Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [60]
The secretion itself was reddish brown, with the consistency of honey, and a penetrating odor celebrated as a sexual lure. Marco precisely describes the Mongol method for obtaining musk: “The hunters sally forth at the full of the moon to catch the said animals; for when one has taken it he finds on it at the navel in the middle under the belly between the skin and the flesh a pustule of blood”—said to grow under the influence of the full moon—“which one cuts off with the whole skin and takes it out, and they dry in the sun. The blood is the musk from which comes so great an odor.”
The musk gazelle so intrigued Marco that years later he returned to Venice bearing “the head and feet of one of the animals, dried, and some musk in the musk sac, and pairs of little teeth.” The trophy served as a poignant reminder of the rich experiences in his past, but one that he could, with effort, re-create for his listeners from memory in his jail cell in Genoa.
About the region’s people, Marco had decidedly mixed feelings; he seems to change his mind even as he speaks of them. They had small noses and black hair, and the men sported no beards, only a few chin hairs. The women were very fair, “well-made in all respects,” with no hair anywhere, “except on the top of the head.” Although he considered himself a worldly fellow, he was both fascinated and repulsed to discover that the men “delight themselves much in the sensuality and take wives enough, because their religion…does not hinder them, but they take as many as they can.” Moreover, he says, “I tell you that the men seek beautiful wives rather than noble, for if there is a very comely and fair woman, and she is of low descent, yet a great baron or great man takes her to wife for her beauty and gives silver enough to her father and mother as they have agreed.” Marco may have been thinking how such payments resembled Venetian dowries, which also transformed matrimony into a commercial transaction and a political alliance between families.
MOVING EAST, Marco Polo came to “the province of Tenduc,” which he erroneously considered to be the former domain of the mythical Prester John. Relying on legends rather than facts, he explains that while the “greater part [of the inhabitants] are Christians,” there are also people of mixed race (by which he means the offspring of parents of different faiths, or cultures). These people, known as argon, are “idolaters,” presumably Buddhists and Muslims. Despite their mixed lineage, they, too, earn Marco’s admiration: “They are the whitest men of the country and fine men more than the others of the country who are infidels, and more clever and better traders than can be found elsewhere in any province.”
Marco stretches still further when he identifies the seat of Prester John as the “place which we call on this side in our country Gog and Magog”—a far-fetched but, to Marco, credible reference to the biblical despot Gog, who ruled the land of Magog.
At this point in his narrative, Marco became hopelessly entangled in legends and fragments of ancient history. The usually reliable narrator of personal experience relied all too heavily on half-remembered histories and legends.
WHEN HE TURNED from history to hawking, Marco resumed his characteristic vigor and accuracy as an enthusiastic witness to his times. Hawking served as the sport of choice for both European and Mongol nobility, and Marco grasped its grandeur and status. Kublai Khan, he wanted his audience to know, visited this region each year to hunt. “He hawks with gerfalcons, and with falcons,” Marco writes, “and takes birds enough with great joy and great festivity.”
The Great Khan established himself during hunting season in a settlement of “several little houses made of wood and stone, where they stay the night, in which he has a very great number of cators, which in our language we call partridges, and quail kept.” Moreover, “for their food, the Great Khan always has millet…and other seeds that such birds like sown over those hillsides in summer, commanding that none shall be reaped