Pools and marshes, which
are much frequented by the birds when they are moulting, and when they
have quite cast their feathers and can't fly, those people catch them.
They also live partly on fish.[NOTE 2]]
And when you have travelled forty days over this great plain you come to
the ocean, at the place where the mountains are in which the Peregrine
falcons have their nests. And in those mountains it is so cold that you
find neither man or woman, nor beast nor bird, except one kind of bird
called Barguerlac, on which the falcons feed. They are as big as
partridges, and have feet like those of parrots and a tail like a
swallow's, and are very strong in flight. And when the Grand Kaan wants
Peregrines from the nest, he sends thither to procure them.[NOTE 3] It is
also on islands in that sea that the Gerfalcons are bred. You must know
that the place is so far to the north that you leave the North Star
somewhat behind you towards the south! The gerfalcons are so abundant
there that the Emperor can have as many as he likes to send for. And you
must not suppose that those gerfalcons which the Christians carry into the
Tartar dominions go to the Great Kaan; they are carried only to the Prince
of the Levant.[NOTE 4]
Now I have told you all about the provinces northward as far as the Ocean
Sea, beyond which there is no more land at all; so I shall proceed to tell
you of the other provinces on the way to the Great Kaan. Let us, then,
return to that province of which I spoke before, called Campichu.
NOTE 1. - The readings differ as to the length of the journey. In
Pauthier's text we seem to have first a journey of forty days from near
Karakorum to the Plain of Bargu, and then a journey of forty days more
across the plain to the Northern Ocean. The G. T. seems to present only
one journey of forty days (Ramusio, of sixty days), but leaves the
interval from Karakorum undefined. I have followed the former, though with
some doubt.
NOTE 2. - This paragraph from Ramusio replaces the following in Pauthier's
text: "In the summer they got abundance of game, both beasts and birds,
but in winter, there is none to be had because of the great cold."
Marco is here dealing, I apprehend, with hearsay geography, and, as is
common in like cases, there is great compression of circumstances and
characteristics, analogous to the like compression of little-known regions
in mediaeval maps.
The name Bargu appears to be the same with that often mentioned in
Mongol history as BARGUCHIN TUGRUM or BARGUTI, and which Rashiduddin calls
the northern limit of the inhabited earth.
