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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
82
MARCO POLO BOOK II.
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the texts, and that grant quantité de chevaus was probably intended. Valuable ponies are produced in those regions, but I have never heard of large horses, and Martini's testimony is to like effect (p. 141). Nor can I hear of any race in those regions in modern times that uses what we should call long stirrups. It is true that the Tartars rode very short—" brevissimas habent sire/ as," as Carpini says (643) ; and the Kirghiz Kazaks now do the same. Both Burmese and Shans ride what we should call short ; and Major Sladen observes of the people on the western border of Yun-nan : " Kachyens and Shans ride on ordinary Chinese saddles. The stirrups are of the usual average length, but the saddles are so constructed as to rise at least a foot above the pony's back." He adds with reference to another point in the text : " I noticed a few Shan ponies with docked tails. But the more general practice is to loop up the tail in a knot, the object being to protect the rider, or rather his clothes, from the dirt with which they would otherwise be spattered from the flipping of the animal's tail." (AIS. Notes.)
[After Yung-ch'ang, Captain Gill writes (II. p. 356) : " The manes were hogged and the tails cropped of a great many of the ponies these men were riding ; but there were none of the docked tails mentioned by Marco Polo."—H. C.]
Armour of boiled léather—" armes cuiracés de cuir bouilli "; so Pauthier's text ; the material so often mentioned in medieval costume ; e.g. in the leggings of Sir
Thopas :—
" His jambeux were of cuirbouly, Ilis swerdës sheth of ivory,
His helme of latoun bright."
But the reading of the G. Text which is " cuir de bufal," is probably the right one. Some of the Miau-tzú of Kweichau are described as wearing armour of buffalo-leather overlaid with iron plates. (Ritter, IV. 768-776.) Arblasts or crossbows are still characteristic weapons of many of the wilder tribes of this region ; e.g. of some of the Singphos, of the Mishmis of Upper Assam, of the Lu-tzi of the valley of the Lukiang, of tribes of the hills of Laos, of the Stiens of Cambodia, and of several of the Miau-tzű tribes of the interior of China. We give a cut copied from a Chinese work on the Miau-tzú of Kweichau in Dr. Lockhart's possession, which shows three little men of the Sang-11liau tribe of Kweichau combining to mend a crossbow, and a chief with armes cuiracés and jambeux also. [The cut (p. 83) is well explained by this passage of Baber's Travels among the Lolos (p. 71) : " They make their own swords, three and a half to five spans long, with square heads, and have bows which it takes three men to draw, but no muskets."—H. C.]
NOTE 5.—I have nowhere met with a precise parallel to this remarkable superstition, but the following piece of Folk-Lore has a considerable analogy to it. This extraordinary custom is ascribed by Ibn Fozlan to the Bulgarians of the Volga : " If they find a man endowed with special intelligence then they say : ` This man should serve our Lord God ; ' and so they take him, run a noose round his neck and hang him on a tree, where they leave him till the corpse falls to pieces." This is precisely what Sir Charles Wood did with the Indian Corps of Engineers ;—doubtless on the same principle.
Archbishop Trench, in a fine figure, alludes to a belief prevalent among the Polynesian Islanders, " that the strength and valour of the warriors whom they have slain in battle passes into themselves, as their rightful inheritance." (Fraehn, ['VolgaBullaren, p. 5o ; Studies in the Gospels, p. 22 ; see also Lubbock, 457.)
There is same analogy also to the story Polo tells, in the curious Sindhi tradition, related by Burton, of Bahá-ul-hakk, the famous saint of Multán. When he visited his disciples at Tatta they plotted his death, in order to secure the blessings of his perpetual presence. The people of Multán are said to have murdered two celebrated saints with the same view, and the Hazáras to " make a point of killing and burying in their own country any stranger indiscreet enough to commit a miracle or show any
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