Laurence Bergreen Read online

  The Badakhshan that greeted Marco Polo was, like the Badakhshan of today, a lush oasis in the desert. To come upon it after weeks on dusty, twisting trails was to encounter a haven promising ease and delight for the exhausted wayfarer. As Marco immediately noticed, the city owed its wealth and notoriety more to its rubies than to legends of Alexander. The rubies, he explains, “are produced in the rocks of great mountains, and when they wish to dig them they are gotten with great trouble, for they make great caverns in the mountains with very great expense and trouble to find them, and go far underground as in these parts here they do who dig the veins of gold and silver.” The king, according to Marco, dug for the gems himself, kept the most precious specimens, and killed anyone who dared to mine them without permission. “The king,” Marco says, “does this for his own honor that the balasci [rubies] may be dear and of great value everywhere as they are, for if he let other men dig them and carry them through the world so many of them would be taken away that all the world would be full of them and they would not be so dear nor of so great value, so that the king would make little or no gain.” The same principles applied to the sapphires in these mountains, as well as “ultramarine azure” (lapis lazuli), silver, copper, gold, and lead. Although Marco does not say so, it is likely that his father and uncle bargained for the gems with the king’s representatives, trading gold or stones that they brought with them for rubies and sapphires, which they concealed by sewing into the folds of their cloaks, keeping them close at all times, day or night. Camels needed water and grass to survive, while merchants such as the Polos needed gems to thrive.

  Marco’s youthful imagination was caught by the sturdy horses of the area, who cantered over the stones without the protection of horseshoes. “They go in the mountains and on bad roads always, and do not hurt their feet, and the men gallop with them over the mountain slopes where other animals could not gallop,” he marvels, “nor would they dare to gallop there.” Marco reports with satisfaction a story that long ago in this region all horses were “born with a horn, with a mark, on the forehead like Bucephalus”—Alexander the Great’s famous mount—“because mares had conceived from that very horse. But afterwards the whole breed of them was destroyed. And the breed of them was only in the power of an uncle of the king, and when he refused to allow the king to have any of them, he was put to death by him; and the wife out of spite for the death of the husband destroyed the said breed, and so it is lost.”

  In this region, Marco saw hawks and falcons above, and fields covered with grain underfoot, all dwarfed by steep, rugged mountains concealing towns that resembled fortresses.

  AMID THIS spectacular setting, something peculiar befell the young Marco, about which he dropped only the slenderest of hints. “When he was in those parts he remained sick for about a year,” he says of himself, “and when he was advised to go up to the mountain”—by whom he does not say—“he was well again.” Those few words suggest an ordeal.

  It is unlikely that he contracted malaria, as is often assumed, since there are no mosquitoes at that high altitude to carry the parasite. Instead, he may have suffered from the effects of syphilis, or severe emotional problems. But more likely, he had tuberculosis. The disease was prevalent in Europe during the years of his childhood. If he had contracted tuberculosis then, the infection could have lain dormant, and become active years later in response to stress induced by travel. He would have developed a fever and a cough, for which opium, or an opium derivative, was a common treatment, and as he recovered, he might have become addicted to the remedy.

  In Marco’s day, Badakhshan was Afghanistan’s leading producer of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), and Afghanistan was, and remains, the leading opium producer in the world. The colorful fields through which he passed produced enormous quantities of poppies, but he would not have considered them flowers of evil. Their bright blossoms, gently swaying in the fresh breeze, looked harmless enough to a lad, as were many of their uses. Tiny black poppy seeds were used in cooking, imparting their nutty flavor to sweet pastries.

  If he became an opium user for medical reasons, or simply to experience the drug’s effects, he would have begun by ingesting the poppy, and perhaps progressed to smoking it, or more precisely, its resin. (Injection did not exist at the time.) One explanation for the unusual length of time that he languished in Badakhshan could be that in the course of trying to recover from a febrile illness, he became dependent on opium, and had to detoxify—a protracted and agonizing process. The symptoms of withdrawal that he might have suffered include nausea, sweating, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, depression, loss of appetite, anxiety, and rapid changes in mood. He would have become edgier, moodier, more sensitive to light, and more highly suggestible. Where his father and uncle saw a road or a bridge or a storm, Marco might have seen evidence of impersonal cosmic forces at work, sweeping them toward an inchoate destiny.

  Fortunately, the mountains of Afghanistan were supremely beneficial to his health. “On the tops of the mountains the air is so pure and the sojourn there so health-giving that if, while he lives in the cities and houses built on the plain and in the valleys near the mountains, a man catches fevers of any kind,…he immediately climbs the mountains and, resting there two or three days, the sickness is driven away,” Marco marvels.

  There is a sound medical basis for his confidence. High altitude and fresh air have long been known as effective treatments for tuberculosis. The low-oxygen mountain air inhibits the growth of mycobacteria, including those that cause tuberculosis. And exposure to sunlight—abundant at high altitudes—increases the body’s vitamin D, which in turn destroys pathogens. In all, the mountains of Afghanistan were a mixed blessing, promoting Marco’s rapid recovery from tuberculosis (if that was his affliction) even while snaring the young man in the coils of addiction.

  No matter what happened to Marco at Badakhshan, he departed a more seasoned traveler, able to cope with the hardships and dangers of life along the Silk Road.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  High Plains Drifters

  But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

  Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

  A savage place!

  THE DELAY at Badakhshan placed the Polo company a full year behind schedule; it was now 1273, they had been away for two years, and their journey east had only begun.

  Once Marco recovered, they proceeded along the Silk Road to higher altitudes, surrounded by wild sheep—Ovis ammon. “They go sometimes in one flock four hundred, five hundred, six hundred,” he says. “And many of them are taken, but they never fail.” These gentle creatures later became known as “Marco Polo sheep,” and they were prized by the region’s capable if slightly desperate hunters. “They are very good archers,” he writes of the hunters, “and the greater part of them are dressed in skins of beasts because they have great dearth of other garments of cloth, for woolen garments are either quite impossible to be had there or are exceedingly dear.” For that reason, “the great ladies of this land and the gentle wear cloth.”

  Women dressed in this manner caught Marco’s attention, if not his fancy, and he offers a description based on a careful personal inspection: “They wear garments like trousers down to the feet like men such as I shall tell you, and make them of cotton and of very fine silk, with musk inside. And they put much cloth into their trousers. There are some ladies who put quite a hundred ells”—equivalent to three feet, nine inches—“of very fine stuff made of flax and of cotton cloth, wrapped about the body like swathing bands,…and make them pleated all round.”

  The fat-bottomed sheep climbing the mountains may have inspired women in the area to exaggerate their physiques. “They do this to show that they have large hips to become beautiful, because in that region their men delight in fat women, and she who appears more stout below the waist seems to them more beautiful,” and not only that, but “more glorious among other women.” Marco’s exploration of the erotic is making only its second appea
rance here, as he languishes in the aftermath of his illness. He is still timid compared with all that he will later set down.

  MARCO SHIFTED HIS gaze from these oddly appealing women to the arduous trail ahead. There was a twelve-day-long trek upriver, past lively villages populated with Muslims, Nestorian Christians, and Buddhists who had come this way on the Silk Road. Eventually the Polo company, with its camels and donkeys, reached another, and lesser, province that Marco called Vocan, which was “subject to the rule of the lord of Badakhshan.” After a brief stopover, the party ascended the steep trail again, “almost always going up through mountains, and one rises so much that the top of those mountains is the highest place, or one of the highest, in the whole world.” For once, Marco did not exaggerate. His party was ascending the Terak Pass, through the Pamir, the traditional dividing line between East and West, heading toward the farthest and wildest western border of China.

  In Turkic, pamir indicates high-altitude rolling grasslands. The Pamir highlands were passable only during cool, dry summers. In season, the Pamir offered pleasant, expansive meadows, unlike anything in Western Europe. Trees were a rarity, as were rivers, but runoff from glaciers provided water. The region’s sunlight was harsh and seemingly gray, barely filtered by the thin atmosphere. Simply breathing posed a great hardship for the wayfarers; they were traversing a region that came to be known as “the roof of the world,” fourteen thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by the highest mountain peaks on earth—Mount Everest among them. The extreme altitude’s thin atmosphere made cooking, or even boiling water, inordinately difficult. Marco could not calculate the altitude of the Pamir, but he noticed that “flying birds there are none because of the high place and intense cold, and because they could have nothing to eat there.”

  For the Polos’ determined little band, the trek through the Pamir required stamina and patience to venture where not even birds would go. They were not the first to test their strength against these ancient mountain passes. Nomads had traversed this harsh landscape for centuries, and along this trail Kublai Khan’s grandfather, Genghis Khan, once led his Mongol troops on their murderous conquests.

  The trek through the Pamir took the Polo company across some of the most extraordinary geologic formations on the planet. The Pamir forms a quadrangle about 150 miles long on each side, marked by snow-capped peaks. The highest mountain ranges in the world radiate from the Pamir: the Hindu Kush extends to the northwest, the Tian Shan—“Celestial Mountains”—system to the northeast, the Karakorum and Himalaya ranges to the southeast.

  The region started to emerge about forty million years ago when the Indian subcontinent collided with Eurasia, a notable instance of plate tectonics—the movement, occasionally violent, of the geologic plates that form Earth’s crust, or lithosphere. In the case of the Pamir, the deformation caused by the immense collision spread all the way to the interior of Eurasia, uplifting Tibet, and created a fault near the Mongolian border. (The collision and deformation continue to this day.) For geologists, the Pamir represents an unusual form of horizontal tectonism, in which colliding plates move sideways as well as up and down. In this case, the horizontal movement may have been caused by the plates’ cooling and shrinking over millions of years.

  Here, on the roof of the world, the Polo company encountered a plateau, an astonishing Shangri-la created by these geologic forces. Marco’s appreciative portrait of this changeless scene remains accurate today: “When one is in that high place, then he finds a large plain between two mountains in which is very beautiful pasture and a great lake from which runs a very beautiful river, both good and large.” Even more remarkably, “Up there in that plain is the best and fattest pasture of the world that can be found; for a thin horse or ox or any thin beast (let it be as thin as you please) put there to graze grows very fat in ten days.” He writes of “multitudes of wild sheep,” distinguished by enormous horns, “some quite six palms long,” from which shepherds made bowls and other vessels, as well as fencing to pen in other animals. Yet nature was not as peaceful as it seemed in the Pamir. By night, wolves descended from the slopes to “eat up and kill many of those sheep.”

  For twelve days the travelers rode through this savage paradise, finding neither “dwelling nor inn, but in the course of the road it is desert and nothing is found there to eat.” They suffered from the rapidly increasing cold and thinning air. Their campfires, starved for oxygen, were dull and stunted, scarcely sufficient to cook their meals.

  At the plain’s end, they followed the trail for another forty days through mountain valleys and slopes, their way marked by piles of animal bones left by previous travelers. As before, their isolation was complete: “Not in all these forty days’ marches is there dwelling nor inn, nor even food, but the travelers are obliged to carry that which they need with them.” There was no caravansary to offer security for the lonely travelers, nor even the evanescent companionship of the road.

  WHEN MARCO at last encountered humanity in the form of mountain dwellers, their primitive state only increased his apprehensiveness. “They are idolaters, even more unfathomable than Muslims,” he writes, “and very savage, and they live by nothing but the chase of animals.” As evidence of their savagery, they wore only animal skins—they were “a mighty cruel and evil people.” Despite the cold and the altitude, the little Polo company picked up the pace, and hurried past without incident.

  THE WORST hardships of the Pamir abated by the time the Polo company reached the thriving oasis town of Khotan, an important stop on the Silk Road, at the edge of the Taklimakan Desert in western China. The region was forbidding in the extreme. The name Taklimakan was said to mean “Desert of Death” or “Place of No Return,” and temperatures varied as much as 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the course of a day. By this point, a bewildered and parched Marco may have thought he was in the middle of nowhere, and in a sense he was correct; Khotan is farther from the ocean than nearly any other place in the world.

  Although nominally loyal to Kublai Khan, Khotan had once been a center of Buddhism, and the lingering Buddhist presence here afforded Marco his first serious exposure to the spiritual system and philosophy that at first repelled him, then intrigued him, and finally won his admiration. The ancestors of the inhabitants were Persian or Indic immigrants from the west and Chinese from the east, who had settled in a fertile strip of land along a river flowing north from the Kunlun Mountains. China conquered Khotan in AD 73; it was succeeded soon after by the Kushana empire from the west, and later on by Tibetan forces. Under Tibetan influence, Buddhism arrived from the East via the Silk Road and flourished here, and temples populated by tens of thousands of Buddhist monks abounded until AD 1000, when Islam abruptly dislodged the Buddhists from their ancient seat. Nevertheless, evidence of Buddhism’s profound impact on Khotan was all around, in the form of images of Buddha (“idols,” Marco calls them), and distant monasteries clinging to mountain overhangs.

  If Marco had overcome his repugnance to “idolatry” and troubled to familiarize himself with Buddhism, he would have learned that the Buddha taught that life is experienced as suffering, brought about by one’s attachment to oneself and to people and objects, all of which are impermanent, and by the resultant craving, which nothing can satisfy. He would have heard that the Buddha said that all sentient beings, including animals and insects, are caught in a cycle of suffering, or samsara, and the results of their actions, or karma, simply create more attachment and more suffering. He would have heard that this cycle continues even after death, since Buddhism held that living creatures are reborn. He would have been relieved, then, to hear that there was a way to escape from the cycle of suffering and to achieve enlightenment, known as nirvana. Had he looked up to the monasteries in the mountains, he would have seen examples of men and women who had renounced their attachments and become monks and nuns, meditating and studying Buddhist scriptures night and day. A traveler like Marco would not have found this so strange, after all, and might have seen
more than a little of himself in the Buddhists’ scheme of things; like them, he had given up his home, comforts, and possessions. Like them, he lived a life of danger and anxiety, of loneliness, of suffering from extreme heat and cold, from thirst, and from deprivation. His life was as empty as the trade route he traveled, his pleasures were fitful and his prospects unknowable, and his goal was distant and seemingly unattainable.

  After the deprivations endured while traversing the roof of the world, Marco had learned to appreciate the luxuries that Khotan offered the traveler. The inhabitants, he says, are “noble”—especially in comparison to the odd creatures he had passed in the mountains—and the city itself is “noble,” as was the surrounding region. “It is fertile and it has abundance of all things needful for the life of man,” he says. “And there grows cotton enough, and flax and hemp, and oil, wheat, corn, and wine and the rest is as done rightly in our lands.” But then he adds smugly that the inhabitants “are not men of arms, but mean enough and very cowardly.” This meant that he felt relatively safe in their midst.

  Having replenished their supplies in Khotan, Marco and his company, trying to make up for time lost in Badakhshan, set out once again for Kublai Khan’s court.

  HEADING EAST, the Polo company faced more than four thousand miles of grassy plains interrupted by occasional mountain ranges. This terrain was known by its Russian name, the Steppe, and it was divided into two parts. The western Steppe extended from the Danube River to the Altai mountain range in Siberia; often described as a sea of grass, it was an area through which rivers and streams flowed freely. The open spaces of the western Steppe enabled caravans and horsemen to travel along the trails and roads that ran its length and breadth.

  The eastern Steppe, extending into Mongolia, was drier and harsher. Grass for grazing was far more sparse, and free-flowing streams yielded to infrequent oases. Negotiating the rigors of the eastern Steppe required endurance and indifference to the elements from those who dared to venture into its expanse.