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.