Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [43]
Amid the desolation of the Desert of Lop, Marco found remarkable beauty and a palpable sense of the supernatural. Like a saint of ancient times, he went into the desert and he beheld visions, especially at night, when the senses are alert and fears multiply. “There dwell many spirits that make for the wayfarers great and wonderful illusions to make them perish,” he says. “For while any company of merchants or others is crossing the desert…, often it happens that they hear spirits malignant in the air, talking in a way that they seem to be their companions, for they call them sometimes by their names, and many times they make them, believing that they are some of them, follow those voices and go out of the right way so they are never reunited to their fellows and found, and news of them is never heard.”
Afraid of being taken for a mere fabulist, Marco emphasizes the veracity of his description: “Again I tell you that not only by night does this appear, but often even by day men hear these voices of spirits, and it often seems to you that you hear many instruments of music sounding in the air, and especially drums more than other instruments, and the clash of weapons.” At other times, the singing sands sounded like a “rush of people in another direction.” Distracted travelers chased after the illusion, hoping to catch up with “the march of the cavalcade,” only to find by day that they were hopelessly lost, tricked by spirits, “and many not knowing of these spirits come to an evil end.”
Travelers who braved this unnerving stretch of the Silk Road developed techniques to defeat the dangerous illusion: “Those who wish to pass that way and cross this desert must take very great care of themselves that they not be separated from their fellows for any reason, and that they go with great caution; they must hang bells on the necks of their horses and animals to hear them continually so that they may not sleep, and may not be able to wander.” Even in daylight precautions proved necessary: “Sometimes by day spirits come in the form of a company to see who has stayed behind and he goes off the way, and then they leave him to go alone in the desert and perish.” At other times, these spirits “put themselves in the form of an army and have come charging toward them, who, believing they were robbers, have taken flight and, having left the highway, no longer knowing how to find the way, for the desert stretches very wide, have perished miserably of hunger.”
To make sure that his readers understand that he is reporting fact, not legend, concerning the many deceptions wrought by the singing sands, Marco repeats, “They are wonderful things to hear and difficult to believe, which these spirits do; but indeed it is as is told, and much more wonderful.”
Although Marco’s account strains credulity, as if it were the result of too much sun and too little water, he was faithfully reporting a frequently observed phenomenon, “Singing Sands,” caused by the action of wind on dunes. The resulting hum has been likened variously to the strumming of a mysterious harp, or booming, or chanting, and has been detected throughout Mongolia; in China, where it was known as “booming sand” and even in Brazil. In the thirteenth century, the Chinese scholar Ma Duanlin said of this treacherous region: “You see nothing in any direction but the sky and the sands, without the slightest trace of a road, and travelers find nothing to guide them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of camels. During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds, sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing, and it has often happened that travelers going aside to see what these sounds may be, have strayed from their course and been entirely lost, for they were the voices