Sojourner in Islamic Lands

13: The Pilgrim of the Heart

13 The Pilgrim of the Heart When Marco Polo returned to Europe after years in the East, he made the journey by camelback, horseback, and sail. It pleases us to follow him. We leave the Fertile Crescent behind and go north before going west, getting on the old branch of the Silk Road that went through Anatolia to the Black Sea. The Persian Royal Road, there before it, ran from Susa on the lower Tigris, today little more than a memory. It carried on to the port of Smyrna on the Aegean, known to the Turks as Izmir. According to Herodotus it ran the other way as well, to India and the Far East. Going on two millennia later, Marco Polo used it. So do we. Royal messengers did the entire journey in nine days. Ordinary travelers took three months. Now that I have the bit in my teeth, I don’t want to dawdle , and we cut out the whistle stops. Our destination is Trebizond, poignant in memory. Once a Byzantine trading port, it held out longer than any other Greco-Roman city against the Ottoman Turks. Before we glimpse its towers, we smell the sea. Cargo ships go out with every tide, and ours brings us by easy stages through the Bosporus into the Sea of Marmara. Taking on fresh cargo, we drop anchor for half a day in Istanbul. Marco Polo knew it as Constantinople and would have been horrified that this greatest city in Christendom could have succumbed to Islam. But “gain and loss have always been partners,” Mary observes, and Istanbul, re-created by the Ottomans, is magnificent in its different way. Looming out of the grainy air, its minarets and shining domes lift this weary traveler’s heart. The Pilgrim of the Heart 215 A short boat ride more and we are into the Aegean, closing in on Euboea, the big island that hugs the west coast of Greece. In Marco Polo’s time, it was known as Negroponte, the objective of our trading vessel, also a junction for travelers from the east. The man we are following was going home to Venice, so took another boat round the southern tip of Greece and north into the Adriatic. Venice is the terminus ad quem of the Silk Road, but Rome is the lodestar whose power to draw a sojourner in distant lands never weakens. In Rome I mean to end my long journey. The eternal city tugs at the heart, the seat of emotion. But the heart is also the condition of health, and its waxing and waning rhythm keeps us in fettle. When the two are in sync—when, to invoke the medieval physiology, the elements are “nicely” or precisely mixed in us—we are at the top of our powers. But in age the heart’s vitality wanes, and the downward slide begins. Conscious of that, I cope as I can. Passing the Italian boot to starboard and the island of Sicily to port, we sail up the Tyrrhenian Sea to Civitavecchia. In the Middle Ages, Ostia was the port of Rome, for centuries the gateway for all westward-bound traffic. I have an eighteenth-century print by Piranesi on my living-room wall that shows the island in the Tiber emerging from the water, raised on the timbers of a shipwreck in pre-Republican times. Livy tells about it, how a grain ship coming from Egypt sank in the river opposite the city and, with the passing of years and the help of thrifty Italians, turned into the island it is now. Gain and loss once again, though: as the Isola burgeoned , Ostia waned. Raiding Saracens, Arab pirates, were the culprit, with a strong assist from drifting sand that silted up the harbor. We disembark at Civitavecchia, a little to the north, and find a taxi. “Al centro,” I tell the driver. The trouble with the center is that staying in it is troppo caro: it costs a bundle. But across the Corso in the old Campo Marzio is a pensione on the first floor above the street, that is, the second floor, clean, cheap, and super convenient. This is where we put up, meaning to renew acquaintance with a few of our holy places before writing finis to our travels. As I am unpacking, I have a try at assessing them. My trek through Central Asia can be plotted along a great arc from Kazakhstan in the far north to...