Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls - M. Polo

The plan was, as for many other books, to read it directly in Italian, since it’s more or less in Italian that it was written, but Il Milione never stroke me as an easy read. Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls is a very short extract published by Penguin that can give an idea what the book is about, which might or might not be what you actually want to know.

I wanted to read this book because it’s a major inspiration for Calvino’s Le Città Invisibili, the similarities are striking already in the extract. Object of the few pages are some Indian Kingdoms; it’s interesting that the tales manage to be repetitive with such a small sample - my idea is that the editor wanted to give a taste of a general aspect of the book, rather than just having picked by chance pages with similar tales. The repetitions would fit the backstory of the book being born as transcriptions.

Mostly I thought the tales were very imaginative, but not necessarily impossible, which is good: Marco Polo telling that in Sri Lanka there’s a mountain where some people believe that the mortal remains of Adam himself are buried is not per se impossible - what seems eher impossible is that Adam himself (whatever this means) lays there, not that some people believe it. And it is a nice concept, Adam being buried somewhere in Sri Lanka. How did he get there? Are there apples there?

Ideas of this type are good. While they might be absurd, they have some internal consistency and answer a basic question (Adam died; where is Adam buried?) without giving details, which can be produced autonomously. Nobody cares exactly what grain of sand lies at the center of the pearl, the pearl is important; but you do need irgendein grain of sand to get a pearl.

So far so good. Then there are this kind of things:

And again I can tell you that the men extract the diamonds by other means. You should know that there are great, deep valleys whose rocky sides are so steep that no one can penetrate them. But I will tell you what the men do. They take some lumps of bloody meat and fling them down into the depths of the valleys; and the places where the meat is flung are jittered with diamonds, which become embedded in the flesh. Now the fact is that many white eagles live among these mountains and prey on the serpents. And when these eagles see the meat lying at the bottom of the valleys, they swoop down, seize the lumps and carry them off. The men, meanwhile, have been carefully watching where the eagles go, and as soon as they see that one has alighted and is swallowing the meat they rush over as fast as they can. The eagles are so fearful of the men who have surprised them that they fly off and fail to take away the meat. And when the men reach the place where the meat is, they pick it up and find it studded with diamonds.

Ideas of this type are bad. Instead of being a grain of sand, it’s very structured and completely absurd - how do the diamonds become “embedded” in the flesh, how do you follow an eagle on foot, but most importantly, how can it be that is the easiest method people were able to come up with? In short, the problem is that this is already a pearl, but not one we produced, and a pearl is a finished product which should be of value by itself - unlike the grain of sand. But in what kind of necklace can you insert something like this?

(Maybe in Cyrano’s. The passage above is quite similar to those found in the Voyage dans la lune.)