Cycling the Silk Road: a trial of trucks and truth
In an excerpt from Lands of Lost Borders, the author considers the veracity of an earlier explorer of the route — Marco Polo
What I craved was wilderness, and the Black Sea wasn’t it. Every day people asked us what we thought of Turkey. “Your country is chok güzel, very beautiful,” we told them, adding that we’d love to come back someday — in the summertime. But even warmth and sunshine probably couldn’t redeem stretches of the Black Sea, particularly once the steep and winding country roads we’d started on morphed, as our host father had warned, into a heavily trafficked highway. The road plundered the seashore of any charm or elegance it once claimed. Most days we felt like we were biking through the scum on the rim of a giant bathtub.
The analogy is apt. Edged by six countries, and fed by rivers from 20 more, the Black Sea drains nearly a third of continental Europe. Since the sea’s only outlet is the strangulated upper current of the Bosporus, as (natural scientist Luigi Ferdinando) Marsigli showed, its deepest layers lie relatively still and stagnant. These bottom waters are poor in oxygen but rich in hydrogen sulphide, a colourless, poisonous gas that reeks of rotten eggs. Except for a few hardy microbial reefs, which subsist on methane seeps on the sea floor, little survives down there.
The road that edged it was similarly bleak. We pedalled a four-lane highway where nothing lived but speed and grief. We passed ditches floating with soda cans and dead dogs, torsos inflated like furred balloons.
We passed a woman in a bus shelter with a face like a perpetual wince. We rode by a freshly splattered cat, then watched a second cat slink through the traffic to check on his mashed companion. We narrowly skirted a pile of dead anchovies on the road shoulder, and the smell of rotting fish stayed with us for kilometres.
I thought about how caviar was once so plentiful, in 14th-century Byzantium, that it was considered the food of the poor. Centuries before that, (Greek geographer) Strabo reported that you could pull bonito, a small relative of tuna, out of the Bosporus with bare hands. Now I was more likely to pull out a plastic bottle.
Although the Black Sea’s oxygenated shallows and undersea shelves once boiled with life, coastal cities in the nations surrounding it have been dumping pesticides, fertilizers, detergents and poorly treated sewage into the shared borderland of its waters. This flush of nitrogen and phosphorus has triggered massive blooms of phytoplankton, which grow in vast, rippling sheets of crimson goo that shield seawater from sunlight. When the blooms die off and decompose, huge quantities of oxygen are consumed, leaving surface waters nearly as anoxic and sterile as the Black Sea’s depths. Only a few invasive species thrive in such conditions, among them the rapa whelk, a Japanese snail that has decimated bivalve diversity in the Black Sea. Beaches are strewn with punctured seashells, the tiny holes marking where small whelks drilled into the carapace, injected digestive enzymes, and slurped out the liquefied flesh. Large whelks don’t waste their time drilling but instead pry bivalves open with their one creepy muscled limb.
It was enough to make Massachusetts Institute of Technology seem appealing. If I was doomed to spend my life with anoxic microbes and alien species, at least laboratories lacked rain and roadkill. Turkey was nothing like I’d imagined, nothing like the Silk Road I’d dreamed of and talked about finishing for so long. If someone had offered me a spacesuit at that point in the bike ride, I would have accepted it gratefully, relieved for any kind of protective barrier between me and weather and traffic on the Black Sea. At what point was I running away from life, and at what point was I running toward it? The distinction suddenly struck me as crucial and troubling.
Atruck veered so close to (my childhood friend) Mel Yule that its draft sucked her off the road shoulder and onto the highway. Fortunately no other traffic was nearby. She veered back onto the shoulder, giving the truck driver the finger in the process, but he didn’t see it or didn’t care. The two of us differed only slightly in scale from the bugs flecking his truck’s giant windshield. When I’d realized, as a kid, that explorers should put themselves at stake, I hadn’t exactly had Turkish transport trucks in mind.
“And we chose this,” I despaired. “We have no one to blame but ourselves.” “And Marco Polo,” Mel added. She had a point, though some historians doubt the Venetian merchant ever travelled beyond the Black Sea. Polo’s name isn’t mentioned in surviving Mongol or Chinese records, which seems odd for a high-level diplomat in the court of Kublai Khan. He confused major Asian battles that happened years apart. He failed to mention the Great Wall, chopsticks and other striking peculiarities of the region he supposedly called home for more than a decade.
Because of these errors and omissions, some scholars, notably British historian Frances Wood, argue that Polo likely stopped travelling thousands of kilometres short of the Orient and that his stories were merely hearsay from fellow traders. She might as well have accused Neil Armstrong of not landing on the moon. “I am condemned to a lifetime of Marco Polo,” Wood noted ruefully in a lecture she gave a year after publishing her playfully subversive book, Did Marco Polo Go to China? “Before embarking upon what I had thought was an amusing little exercise in the cutting down (though not necessarily total demolition) of a legend, I had no idea how seriously Marco Polo is viewed.”
He is seriously viewed in the public imagination, at least, where the Venetian merchant has long been apotheosized as a household name — and one romantically synonymous with “explorer,” though all Polo did was travel to lands new to him but old to others and write about what he saw. Could it be so simple? The idea gave me strange hope.
Some academics take Polo at his word, arguing that for whatever picky facts he got wrong — such as reporting 24 rather than 13 arches on what is now called “Marco Polo Bridge” near modern Beijing — he got many other cultural and geographic details right, far more than can be ascribed to fluke or gossip. Plus Polo didn’t even write his book; he dictated stories to Rustichello da Pisa while both men were imprisoned during the Venetian-Genoese Wars, and Rustichello compiled them into The Description of the World. Any errors or omissions in the manuscript, then, can be blamed on a bad ghostwriter.
I align myself with the believers, though for a rather different reason: the book is frankly too boring to have been made up. If Marco Polo was such a fabulist, why does his magnum opus read like a guidebook written by a merchant for other merchants? His account of the Silk Road is so utilitarian, so oblivious to wonder and beauty, so obsessed with the bottom line. If Polo had written a dream-like sequence in the style of Italo Calvino’s In- visible Cities, describing a Silk Road of possible futures and unforgettable pasts — territories of memory and desire, ruin and renewal — I might be less likely to believe the book. I would also love it more.
Of course, I’m judging Polo’s work by modern literary standards. In his day and age, The Description of the World seemed as sensational as a science-fiction novel, at least to its mostly European readers, who had never heard of cities with 12,000 bridges, winds so hot they suffocated people and turned them to dust, or black stones and a black liquid that burned.
His book would go on to be the most famous and influential travelogue of all time, spurring the likes of Columbus to seek shortcuts to Asia’s treasure trove of gold and spices. When it was first published, though, the book mostly earned Polo the mocking nickname “Il Milione,” or Marco of the Millions, reflecting the extravagant scale of his claims about the wealth and territories of Kublai Khan. People doubted the Venetian merchant’s seemingly tall tales even then. And perhaps such skepticism was deserved, given Rustichello’s fulsome prologue asserting that “from the creation of Adam to the present day, no man, whether Pagan, or Saracen, or Christian, or other, of whatever progeny or generation he may have been, ever saw or inquired into so many and such great things as Marco Polo.”
When Polo was on his deathbed, several nobles of Venice visited him to extract confessions, threatening that this was his final chance to come clean. But Polo, defiant to the last wheeze, said, “I did not tell the half of what I saw.”
Neither did we, certainly not to our parents. When Mel and I called home with updates from the Silk Road, we told them the better half of it: the warmth and hospitality of the Turkish people, the delicious meals that rendered scurvy impossible and the sweeping, moody views across the Black Sea, that liquid frontier always to our left. Maybe Polo also realized that some things are best left unsaid. Excerpted from Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris. Copyright © 2018 Kate Harris. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.