And here you creep in from a foggy night, smelling like the crotch of a Sirkeci whore!' 'But I expected you on jeweled elephants,' complains the first Venetian they meet, 'I Re Magi, coming out of the East in a triumphal parade, with Nubian slaves beating drums. Their return a quarter century later is at first less than auspicious.

They bring with them bricks of saffron, more valuable than gold, 'cods' of musk, hidden about their privates, and two dispirited Dominican priests who vamoose after one look at the glorious East. To say that adventures occur is like saying The Right Stuff is about flying machines. The essentials of the tale are the same: Marco, his father and uncle set out for the court of the Khan Kubilai for the purpose of bringing thither commerce and Christianity. He is also more than pleased to comply, for reasons we do not fully appreciate until the end of this, his second book. Recalling that 'we determined to leave out of the (first) book anything which might strain the credence of any stay-at-home- reader,' Marco embraces his old friend's new literary endeavor. He wants the material for an epic poem about a peripatetic Frenchman. Rustichello has written Marco, now an autumnal Venetian of 66, asking him to 'tell all' about the 24-year voyage from Venice to Peking and back. The Journeyer opens with a letter from Messer Marco to Luigi Rustichello of Pisa, the writer of romances who collaborated with Polo on his book The Travels while the two were prisoners of war in Genoa. Gary Jennings, the author of Aztec, has now told the other half-and then some.

The old voyager is said to have shot back, 'I have not told the half of what I saw and did.' He died, but he did not give up the spirit. ON HIS DEATHBED, Marco Polo was asked by a priest to admit what the world already knew: that he had stretched the truth about his travels.

The adventures of marco polo book