Outside Magazine

The first sign of doubt is a renewed fanaticism. Back at university, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I studied harder than ever in hopes of becoming an astronaut, despite questioning, deep down, whether I wanted to permanently emigrate to Mars if it meant a lifetime of containment. I spent my spare time presiding over a space club and volunteering in a marine microbiology lab, where my job was to tease long, invisible threads of DNA from the basaltic crust of the Pacific Ocean. Though I didn’t have the opportunity to retrieve those sea-floor samples in a submarine, the lab was located in a windowless basement, which offered a similar experience of sensory deprivation, only without any of the adventure. Whenever I walked outside, pale and blinking, I felt as if I’d been submerged for months. Books kept me going like bubbles of oxygen. One afternoon, shielding my face against the sun after the dim fluorescent flicker of the lab, I settled onto the grass on campus with my old friend Marco Polo, hoping to let my eyes readjust to wider horizons with the help of a childhood hero—this time in his full, unabridged glory.

But as I read The Description of the World, I was shocked to encounter a stranger in the Venetian explorer, someone who didn’t relish slogging across lands that left me dizzy with longing. Instead, this Polo skirted the Taklamakan’s wandering dunes as widely as possible, meekly plugging his ears against the spirit voices he feared would lure him into the trackless sands. He may never have seen a big-horned sheep alive in the Pamir, just their horns carved into bowls or stacked as fences, though this species, Ovis ammon polii, was eventually named after him: the Marco Polo sheep. And when he visited the Tibetan Plateau, he dismissed it as a blighted wasteland. “You ride for 20 days without finding any inhabited spot,” he complained, “so that travelers are obliged to carry all their provisions with them, and are constantly falling in with those wild beasts which are so numerous and so dangerous.” Again and again the so-called explorer dashed around mountains and deserts as quickly as possible, cursing wilderness as a mere obstacle to swift progress and profit.

I couldn’t exactly blame him, for the Silk Road was a 13th-century superhighway for trade, after all, and Polo a merchant. After following his businessmen uncles to Cathay, where Kublai Khan took a shining to the Venetian teenager, Polo was tasked with assessing the value and variety of goods throughout the Mongolian empire, which at the time spanned Asia to the edge of Europe. Polo took this duty seriously, and as a result his travelogue reads more like a catalog. The book details the precious commodities available along the Silk Road: silver in Armenia, rubies in Badakhshan, black magic charms in Kashgar, ivory in India. With regard to lands less obviously exploitable, such as Tibet, the text is far terser.