cadence and accelerated. When we crossed the only bridge built by the Americans in the days of the British Empire I cried, not because I was moved by the beautiful scenery, but because I noticed to my surprise that my temperature had returned to normal. My body was no longer burning, I had stopped shaking with cold or with terror, even though I still felt weightless. Light from street lamps filing slowly past outside reached into the carriage, lingering over me, scrutinising my ashen face and my hands gripping the seat, then disappeared. I sat beside the window, which gleamed in the dark, with tears rolling down my cheeks, though less from relief than a sort of homesickness, a searing feeling of exhaustion, loneliness and general disappointment that settled over me. If this is what freedom has to offer, I thought to myself, then it’s horrible, dismal even.
At various points in our lives, or on a quest, and for reasons that often remain obscure, we are driven to make decisions which prove with hindsight to be loaded with meaning. The moment I arrived in Mandalay I hailed a taxi, but—instead of looking for a hospital or hotel or going and visiting the palace with its seven hundred stupas, its statues and markets—I asked to be taken straight to the port, where I caught the first boat for Pagan.
5
MARCO POLO
THE BOOK OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD CXXVI, THE CITY OF MIEN
Now it should be known that after travelling on horseback across far-flung places for the two weeks I have recounted above, one comes to a city called Mien, a very large and noble place, which is the capital of the kingdom. Its people are idolatrous and have a language all their own. They are subjects of the Great Khan.
NOTES MADE BY PAUL D’AMPÈRE: Mien is the Pagan of today, a village on the banks of the Irrawaddy It has a school of lacquer-work famous throughout the region, and a printing press-monastery It has been the capital of Burma since the ninth century (It is not without significance that, shortly after its independence in 1950, the country rejected the name Burma given to it by the British colonial administration and called itself Myanmar, a name derived from the ancient city of Mien, which, although less familiar to us than Burma, is the name by which it is now officially recognised worldwide.)
Pagan is first referred to in 1106 in a work regarded in China as authoritative, Archival Studies Volume 332:
In the fifth year of Xi Lin of the Song dynasty Pagan sent an ambassadorship with a tribute for the imperial court. These were the instructions given by the emperor: “Pagan is now an important kingdom and no longer a dependent state. It deserves the courtesy granted to Arabia, Tonkin, etc. Henceforth, all imperial missives addressed to its king should be written on a sheet of white paper backed with gold paper, printed with flowers, sealed in a wooden coffer covered in gold plate, locked with a silver padlock and wrapped in silk and satin cloth.
Contrary to accepted wisdom about the Book of the Wonders of the World (by which I mean that it is considered to be more or less a collection of the Venetians personal memories), what he tells us about the road that apparently took him to Mien was not based on his own experience; he must have heard or read it somewhere without ever setting foot in Burma. One sentence alone betrays him: the fact that, according to him, he had to ride for a fortnight to reach Mien-Pagan, when the only access to it—to this day and from whichever direction—is along the Irrawaddy River.
A careful reading of the preceding chapters, where he claims to have stayed in Yunnan very close to the Chinese-Burmese border, proves the even more regrettable fact that he never crossed that border nor saw the Irrawaddy with his own eyes, even though in his writings he describes the river as magnificent and unforgettable. The name might be famous the world over, but at least Marco Polo could have left us a first-hand account describing the rivers course, which would have equipped us to respond to theories put forward by some English geologists who claim it used to flow into the valley of the Sittang, another much wider river that flows from central to southern Burma. If that were the case, then its major western tributary, the Chindwin, and the upper Irrawaddy itself would have