarcian, the Mongols were plundering the region as they had since the days of Genghis Khan. “When it happens that an army of Tartars, as well friends and enemies, passes through the country of Ciarcian, if they are enemies they carry off all their goods, and if they are friends they kill and eat their cattle.” Those men who considered themselves enemies of the Mongols adapted to the onslaught by fleeing with their wives, children, animals, and possessions across the desert sands for two or three days “into other places where they knew that there was pasture to be found and good water.” There they could wait until the army passed. Marco’s description reveals some compassion for the uprooted villagers, but at the same time, their stratagems for survival struck him as pathetic and cowardly. Yet he had not come face to face with the Mongols himself, and could only guess at the terror their ruthlessness inspired.
The Polo company pushed on through five more days of desert, occasionally stopping at oases—some sweet, others “very bad”—until they reached Lop, a name synonymous with the edge of the unknown. An immense, dry, salt-encrusted lake bed covering extreme northwestern China, the wasteland was notorious for its special hazards, which seduced and misled even the most wary travelers.
“LOP IS A great city at the end of the desert, from which one enters into the very great desert which is called the Desert of Lop,” Marco records, noting that Kublai Khan’s rule extended even here. “All things needful for travelers who wish to cross the desert are made ready in this city,” he warns. “I tell you that those who wish to cross the great desert must rest in this town at the least a week to refresh themselves and their beasts. At the end of a week they must take food for a month for themselves and for their beasts, because they take so long to pass across that desert.”
The scale of the desert defied the imagination, but Marco tried to make his European audience, accustomed to a dense, compact landscape, comprehend something of its emptiness, reporting that crossing even the narrowest portion would require a month’s hard riding. Traversing its length was simply beyond human endurance and ingenuity: “Lengthwise it cannot be passed because of the great length of it, for it would be impossible to carry enough food…. One travels for a month of marches without finding any dwelling. It is all barren mountains and plains of sand and valleys, and nothing to eat is found there.” There was sweet water, it was true, “but no water that a sufficiently large company could take, but as much as is needed for quite fifty or a hundred men, but not yet with their beasts.” Fifty struck him as the largest number that could form a caravan, fifty hostages to heat and sandstorms and elusive water supplies. “You must always go a day and a night finding nothing before you find water to drink in this way. Moreover, I tell you that in three places in four one finds bitter and salt and evil water.” No livestock, he reports, nor birds, “because they would find nothing to eat here.”
Marco’s stark characterization of the Desert of Lop was entirely accurate. The region, at an altitude of slightly under three thousand feet, is nearly flat across its length and breadth. Underfoot, a mixture of fine yellow or yellow-gray gravel and clayey sand extends to the horizon in every direction. At times the windstorms the Polos encountered became so powerful that they swept the desert bare of sand, with the wind-borne granules blasting rocks below, and carving furrows as deep as twenty feet, creating a series of undulating dunes hypnotic to the traveler. Marco does not indicate the time of year they made their crossing, but if he and his party ventured into