I’ve finished up the first volume of The Travels of Marco Polo and have moved on to Volume 2, a fact that doesn’t amount to much when you’re reading ebooks. There’s no satisfactory closing of the book once I reach the last page — just a new file that I tap on and suddenly I’m back at 0%.
I’m not diving too deeply into the footnotes anymore; one could dedicate a lifetime to learning about Marco Polo’s travels, so I consider myself more akin to a tourist who’s just passing through. I’ll check out what interests me, but leave the minutia to the academics.
It’s interesting, though, to question how reliable Marco Polo is as an author. We know that some of his descriptions are embellished, and others (like those of Prester John) are straight-up folklore, but there are a lot of small details that may be … odd falsehoods. For example, Polo says that there’s a way across a certain stretch of desert that only takes a matter of days, but historians (and cartographers, I suppose) cannot find any such path. Was Polo lying, or have the desert sands shifted?
Who needs answers when you have so many questions?