Nicolo, Maffeo, Marco

The Book.* Here is retold the story of two ancients and a man of middle age who, in 1295 A. D., returned to their native Venice after an absence of 26 years, so changed that they had to beat their way into their own house past forgetful relatives. They drove doubt from their listeners' minds by many changes of rich raiment during a banquet they straightway held, and by slitting seams of the rags they had arrived in and pouring forth heaps of jade, diamonds, rubies and other stones of the Far East. Even then they were not fully believed, and from the numbers of men and the distances they described, their audiences became known as "the court of the millions." Until just last year one of the things they related -- of a sheep with great horns -- was still regarded as semi-fabulous./- English schoolboys still call a dubious story a "Marco Polo."

Yet Marco was not an imaginative man. He was a shrewd merchant, businesslike. When he was imprisoned, fighting for Venice at Genoa in 1298, rather than waste time he employed an amanuensis and dictated a careful account of what his father (Nicolo) and uncle (Maffeo) and self had seen. He indited the script to "Emperors, Kings, Dukes, Marquises, Earls and Knights," full knowing that the house of Polo would profit by the advertisement. Copies of this manuscript were made in several tongues, which scholars and explorers have annotated through the centuries. The present volume is the classic translation by Scholar Marsden of England (1818), edited now with reference to the most modern scientific research and with an aim forgotten since Marsden's time, in a welter of notes, namely, to make the Polos' travels readable primarily as rare narrative.

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

INNOCENT BIRDS--T. F. Powys-- Knopf ($2.50). Readers will wonder whether Author Powys could have been aware of the U. S. interpretation that might be put upon his title. Probably not; Author Powys is, though an ironist, himself an innocent. Yet U. S. slang was never more expressive than on this accidental occasion. The scene is the English croft of Madder; the story, a frail, obscure network of the sex impulses, superstitions and avarice of incredibly primitive creatures. There is Mr. Bugby, who buys "The Silent Woman" because of the sinister coincidence that successive keepers of that tavern were speedily widowed. There is Maud Chick, an imbecile girl longing to have a baby, whom Mr. Bugby avoids after one experience; and Polly Wimple, prim Miss Pettifer's maid whom he does not avoid, to her great cost. A cormorant, far from the sea, that flaps and roosts arbitrarily at dusk whenever anything especially morbid or malicious is about to take place, is an apt metaphor for a shadowy flight of the author's imagination which is inconsequential beside other of his masterly stories (The Left Leg, Black Bryony, Mr. Tasker's Gods).

On Going White

FLIGHT--Walter White--Knopf ($2.50). The foremost Negro novelist shows light-colored Negresses that "going white" is not worth the candle. The education of auburn-haired Mimi Daquin by her wistfully intelligent father is a lesson in race tolerance and dignity. Her free-love child and disillusionment by an educated lover teach moral courage to young theorists and at the same time demonstrate to white readers that sex morals are not so innocently casual among Negroes as Mr. Sherwood Anderson and other people think. Even Harlem, so-called cultural capital of the Negro, is not above scandalmongering. Mimi leaves it to become a downtown modiste, a white girl. Her looks and ability soon bring success and a suitor, a white, amiable young financier whose importunity will not hear honest Mimi's tragic secret. They marry. He never knows. But in the end she flees for the warmth and color of her own kind. The author's style and inspiration being rather conventional, interest in his book will depend largely upon the reader's concern with racial problems.

"Most Blatant"

MANTRAP--Sinclair Lewis--Harcourt, Brace ($2). For the moment laying aside the loaded knouts with which he has scourged Main Street, Babbitt and the medical profession, Castigator Lewis now swings a cutting quirt upon upholders of "the most blatant of all American myths," namely, Roughing It Like a He-Man in the North Woods. The chief culprit is round, thick, heartily self-satisfied E. Wesson Woodbury, village fatboy grown up to hosiery sales-manager, who backslaps his tired little lawyer-friend Ralph Prescott into taking a canoe trip to Mantrap Landing, upper Canada, and then bully-rags him for a tenderfoot after flies, rain, solitude have dispelled the jimmy-pipe dream.

Trader Joe Easter of Mantrap turns up, the genuine article in quiet He-Men, and it really looks as though the Castigator were going to take a few last slashes at E. Wesson Woodbury and finish the story in unparalleled Open Spaces style. Prescott curses his bumbling tormentor, quits him and goes off with sympathetic Joe Easter. Joe philosophizes with winning rusticity, curbs wild nature with handsome ease and is quite touching about his young wife, a city manicure-girl regenerated by Nature.

But never fear. Castigator Lewis is too full of important messages for mankind to let even this slender opportunity escape him. Joe's little Alverna is soon revealed in her true cosmetics--an incorrigible, shallow flirt, bored stiff by Joe's backwoodsmanhood. She tempts Prescott until he has to run away to save his honor; then she overtakes him and completes the seduction. The runaways are pursued through the wilderness by a forest fire and Joe Easter, the fire hanging back just far enough to make an impressive setting for some sterling heroics by Joe when he catches up. Joe has been cleaned out by tricky Indians and now offers 1) to save his good friend Prescott from foolish Alverna; 2) to commit suicide. After a protracted love-feast, the two men ship Alverna back to Minneapolis, and splendid Joe then pretends to get drunk so that Prescott will see what a mistake it would be to take him to New York and introduce him to cultured friends.

All told, the book is rather a mediocre feat for the celebrated scorner of average men, literary grace, Pulitzer Prizes. The flaying of E. Wesson Woodbury may spoil a great many people's summer vacations, but far more malice could have been wrought, and more sales made, if the ending had not been so tediously dragged out. After paddling far up the stream of U. S. literature, Mr. Lewis has idly turned his canoe and shot some unexciting rapids.

*THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO--Edited by Manuel Komroff -- Boni, Liveright ($3.50).

/-The U. S. brothers Roosevelt (Theodore, Kermit) collected, as everyone knows, specimens of Ovis poli on the Pamir Plateau last summer (TIME, Oct. 12, SCIENCE).

**From hashishin, as the Old Man's followers were called, comes "assassin."

/-/-Colonel Umberto Nobile of the Norge.