Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [48]
SIXTEEN DAYS’ march from Kamul across a “little desert,” the Polo company came upon a natural wonder in the form of asbestos, which, like so much else in China, was scarcely known in the West. Nowadays, airborne asbestos fibers are notorious for their association with serious respiratory illness, including cancer, but in Marco’s day, fabrics woven of asbestos were held in high regard as the equal of gold and fit for the burial shrouds of Eastern kings. Following the convention of the era, Marco called the substance “salamander,” after the tiny, lizard-like animal that was supposedly impervious to fire. He immediately grasped the military implications of a fireproof material.
“In this mountain is found a good vein from which salamander is made that cannot be burnt if it is thrown into the fire,” he reports. The salamander is neither beast nor serpent, he explains, and “it is not true that those clothes are of the hair of an animal that lives in fire, as they say in our country.”
Marco tries to dispel the tenacious European belief that the salamander cloth had such a fantastic origin, explaining that he had become acquainted with a Turkish merchant named Çulficar, “who was very knowing in my judgment and trustworthy,” and who had for three years supervised production of salamander—or asbestos—from these mountainside mines for the khan himself. To demonstrate just how far asbestos was from being the byproduct of a supernatural creature, Marco furnishes a careful description of its manufacture. “When one has dug from the mountains some of that vein,” he writes, “it is twisted together and makes thread like wool. And therefore when one has this vein he has it dried in the sun, and then when it is dry has it pounded in a great copper mortar,” washed with water, “and only that thread like wool of which I told you stays on top of the water, and all the earth clinging there, which is worthless, falls off.” The resulting thread was spun into cloth and towels. “When the towels are made I tell you that they are not at all white, and they are brown when they are taken from the loom. But when they wish to make them white they put them in the fire and leave them to stay there a space of an hour, and when it is taken out the towel becomes very white, like snow.”
Expecting to be disbelieved, he insists, “I have seen it with my eyes put into the fire and come back very white.” No fire-dwelling serpent is involved, and all the popular tales to that effect are nothing but “lies and fables.” With such statements, Marco demonstrates that he could demolish old myths as readily as he generated new ones.
IN CAMPçIO, yet another ill-defined stop along the Silk Road, the Polo company rested once again. The usually expansive Marco furnishes only this cryptic note concerning the extended interlude: “Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco stayed about one year in this city for their business, which is not worth mentioning.”
By the time they mounted their camels and donkeys again, it was 1274, according to the Christian calendar. Marco was turning twenty. The Polos had been traveling the Sericulture Superhighway for three years, and they were still more than two thousand miles from their destination, the court of Kublai Khan.
CHAPTER SIX
The Secret History of the Mongols
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man….
WITH EVERY MILE that Marco Polo traveled along the Silk Road, he became ever more aware of the grandeur of the Mongol Empire, and the mystique surrounding the founder of the Mongol dynasty, Genghis Khan, reviled throughout Europe. Yet he has this to say concerning the ruthless warrior: “Genghis Khan was a man very upright: eloquent, and of great valor and of great wisdom and of great prowess.” Continuing in this boldly revisionist vein, Marco insists: “I tell you that when this man was chosen for king he ruled with such justice and moderation that he was