“Marco, I accept freedom as the price of my diamond,” Miranda answered instantly, “but instead of returning to England I wish to remain with you.”
“Then so be it,” the Khan declared in a resonant voice. “Marco Polo, I accept your service and will appoint you a task ere long.” With that he raised his hand to dismiss me from his attention.
I dropped on my knees and knocked my head four times upon the floor in the full kowtow to Kublai Khan, as though indeed for him the world was made. For I was Marco Polo, an adventurer from Venice, for whom no grain of corn or dust was made, but who by the same token must get on in the world, and who loved it with great passion. And beyond all this, he was a man of middle height, past sixty, stout, with a gross nose, who had sighed a little as he parted with his new slave girl; so I could not withhold my tears.
I saw him reach for the wine cup that stood on his stand. Then the notes of a hidden flute floated into the silence and lightly breached it as a waking bird’s first warble breaks the mysterious hush of dawn.
HISTORICAL NOTES
BOOK ONE
[1] The legend of Prester John is still told and believed in remote areas of Central Asia. Marco Polo repeated it with tongue in cheek for reasons unknown.
[2] This simple formula for invisible writing must have been known to the skilled Arabian chemists long before Marco Polo’s time.
[3] We cannot help wondering over the effect on history if Kublai Khan’s plan of importing one hundred learned Christian priests to spread Christianity throughout Asia had been carried out. It may be that the greatest opportunity that ever came to any man came to Pope Gregory X (1271-1276). For reasons even now unknown, he let it pass.
[4] The hypothesis of hatred between Nicolo Polo and his son Marco Polo underlying the plot of this novel derives from evidence that Nicolo left his wife before Marco was born to live in Constantinople, did not return at her death, and did not lay eyes on Marco until he was in his sixteenth year. If this were deliberate abandonment, which I believe, Marco obtained poetic revenge when he dictated the account of his travels that has come down to us. After brief mention of Nicolo’s earlier journey, he abandons him to oblivion. Not merely pushed into the background, he is barely mentioned throughout the long chronicle.
[5] The Jews were well advised. However, the rebellion of Kublai’s cousin Nayan was put down in four years of costly war. “He was wrapt in a carpet, and tossed to and fro so mercilessly that he died.”
[6] In spite of the culture, gaiety, humor, and spotty piety of the Venetian people in Marco Polo’s time, they were ferocious as wolves in punishing criminals.
[7] The fact that the world was a sphere was as well known to savants in 1270 as the existence of island universes to astronomers of the present day.
[8] Hypnotism was employed by mystics in India for psychoanalysis (by whatever name) long before the Christian era.
[9] Even Albertus Magnus tried to make out that asbestos was salamander wool or plumage. Actually the ancients knew what it was, but never put it to general use. The piece that covered the napkin of Saint Veronica was found in a pagan tomb of the Appian Way.
[10] The earliest authority on chess was Masudi, an Arab writing three hundred years before Marco Polo, and the game was ancient even then. The Italians probably learned it from the Byzantians a century before Marco Polo. Carlyle believed that King Canute of England was a chess player.
[11] Eratosthenes of Alexandria, who knew perfectly well that the world was round and something like 25,000 miles in circumference, lived seventeen hundred years before Columbus.
BOOK TWO
[12] Mount Ararat, nearly 17,000 feet high, stands in these cold highlands.
[13] The Polos came to Hormuz with apparently every intention of taking ship on the Arabian Sea and going by sea to Cathay. Why they changed their minds and retraced their steps and journeyed overland, no historian can tell. So it is fair for a novelist to guess.
[14] Marco’s mention of having “lost his whole company except seven persons” to the murderous slave-catching Karaunas near the village of Konsalmi is one of the very few references to personal experiences in the whole body of his work. He tells no more than this, but the trick that the bandits played in this novel is a time-honored one among their ilk to the present day.
[15] The descendants of the Old Man of the Mountains have reigned over their sect from then until now. One of the later Imams, Aga Khan I, won the favor of the British and died in 1881. The heir to the present Imam married and was divorced by an American movie star, Rita Hayworth.
[16] The custom of permitting temporary marriages between travelers and the girls of the oasis was widespread in Central Asia. In Kashgar the girls were known as chaukans until very recently.
[17] In Marco’s day, lions were fairly common in Asia from Arabia to the western foot of the Pamir. However, he used the word “lion” to mean the tiger as well, and occasionally described the latter as having black stripes. Small, pale-colored tigers are found today in Persia, but it was the black-maned lion of the desert that captured the imagination of royal hunters, sculptors, architects, and poets of that region and time.
[18] The author has seen a lion launch a charge so violently that he could not instantly obtain traction—his legs driving at such a pace that he literally tore the turf from under his own feet.
[19] Marco Polo’s description of the great wild sheep of the Pamir is the first known reference to the animal in Western literature. As a result it has been officially named Ovis Poli—the Marco Polo sheep. Kermit Roosevelt wrote me that he considered this sheep the finest big-game trophy he had ever taken.
[20] Such tales are still told of the dread Takla Makan.
[21] It is not at all unlikely that the learned physicians of the Mohammedan capitals had learned the use of escharotics.
[22] On his return to Venice at long last, Marco Polo owned a slave named Pietro. By the ups and downs of Kismet, was he Zurficar the Tatar?
[23] The worship of the mystic cross Swasti was widespread in the great highlands bordering the Gobi. Its worshipers were called the Swastika, which word came to mean the jointed cross itself.
[24] Unlike Kublai’s great palace in Peking, well described by Marco Polo, his pleasure palace Xanadu (Chandu) Keibung is not portrayed in any contemporary writing that we know. But Marco gives us a few paragraphs about the park, and a great poet dreamed about it to the whole world’s gratitude.
[25] The striped hunting lions Marco Polo described were patently tigers. The tigers to which Kublai’s trainers had the most access were the huge, long-furred tigers of Korea and Eastern Siberia.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.
[The end of Caravan to Xanadu, A Novel of Marco Polo by Edison Marshall]