128.)
With the caution that Marco's Travels in Tibet were limited to the same
mountainous country on the frontier of Sze-ch'wan, we defer further
geographical comment till he brings us to Yunnan.
NOTE 2. - Marco exaggerates a little about the bamboos; but before
gunpowder became familiar, no sharp explosive sounds of this kind were
known to ordinary experience, and exaggeration was natural. I have been
close to a bamboo jungle on fire. There was a great deal of noise
comparable to musketry; but the bamboos were not of the large kind here
spoken of. The Hon. Robert Lindsay, describing his elephant-catching in
Silhet, says: "At night each man lights a fire at his post, and furnishes
himself with a dozen joints of the large bamboo, one of which he
occasionally throws into the fire, and the air it contains being rarefied
by the heat, it explodes with a report as loud as a musket." (Lives of
the Lindsays, III. 191.)
[Dr. Bretschneider (Hist. of Bot. Disc. I. p. 3) says: "In corroboration
of Polo's statement regarding the explosions produced when burning
bamboos, I may adduce Sir Joseph Hooker's Himalayan Journals (edition of
1891, p. 100), where in speaking of the fires in the jungles, he says:
'Their triumph is in reaching a great bamboo clump, when the noise of the
flames drowns that of the torrents, and as the great stem-joints burst,
from the expansion of the confined air, the report is as that of a salvo
from a park of artillery.'" - H. C]
