SOURCE: "Merchant and Missionary Travels," in The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600, Cornell, 1988, pp. 87-121.

In the following excerpt, Campbell discusses methods of description and narration employed by Polo, suggesting that "the being'' that Polo has given to the East in his book "is the body of the West's desire."

In the works of Marco Polo and the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck, the experiencing narrator born and bred in the pilgrimage accounts meets the fabulous and relatively unprescribed East of Wonders [of the East] and the Alexander romances. One might expect this encounter between the eyewitness and the factitious to be a meeting of matter and antimatter, in which explosion a host of images will perforce be smashed. But images are hardier than that:

They have many wild elephants and they also have unicorns enough which are not at all by any...