Messer Marco Polo

"Well, that depends upon what you call long," says the captain. "If you mean time, it's one thing. If you mean voyage, it's another. For you've got to take into account," says h...

I would have you now see her as I see her, standing before Li Po, the great poet, in her green costume. And Li Po, big, fat, with sad eyes and a twisted mouth, uncomfortable as...

You must see him now as he was seventeen years after he had come to China, and fourteen years after his wife, little Golden Bells, had died, a lean figure of a man, with his hai...

I shall now tell you how it came about that Marco Polo went to China with his uncle and father, though he had no eye for a bargain, or interest in courting foreign women, or sen...

And so they set forth with their great train of red, snarling camels and little patient donkeys and slender, nervous horses toward the rising sun. Behind them the green hills of...

The times went by, and Marco Polo busied himself with his daily affairs, keeping track of the galleasses with merchandise to strange far-away ports, buying presents for refracto...

It was a dark, long room, very high, full of shadows between the flaming torches on the wall. At one side of it was a great fire burning, for all it was the first night of sprin...

"I don't quite understand myself, Golden Bells. But that is all I can tell you. But you will understand more," he said. "My mission is finished now, and I will go back. I will s...

Now it's nearing night on the first day of spring, and you could see how loath day was to be going for even the short time until the rising of the sun again. And though there wa...

"It is not to you, Nicolo Polo, that I wish to speak, nor to you, Matthew Polo, for neither of you are my ambassadors to the Great Khan. Merchant and sportsmen, I honor you, and...

Now, you might be thinking that the picture I'm drawing is out of my own head. Let you not be thinking of it as it is now, a city of shadows and ghosts, with a few scant visitor...

Wherever they went now was sand, and a dull haze that made the sun look like a copper coin. And a great silence fell on the caravan, and nothing was heard but the crunch of the...

At the north end of the great hall sat the Khan himself, and Marco Polo nearly dropped with surprise; for where he expected a great, magnificent figure of a man, with majesty sh...

"Well, now, laddie," said the great Khan, "when we come to examine this sermon you quoted to us, what is there in it but the rule of the righteous man? We've had a great thinker...

And he told her of Paul, who had seen a vision and gone preaching through, the world, who was persecuted, who was shipwrecked, who was bitten by a viper, and who survived everyt...

"That is a warm story, Malachi of the Glen, a warm and colored story, and great life to it, and Golden Bells is as alive to me as herself there by the fire, and I can see Marco...

And he told of the flight into Egypt when savage Herod reigned, and of the Jewish maid and her child sleeping beneath the shadow of the great Sphinx, while the shades of the old...

And now when Marco Polo was rested and had recovered, they brought him from the Convent of the Red Monks to where the khan was in the city of Chandu. Now, there were two palaces...

And after a while he got up from his knees and set his teeth on his sobbing and threw his head back and squared his shoulders and notched his belt and faced the three ancient men.

"Let you sing a little song, Li Po," the magician said, "the way she'll be hearing and come. I have part of her here, and let you put in the garden the atmosphere she loved." An...

They passed through Khotan, where the divers bring up jade from the rivers, white jade and black jade, and green jade veined with gold. They passed through Carnal, the shameful...

And now the place of Li Po was usurped, and gone Sanang with his magic glass, and in the jasmine garden by the Lake of Cranes Marco Polo sat and instructed Golden Bells...