chanmino dandare dana Tana al Ghattajo e sichurissimo![39] Think only of what it all means.  Marco Polo travelling where no man set foot again till the twentieth century.  The bells of the Christian church ringing sweetly in the ears of the Great Khan in Peking.  The long road across central Asia perfectly safe for merchants.  The ‘many persons at Venice’ who have walked in the streets of Hangchow.  This is in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, in the despised and hidebound Middle Ages. E sichurissimo!  It takes some of the gilt off Columbus and Vasco da Gama and the age (forsooth) of ‘discovery’.

But a change came over everything in the middle of the fourteenth century.  Darkness fell again and swallowed up Peking and Hangchow, the great ports, the crowding junks, the noble civilization.  No longer was the great trade route sichurissimo, and no longer did Christian friars chant their Masses in Zaiton.  The Tartar dynasty fell and the new rulers of China reverted to the old anti-foreign policy; moreover, Islam spread its conquests all over central Asia and lay like a rampart between the far east and west, a great wall of intolerance and hatred stronger by far than the great wall of stone which the Chinese had once built to keep out the Tartars.  All Marco Polo’s marvels became no more than a legend, a traveller’s tale.

But that great adventurer was not done for yet.  Nearly a century and a half after Marco’s death a Genoese sea captain sat poring over one of the new printed books, which men were beginning to buy and to hand about among themselves.  The book which he was reading was the Latin version of Marco Polo’s travels.  He was reading it with intentness and indeed with passion.  As he read he made notes in the margin; on over seventy pages he made his notes.[40] From time to time he frowned and turned back and read again the tale of those great ports of Cathay and the gold-roofed palaces of Cipangu; and always he wondered how those lands might be reached, now that the wall of darkness covered central Asia, and anarchy blocked the road to the Persian Gulf.  One day (may we not see him?) he lifted his head and smote his hand upon the table.  ’I will sail west’, he said.  ’Maybe I shall find the lost island of Antilha in the western ocean, but maybe on its far rim I shall indeed come to Cipangu, for the world is round, and somewhere in those great seas beyond the coast of Europe must lie Marco Polo’s rich Cathay.  I will beseech the kings of England and of Spain for a ship and a ship’s company, and the silk and the spices and the wealth shall be theirs.  I will sail west,’ said the Genoese sea captain, and he smote his thigh.  ‘I will sail west, west, west!’ And this was the last of Messer Marco’s marvels; he discovered China in the thirteenth century, when he was alive, and in the fifteenth, when he was dead, he discovered America!

CHAPTER IV