After You, Marco Polo

Jean Bowie Shor

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786258243
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

From Venice to Pelping across high Asia, an adventurous American couple follows a dangerous trail seven centuries old."Franc and Jean Shor are the most widely traveled American couple on the world scene. They have gone to the farthest reaches, to the bleak places few have ever seen. They are warm-hearted, hospitable people, and keen observers, with great perception and understanding. "It's an exciting and absorbing adventure story that Jean Shor tells. It has a gay and humorous side; and a grim and near tragic one too. She and Franc follow Marco Polo by car, by horse and yak, and on foot over the top of the Pamirs of Central Asia, through heat and freezing cold. She has also followed Marco Polo's example by giving a faithful account of the people of the various regions—their customs, institutions, habits, diet, dress, dances, and religion."This is the best travelogue I know. It takes one where only a handful from the West have ever gone. The account is on par with Marco Polo's great classic. And it has more warmth and meaning, because it is rich in the details that only an understanding woman can contribute."—WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and author of Beyond the High Himalayas, etc.

1—AMARILLO TO SHANGHAI

THERE IS A PASS across the High Pamirs, in the region called Wakhan. It is dangerous, and eerie, and awful. Marco Polo crossed that pass, and so did I. And one night I stood watch in a rude rock shelter on a snow field under the 20,000-foot summit while my husband, Franc, raved in fever.

I knew that he was probably dying, and in his lucid moments he knew it too. In an atmosphere so thin that every movement required painful exertion of will and body, I gathered yak dung for our guttering fire. I melted snow and cajoled him to drink, and I bathed his parched skin.

The candle, flickering low, was our last. I adjusted it so the light would not shine in Franc’s eyes, but would be reflected on the broad, brooding faces of our Kirghiz yak pullers. The military escort provided by the King of Afghanistan had deserted us. Only the tribesmen remained, and they were no longer reliable. For three days we had had almost nothing to eat. Now, when I forced medicine down Franc’s throat, they suspected that I fed him from a secret store. They gave me no help, only watched intently. I knew they were waiting for Franc to die, hoping he would die quickly, so that they could desert us.

Franc’s temperature passed 105, almost certainly fatal at such an altitude. He became delirious and struggled to get out of his sleeping bag. He said he was going back to the pass. He is a big man, but I tied him in the bag, and sat on him until he slept.

At dawn, exhausted, I crawled through the door of the abandoned sheep fold in which we had found refuge, and looked out upon the march of ice-helmeted stone giants ringing us, and asked myself a question. I asked it aloud:

“Jean Bowie Shor, what are you doing here?”

My heart knew the answer. I had persuaded my husband to embark with me upon an impossible adventure. I had dreamed of following the footsteps of Marco Polo, for many years a hero to me, on his immortal journey from Venice to China. I wanted to follow Marco Polo’s footsteps exactly, across the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Roof of the World.

Everyone had said that we couldn’t make it, not in the middle years of the twentieth century. Travel had been simpler in the thirteenth century, when visas were unnecessary and there wasn’t so much suspicion and fear on the border roads between East and West. In Marco Polo’s day, people were more hospitable to strangers. Marco Polo had traveled with the blessings of a pope, the sanction of princes, and under the protection of the Golden Tablet of Kublai Khan. We possessed a plain American passport, in a day when Americans were not everywhere welcome.

The expedition seemed impossible for a physical reason as well—what geographers call the Pamir Knot. Imagine that a giant confined inside the earth in Central Asia had struck an angry blow against his round prison, so that his fist raised a great plateau, and his knuckles twisted peaks. In this convulsion were created the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, to jostle the mighty Himalayas. Here is the Pamir Knot. Here Russia, Afghanistan, China, and Pakistan meet but do not merge.

Struggling toward Cathay, Marco Polo had traversed the Wakhan to reach the Pamirs. Franc had talked with awe of this treacherous corridor. Few Europeans, and no woman, had ever attempted it. If we crossed successfully, we would be the first Westerners to go through the Wakhan in 110 years. Expeditions backed by governments, possessing elaborate equipment and unlimited funds, had been turned back. The odds were forbiddingly heavy against our succeeding.

I had been stubborn, insistent. The responsibility was mine. My fault that we were trapped in this savage place. I was afraid, and more than afraid. I was guilty.

If I wanted to indulge in wild rationalization, I might suggest that the person chiefly responsible for my predicament that night in the Wakhan was not me at all, but my grandfather, George Morland Bowie, who died when I was young. He was a restless Scottish schoolteacher who started for China in the seventies. He crossed the Atlantic, took the train to St. Louis, and then set out on horseback for San Francisco, where he hoped to board a Shanghai-bound packet. He never made it. In central Texas he met a girl, and that was as far on the road west as Grandfather Bowie ever traveled. He settled down, married, started a family, and founded a prosperous lumber business.

My grandfather Bowie was a courageous man, for he wore his kilt and plaid in Texas. He was bald and of medium height, but I was always awed by his enormous dignity, his formal manner, and by his beautiful white beard.

His questing spirit refused to be confined to the town of Weatherford, Texas. Whenever he could get away from business he journeyed to Europe, Mexico, Central and South America. And he bought travel books, and stories of adventure, and histories by the hundreds. In those days, sets of books were sold from door to door, and in Texas from ranch to distant ranch, by dusty book peddlers in weathered buckboards. These plains-hardened traveling salesmen seldom stopped at the Bowies’ without making a sale.

Grandfather Bowie never did get to China, but as Tennyson said of Marco Polo, he was “always hunting with a hungry heart.” This wanderlust was his special legacy to me, a heritage which many years after his death drove my husband and me to the pass in the High Pamirs.

My career as a nomad began, I believe, at the age of five. I loaded my little red wagon with apples, cookies, and my favorite doll, and found my way to the house of a relative, ten unfamiliar blocks away. Our Negro cook commented sagely, “That Miss Jean, she sure got her foot in the path!” When I started to read, I skipped the books that little girls usually like, and began early to concentrate on the far places. I soon discovered The National Geographic Magazine, with its fascinating maps and pictures. Grandfather had been one of the earliest members of the National Geographic Society, and he had saved each issue. Then, through Rotary International, I corresponded madly with children in Holland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Poland, who wanted to hear from American “cousins.” I learned a good deal—mostly about Texas. My correspondents on the other side of the Atlantic had a thousand questions to ask, and I had to do considerable research to answer them.

In the cool Texas evenings, I sailed off to India, to the South Seas, or to England with Kipling and Maugham and Robert Louis Stevenson. I accompanied the caravans of Harold Lamb, and read every history of Asia and Europe I could lay my hands on. With wonder, I consumed Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, and Sven Hedin’s accounts of his travels in Asia. I read Cellini, Leonardo da Vinci, and the history of the Borgias. But above all else, I was enthralled by the adventures of Marco Polo. The itinerary of Marco Polo I could recite like a train schedule, and it was Marco Polo who taught me respect for maps.

I dreamed of becoming an explorer, and seeking out the unknown places of the earth. In my dreams the purple sunsets became Oriental battlements, and the tiny twisters we call dust devils took human shape and pursued me across the plains. Right in Texas, I have fled the Mongol hordes of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.

Eventually, those dreams began to come true. I became familiar with Europe, and saw war, and witnessed the creeping conquest of China. I was captured by Communists and subjected to brainwashing, when the term, and the ordeal, was a novelty to Americans. I hitchhiked across the Gobi Desert, and looked upon the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and the tomb of Genghis Khan. Finally, I followed Marco Polo’s path east, from Venice to China.

My first trip abroad was a wonderful carefree, pre-war unconducted tour. An aunt from Connecticut—everyone should have one!—sent me a check for $1,000 with a note saying that “it is about time you see Europe.” I left a week later while the family was still trying to decide if it was all right for me to go alone. The summer and autumn of 1938, I stretched that $1,000 to the vanishing point, begrudgingly parting with my pennies in London’s Soho, in Paris where I discovered lapin meant rabbit and you could eat it, in Berlin where I caught a frightening glimpse of Hitler meeting Admiral Horthy in a city eerily floodlit in green. I stretched it through Hungary and Italy and Holland. My pocket-book and my feet took an awful beating. Everywhere I traveled third class, or no class at all, wide-eyed, incredulous, and certain that I had found my profession, traveling.

As it turned out, the U.S. Government took the responsibility for my second safari out of my aunt’s hands. Soon after the United States entered World War II, I joined the American Red Cross and asked for overseas duty. My life in far-off places began—with a vengeance.

I was assigned to the 306th Fighter Wing of the 15th Air Force, based on the Adriatic side of Italy. The mission of the wing was to protect the heavy bombers that struck each day into Germany and Central Europe. My mission was to command a clubmobile, and serve doughnuts and coffee to the fighter pilots and their ground crews on two adjoining airfields.

I saw the first missions off before dawn every morning, and welcomed the last ones home in late afternoon. I delivered and distributed some three thousand doughnuts a day on the bases, altogether handing out more than a million. One morning, suffering from doughnut fatigue, I inadvertently mixed soap powder into the batter, and the next day most of the Fourth Squadron of the 52d Fighter Group were immobilized. (Perhaps, come to think of it, immobilized is not precisely the word!) Yet, on the whole, the doughnut business must have seemed worthwhile because whenever the mix ran low the wing loaned me a B-17 heavy bomber—complete with crew, of course—and I rode to Florence or Bari in high style for more lard and flour from the Red Cross depot.

When a mission was expected back, I’d drive out to the field in either an old ambulance or an equally old command car, unlimber a big camp stove, and make coffee in twenty-gallon lots, boiling my water in GI cans. I’d lay out trays of cups hammered from old tin cans, a ten-pound sack of sugar, punctured cans of milk, and doughnuts by the hundreds. Then I’d ring a gas alarm bell or honk my horn for customers. Business was fine. There never was a slack season.

For months the home of our five-girl unit was the little town of San Severo where we occupied a two-room apartment over a wine press. San Severo’s red-light district was down our street some six blocks and was often a source of bewildering amusement and some annoyance. One day a misdirected and happily inebriated GI knocked on our door, and I answered. “Howdy, Signorinie,” he said politely, listing a bit to starboard, and added a few more phrases in bad Italian.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t understand you. What do you want?”

His eyes lit up. “Gee!” he said. “They speak English, too!”

We straightened him out, not without difficulty, and sent him on his way.

I won’t forget the unfailing politeness and consideration of the GIs. Occasionally I’d stay on the airfield after dark for a movie. You haven’t heard descriptive language until you’ve sat through a Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth film attended by several hundred appreciative airmen and soldiers shouting advice, opinions, and ad lib dialogue. So before the start of a feature, invariably some alert GI would stand up and make an announcement. “Watch your language, you bums,” he’d say. “Jean’s here tonight.” I’m afraid I spoiled their fun.

After V-E Day I traded a case of fruit juice to a British flying officer for a bottle of Scotch, and swapped the Scotch with a homeward-bound American sergeant for a “liberated” Volkswagen. I filled its tank with army gasoline, loaded PX supplies aboard, and toured Italy at leisure. Most of the countryside was in the same battered condition as my car. A firsthand look at war’s bleak aftermath should be part of everyone’s education. If you haven’t seen the effects of war you cannot understand it. Even those who have seen it forget quickly, as they forget pain. They prefer to recall leaves in Paris and Wiesbaden rather than numbing days at the front and starving children in ruined villages and bodies piled like cordwood in concentration camps.

WHEN THE WAR was over on both fronts, I resigned from the Red Cross, but by then my foot was definitely “in the path.” The world of Marco Polo lay to the east, in Asia. In 1946 I took a job with UNRRA in China and went to work as an administrative assistant in Shanghai.

Post-war Shanghai was the world’s most wicked city—and proud of it. Its fabled White Russian women were at once its courtesans and entrepreneurs. Its black marketeers traded in dollars and gold and diamonds, canned food and morphine, silks and bodies, and in the secrets of any country. It was jammed with Jewish refugees, and American troops, and rich Chinese fugitives from the areas already overrun by the Communists, and people without “visible means of support” who might rightfully be called international adventurers.

It was a city of skyrocketing prices and worthless currency and chain cocktail parties and wild rumors. Incredible luxury and unbelievable squalor lived side by side. Everyone assured everyone else that Shanghai’s future was bright, that things were going to be all right, but nobody really believed it. The shadow of doom lay over the city.

Yet I loved my years in Shanghai. I loved the crowded streets and the luxurious hotels, the little shops where ivory and bronze and jade were piled in careless profusion, the men who sold sesame seeds on the curbs, the ricksha coolies who jauntily risked their lives in front of speeding cars. I loved sluggish Soochow Creek, and the ancient junks which covered its slimy surface, and the families who spent their lives and made their living on these junks and raised innumerable children to play in the filthy water. Shanghai was wicked and riddled with graft, but it was alive and vibrant, and there was no boredom there....

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• DEDICATION
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• 1-AMARILLO TO SHANGHAI
• 2-HITCHHIKE ACROSS THE GOBI
• 3-THE TRAIL OF MARCO POLO
• 4-VENICE TO TABRIZ
• 5-PERSIA AND THE SHAH
• 6-TEHRAN TO KABUL
• 7-THROUGH THE WAKHAN
• 8-HUNZA