The Cattle Must Needs
Drink The Bad Water, Will They Nill They, Because Of Their Great Thirst.
At The End Of Those Eight Days You Arrive At A Province Which Is Called
TONOCAIN.
It has a good many towns and villages, and forms the extremity
of Persia towards the North.[NOTE 1] It also contains an immense plain on
which is found the ARBRE SOL, which we Christians call the Arbre Sec;
and I will tell you what it is like.
It is a tall and thick tree, having
the bark on one side green and the other white; and it produces a rough
husk like that of a chestnut, but without anything in it. The wood is
yellow like box, and very strong, and there are no other trees near it nor
within a hundred miles of it, except on one side, where you find trees
within about ten miles' distance. And there, the people of the country
tell you, was fought the battle between Alexander and King Darius.[NOTE 2]
The towns and villages have great abundance of everything good, for the
climate is extremely temperate, being neither very hot nor very cold. The
natives all worship Mahommet, and are a very fine-looking people,
especially the women, who are surpassingly beautiful.
NOTE 1. - All that region has been described as "a country divided into
deserts that are salt, and deserts that are not salt." (Vigne, I. 16.)
Tonocain, as we have seen (ch. xv. note 1), is the Eastern Kuhistan of
Persia, but extended by Polo, it would seem to include the whole of
Persian Khorasan. No city in particular is indicated as visited by the
traveller, but the view I take of the position of the Arbre Sec, as well
as his route through Kuh-Banan, would lead me to suppose that he reached
the Province of TUN-O-KAIN about Tabbas.
["Marco Polo has been said to have traversed a portion of (the
Dash-i-Kavir, great Salt Desert) on his supposed route from Tabbas to
Damghan, about 1272; although it is more probable that he marched further
to the east, and crossed the northern portion of the Dash-i-Lut, Great Sand
Desert, separating Khorasan in the south-east from Kerman, and occupying a
sorrowful parallelogram between the towns of Neh and Tabbas on the north,
and Kerman and Yezd on the south." (Curzon, Persia, II. pp. 248 and 251.)
Lord Curzon adds in a note (p. 248): "The Tunogan of the text which was
originally mistaken for Damghan, is correctly explained by Yule as Tun-o-
(i.e. and) Kain." Major Sykes writes (ch. xxiii.): "The section of the Lut
has not hitherto been rediscovered, but I know that it is desert
throughout, and it is practically certain that Marco ended these unpleasant
experiences at Tabas, 150 miles from Kubenan. To-day the district is known
as Tun-o-Tabas, Kain being independent of it." - H. C.]
NOTE 2. - This is another subject on which a long and somewhat discursive
note is inevitable.
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