ree years and a half, till they stood in the presence
of Kublai Khan; beyond Gobi and the Great Wall and the mountain barriers
of China, in Cambaluc or Pekin, "princess encrowned of cities capital."

Their journey was first through Armenia Lesser and Greater, then through
Mosul (Nineveh) to Bagdad, where the last "Caliph and Pope of the
Saracens" had been butchered by Holgalu and his Tartars, sewn in a sack
and thrown into the Tigris by one account, walled up alive by another,
in 1258. But though the stories in Marco's journal are a main interest
of his work, as a summary and reflection of the science and history and
general culture of the Christian world of his time, we must not here
look outside his geography. And his first place-note of value is on the
Caspian, "which containeth in circuit twenty-eight hundred miles and is
like a lake, having no union with other seas and in which are many
islands, cities, and castles." The extent of the Nestorian missions,
"through all parts of India and to Cairo and Bagdad, and wherever
Christians dwell," strikes him even now at the beginning of his
travels--much more when he finds their churches on the Hoang Ho and the
Yang-Tse-Kiang--declining indeed, but still living to witness to the
part which that great heresy had played as an intermediary between the
further and the nearer East--a part which history has never yet worked
out. Entering Persia as traders, the Polos went naturally to Ormuz,
already the great mart of Islam for the Indian trade, where Europeans
really entered the third, and, to them, unknown belt of the world, after
passing from a zone of known home-land through one of enemies' country,
known and only known as such. Failing to take the sea route at Ormuz for
China, as they had hoped, our Italians were obliged to strike back
north-east, through Persia and the Pamir, the Kashgar district and the
Gobi steppes, to Cathay and the pleasure domes of Kublai, visiting
Caracorum and the Altai country on the way, by a turn due north. In 1275
they were in Shang-tu, the Xanadu[25] of Coleridge--the summer capital
of Kublai Khan--and not till 1292 did they get leave to turn their faces
to the West once more.

[Footnote 25:

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sacred sea.

COLERIDGE: _Kublai Khan_.]

Here the Polos became what may be called consulting