Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [98]
Earlier in the Travels, he had spoken of paper money, and silk money, about which Europeans would remain deeply skeptical. Now he would take up money in the form of salt, a concept still more baffling to Western sensibilities. Marco explains how this sort of currency was produced in the region: “They take salt water and have it boiled in a pan…for an hour [until] it becomes stiff like paste, and they cast it into a mold, and it is made into shapes…that are flat on the under-side and are round above, and it is of a size that can weigh about half a pound.” The salt cakes were placed on fire-heated stones until they dried. “On this sort of money they put the seal of the lord; nor can money of this kind be made by others than the officers of the lord.”
Once he became familiar with the intricacies of trading these homemade hard salt cakes for gold, Marco realized they presented an opportunity to acquire a substance whose intrinsic value he fully appreciated. Throughout “Tibet,” he saw merchants “go through mountains” to reach remote hamlets where they traded salt cakes for gold to “make vast gain and profit, because those people use that salt in food, and also buy things that they need. But in the cities they use almost nothing but the broken pieces of the coins in food, and spend the whole coins.” One can sense Marco’s wonder at this odd transaction, in which both sides came away with the item they believed they needed. The government salt monopoly, it seemed to him, was virtually a license to print, or in this case boil and bake, money.
MARCO next turned his attention to a place he called Karagian, his rendering of the Turkish name for the modern Chinese province of Yunnan.
Although ruled by Kublai Khan’s son Temür, Karagian offered scant reassurance for the unsuspecting merchant traveler. It was a land where quantities of “very great adders…very hideous things to see and to examine” lurked in the swampy muck. The creatures were ten paces long, and thick as a man. Barely containing his disgust, Marco endeavors to portray these brutes: “They have two short legs in front near the head, which have no feet, except that they have three claws, namely, two small and one larger claw made sharp like a falcon’s or a lion’s.” The creature’s massive head was the stuff of nightmares, with its two shining eyes, each the size of “four dinars.” As for the mouth, Marco would have his audience believe that it was “so large that it would well swallow a man [or] an ox at one time,” tearing its victim to shreds with “very large and sharp teeth.” In sum, says Marco, “it is so very exceedingly hideous and great and fierce that there is no man nor beast that does not fear them.”
The monsters were, of course, neither adders nor serpents, but crocodiles. Marco resolutely outlines how to catch one of them without getting eaten alive. Hunters, he explains, “put a trap in the road by which they see that the adders are usually gone toward the water, because they know they must pass there again. They fix a very thick and strong wooden stake so deeply in the ground—that is, in the road of those adders, on some sloping bank by which the path descends—that…none of the stake is seen; in which stake is fixed a sword made like a razor or like a lance, and it projects about a palm above the stake, very sharp and cutting and always sloping toward the approach of the serpents. And he covers it with earth or sand so that the adder does not see it at all. And the hunters put very many such stakes there in many places…. When the…serpent comes down the middle of the road where the irons are, it strikes them with such force that the iron enters it by the breast and rends it as far as the navel, so that it dies immediately. When they see them dead, the crows begin to clamor. One knows by the noise of birds that the serpent is