Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [63]
“And when he has drunk, the cups go back to the place they set out.” In case his listeners doubt this report, Marco insists that the exhibition took place in full view of the court: “They do this sometimes while ten thousand men look on, and in the presence of whomsoever the lord wishes to see it; and this is most true and trustworthy with no lie, for it is done at the table of the lord every day.”
Marco reported the occurrence as if he had observed it himself. Perhaps his enthusiasm overwhelmed his common sense in this instance, or perhaps the charmers had temporarily managed to bewitch his senses, along with everyone else’s.
AMONG ALL THE sights at the summer palace, nothing matched Kublai Khan’s huge albino herds. “This lord has a breed of white horses and of mares white as snow without any other color, and they are a vast number”—more than ten thousand in the herd, according to Marco—as well as an equally impressive number of “very white cows.” The milk supplied by these ethereal white mares and cows was considered so precious that “no one in the world dares drink of it except the Great Khan and his descendants,” with the exception of “another race of that people of that region that are called Horiat.” Long ago, says Marco, Genghis Khan accorded the Horiat that privilege “as a reward for a very great victory that they won with him to his honor.” As a result, “he wished that they and all their descendants should love and should be fed on the same food on which the Great Khan and those of his blood were fed. And so only those two families live on the aforementioned white animals, and on the milk obtained from them.”
Everyone else accorded special respect to the noble white beasts. Marco continues: “When these white animals go grazing through the meadows and forests and pass by some road where a man wishes to pass, one does them so great a reverence that if, I do not mean only the ordinary people but a great lord and baron were to see them passing there he would not dare for anything in the world to pass through the middle of these animals, but would wait till they were all passed, or would go so far forward in another direction, half a day’s journey, that he would have passed them.”
For the Mongols, the beasts had magical properties: “The astrologers have told the Great Khan that he must sprinkle some of this milk of these white mares through the air and on the land on the twenty-eighth day of the moon of August each year so that all the spirits that go by air and by land may have some of it to drink as they please.” Once they do, “all his [the khan’s] things may prosper, both men and women, and beasts and birds, and corn, and all other things that grow.”
The worship of the white mares and their milk was commemorated in an annual festival, which took place on the day of the khan’s departure from the summer palace, August 28. “On the day of the festival,” Marco reports, “milk is prepared in great quantity in honorable vessels, and the king with his own hands pours much of the milk here and there to honor the gods. The astrologers drink the milk thus poured out.” Having drunk deeply of the koumiss, king and court would fall into a drunken stupor.
FOLLOWING the feast came the sober departure from Xanadu and the disassembly of the summer palace. Marco says that Kublai Khan “has so planned it that he can make it and take it to pieces at his will very quickly; and it is all packed by pieces and is carried very easily where the lord commands.” With that, the nomads took their leave.
The notion of a collapsible, portable summer palace made of bamboo or any another light, durable material that could be quickly dismantled and packed up and moved