Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [95]
At this point in Marco’s account, one of the magicians collapses, “as if dead, and foams at the mouth.” Those left standing beseech the “idol” to forgive and heal the sick man. At times, the idol responds in the affirmative, at other moments, he replies that the sick man “is not yet fully forgiven.”
Having exacted still more tribute, “the spirit answers, after the sacrifice and all things commanded are done, that he [the sick man] is pardoned and he will soon be healed. When they have this answer, and have sprinkled broth and drink and have made a great light and great censing, believing that in this way they have given the spirit his share, they say that the spirit is on their side and is appeased, and they all joyfully send the sick man home, and he is made whole.”
On occasion, the sufferer died after the magicians pronounced him healed. Nor did everyone who fell sick receive attention. A rite of this complexity was reserved for the wealthy, and took place only once or twice a month, according to Marco, who was ever attentive to finances, even where magic was concerned.
The individuals practicing these black arts, Marco insists, were deeply suspect, “bad men of evil habits.” They looked the part, too, accompanied by the “very largest mastiff dogs in the world, which are as large as asses and are very good at catching all sorts of wild beasts.”
IN TIBET, Marco confronted the dark side of the Mongol conquest of Asia. To his credit, he describes in unflinching detail the havoc wrought by Kublai’s brother Möngke, who, Marco flatly states, “destroyed [Tibet] by war.” Following the path of Möngke’s devastation, Marco experienced stabs of anxiety and dread the likes of which had not appeared in his account since his poignant description of crossing the Gobi Desert. The experience challenged his assumptions about the nature of the Mongol Empire and his small place in it. Alone in the desolate world, Marco had nothing more than his talismanic paiza to clutch for reassurance, a reminder of the comfort, indulgence, and grandeur of Cambulac and especially Kublai Khan, several thousand miles to the east. Even though the gold paiza conferred a special status on Marco as the khan’s emissary, the object did nothing to dispel his sense of bewilderment at the chaos surrounding him, some of it caused by Möngke, some by the baffling and seemingly perverse nature of the Tibetans. All around him was evidence of the original Mongol culture—nomadic, predatory, its values utterly different from the charitable ethic that Kublai Khan championed.
Marco passed through a desiccated landscape drained of color and harmony, the somber aftermath of conquest. In disgust, he recounts what he saw in the “dilapidated and ruined” region: “One passes for twenty days’ journey through inhabited places, through which a vast multitude of wild beasts roam, such as lions, lynxes, and other kinds; for which reason the passage is dangerous.” But the dangers would only increase as he ventured ever deeper into Tibet.
POP! Pop! Pop!
The explosive reverberation tearing through the curtain of night frightened Marco, as it did everyone else new to the region, and there was no escaping it. Eventually he found the explanation: “There are found in that region, and specially near the rivers, very wonderfully thick and large canes”—three palms around, he estimated, and fifteen paces long. “The merchants and other wayfarers who go through such country, when they wish to rest by night, take some of those canes with them and put them on a cart, and make a fire of them, because when they are in the fire, they make so great crackling and so great report that the lions and the bears and the other fierce beasts have so great a fear of it that when they hear those terrible reports they fly as far as they can, and would not try to come near the fire for anything in the world. And the men make fires like this to protect themselves and their animals from the fierce wild beasts