to Venice.]

It has been said that the failure of Kublai's mission to the Pope led
him to apply to the Grand Lama, at Thibet, who responded more
efficiently and successfully than Gregory X., so that Buddhism seized
the chance which Catholicism failed to grasp. The Venetians, however,
lost nothing in the good Khan's esteem. Young Marco began to make
himself proficient in speaking and writing several Asiatic languages,
and was presently taken into the Khan's service. His name is mentioned
in the Chinese Annals of 1277 as a newly-appointed commissioner of the
privy council.[330] He remained in Kublai's service until 1292, while
his father and uncle were gathering wealth in various ways. Marco made
many official journeys up and down the Khan's vast dominions, not only
in civilized China, but in regions of the heart of Asia seldom visited
by Europeans to this day,--"a vast ethnological garden," says Colonel
Yule, "of tribes of various race and in every stage of uncivilization."
In 1292 a royal bride for the Khan of Persia was to be sent all the way
from Peking to Tabriz, and as war that year made some parts of the
overland route very unsafe, it was decided to send her by sea. The three
Polos had for some time been looking for an opportunity to return to
Venice, but Kublai was unwilling to have them go. Now, however, as every
Venetian of that day was deemed to be from his very cradle a seasoned
seadog, and as the kindly old Mongol sovereign had an inveterate
land-lubber's misgivings about ocean voyages, he consented to part with
his dear friends, so that he might entrust the precious princess to
their care. They sailed from the port of Zaiton (Chinchow) early in
1292, and after long delays on the coasts of Sumatra and Hindustan, in
order to avoid unfavourable monsoons, they reached the Persian gulf in
1294. They found that the royal bridegroom, somewhat advanced in years,
had died before they started from China; so the young princess became
the bride of his son. After tarrying awhile in Tabriz, the Polos
returned, by way of Trebizond and the Bosphorus, to Venice, arriving in
1295. When they got there, says Ramusio, after their absence of four and
twenty years, "the same fate befel them as befel Ulysses, who, when he
returned to his native Ithaca, was recognized by nobody." Their kinsfolk
had long since given them up for dead; and when the three wayworn
travellers arrived at the door of their own palace, the middle-aged men
no