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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
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CHAP. XIX. THE DESCENT TO THE CITY OF IIORMOS
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The Sárdú road enters the Jíruft plain at the ruins of the old city, the Deh Bekrí route does so at some distance to the eastward. The first six stages performed by Marco Polo in seven days go through fertile plains and past numerous villages. Regarding the cold, " which you can scarcely abide," Marco Polo does not speak of it as existing on the mountains only ; he says, " From the city of Kermán to this descent the cold in winter is very great," that is, from Kermán to near Jíruft. The winter at Kermán itself is fairly severe ; from the town the ground gradually but steadily rises, the absolute altitudes of the passes crossing the mountains to the south varying from 8000 to I 300 feet. These passes are up to the month of March always very cold ; in one it froze slightly in the beginning of June. The Sárdú Pass lies lower than the others. The name is Sárdú, not Sardú from sard, " cold." Major Sykes (Persia, ch. xxiii.) comes to the same conclusion : " In 1895, and again in 1900, I made a tour partly with the object of solving this problem, and of giving a geographical existence to Sárdu, which appropriately means the ` Cold Country.' I found that there was a route which exactly fitted Marco's conditions, as at Sarbizan the Sárdu plateau terminates in a high pass of 9200 feet, from which there is a most abrupt descent to the plain of Jiruft, Komádin being about 35 miles, or two days' journey from the top of the pass. Starting from Kermán, the stages would be as follows :—I. Jupár (small town) ; 2. Bahrámjird (large village) ; 3. Gudar (village) ; 4. Ráin (small town). . . . Thence to the Sarbizan pass is a distance of 45 miles, or three desert stages, thus constituting a total of I Io miles for the seven days. This is the camel route to the present day, and absolutely fits in with the description given. . . . The question to be decided by this section of the journey may then, I think, be considered to be finally and most satisfactorily settled, the route proving to lie between the two selected by Colonel Yule, as being the most suitable, although he wisely left the question open."—H. C.]
In the abstract of Major Smith's Itinerary as we have given it, we do not find Polo's city of Canzaai. Major Smith writes to me, however, that this is probably to be sought in " the ruined city, the traces of which I observed in the plain of Jiruft near Kerinnabad. The name of the city is now apparently lost." It is, however, known to the natives as the City of Dakidnús, as Mr. Abbott, who visited the site, informs us. This is a name analogous only to the Arthur's ovens or Merlin's caves of our own country, for all over Mahomedan Asia there are old sites to which legend attaches the name of Dakianus or the Emperor Decius, the persecuting tyrant of the Seven Sleepers. " The spot," says Abbott, " is an elevated part of the plain on the right bank of the Hali Rúd, and is thickly strewn with kiln-baked bricks, and shreds of pottery and glass. . . . After heavy rain the peasantry search amongst the ruins for ornaments of stone, and rings and coins of gold, silver, and copper. The popular tradition concerning the city is that it was destroyed by a flood long before the birth of Mahomed."
[General Zloutum-Schindler, in a paper in the four. R. As. Soc., Jan. 1898, p. 43, gives an abstract of Dr. Houtsma's (of Utrecht) memoir, Zur Geschichte der Sa jugen von Kerman, and comes to the conclusion that " from these statements we can safely identify Marco Polo's Camadi with the suburb Qumadín, or, as I would read it, Qamádin, of the city of Jíruft."—(Cf. Major Sykes' Persia, chap. xxiii. : " Camadi was sacked for the first time, after the death of Toghrul Shah of Kermán, when his four sons reduced the province to a condition of anarchy.")
Major P. Molesworth Sykes, Recent Journeys in Persia (Geog. Journal, X. 1897, p. 589), • says : " Upon arrival in Rudbar, we turned northwards and left the Farman Farma, in order to explore the site of Marco Polo's ` Camadi.' ... We came upon a huge area littered with yellow bricks eight inches square, while not even a broken wall is left to mark the site of what was formerly a great city, under the name of the Sher-i-J iruft. "—H. C.] The actual distance from Bamm to the City of Dakianus is, by Abbott's Journal, about 66 miles.
The name of REOBARLES, which Marco applies to the plain intermediate between
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