Caravan To Xanadu

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]