Darius. There they took leave of their princess, who had come on the
long voyage to love them like fathers, so Marco says, and wept sorely
when they parted. It was while they were still in Persia, where they
stayed for nine months after handing over the princess, that the Polos
received news of the death of the Great Khan whom they had served so
faithfully for so many years. He died at the ripe age of eighty, and
with his death a shadow fell over central Asia, darkening the shining
yellow roofs of Cambaluc,

the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany waggons light,

the minarets of Persia, and the tents of wild Kipchak Tartars, galloping
over the Russian steppes. So wide had been the sway of Kublai Khan. A
shadow fell also upon the heart of Marco Polo. It was as though a door
had clanged to behind him, never to open again. 'In the course of their
journey,' he says, 'our travellers received intelligence of the Great
Khan having departed this life, which entirely put an end to all
prospects of their revisiting those regions.' So he and his elders went
on by way of Tabriz, Trebizond, and Constantinople to Venice, and sailed
up to the city of the lagoons at long last at the end of 1295.

A strange fairy-tale legend has come down to us about the return of the
Polos. 'When they got thither,' says Ramusio, who edited Marco's book in
the fifteenth century, 'the same fate befell them as befell Ulysses, who
when he returned after his twenty years' wanderings to his native Ithaca
was recognized by nobody.' When, clad in their uncouth Tartar garb, the
three Polos knocked at the doors of the Ca' Polo, no one recognized
them, and they had the greatest difficulty in persuading their relatives