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The Travels. Last year an airplane flew from Rome to Tokyo via Australia in less than a month. The Polos had been gone from Venice several times that long before they had passed through the two Armenias into Mosul and Maredin (where they observed "a fountain of oil . . . good for burning"). Thence they pushed on to Baudas (Bagdad), where faith once moved a mountain, and Persia, where a few could tell of three Magi that had brought sacred fire from Bethlehem in Judea. They traversed Kirman and Reobarle, on the Tartar marches, Marco noting the wild birds and manufactures. They felt the hot wind of Ormus, saw antimony and zinc sublimated in Kobiam. They heard of Aloadin, last Old Man of the Mountain, in Mulehet, who obtained youths to perform his errands of justice or revenge by feeding them hashish before and after placing them amid actual streams of milk and honey, tended by sweet houris, so that they thought they had tasted paradise and yearned to die!** On the elevated plain of Pamer (Pamir) the wild sheep were so numerous men built fences and road-markers of their heaped horns. . . .
In Marco's first book he told of all the regions passed through to reach the great Kublai Khan's stately pleasure domes at Shandu ("Xanadu," Shangtu), at Kanbalu (Peking) and Kin-Sai (Hang-Chau).
In his second book he described the Khan's conquests of all but all of Asia; his many cities, court ceremonies, hundreds of wives and how they were chosen; his sorcerers, sagacity, tolerance, generosity; his tremendous hunting parties; also mentioning how he, Marco, served the Khan as investigator, messenger, governor; how his elders built a mangonel to aid a siege; how black stones (coal) were burned for fuel in Cathay; and explaining how the death of the Persian Khan's wife afforded the Polos a lucky chance to get home.
The third book told of the Khan's conquest of Zipangu (Japan) and of all the islands and countries visited by the Polos on their voyage home—Ceylon, Sumatra, Java; India (where diamonds were obtained, as Sinbad later found, by dropping meat into steep valleys whence the eagles brought it up preciously encrusted); Madagascar (where flew rukhs [rocs?] huge enough to prey on elephants); Zanzibar (where the elephants were made drunk with wine before battle).
In the last book he told of the Khan's northern dominions and the sunless Russian marches where men traveled the snow and ice on wheelless chariots drawn by great dogs.
The Significance. Marco, note again, was not imaginative; he wrote for princes, for profit. His dying words were, "I have not told half that I saw." And his observations are continually receiving modern indorsement. His journal of the world's first great exploring party is appropriately republished in the year that terrestrial exploration was completed by polar Polos in a ship designed and flown by another Italian.††
FICTION
Birds