IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
352 RECOLLECTIONS OF TRAVEL IN THE EAST,
which there are many christians who dress after the Latin fashion, and speak a language very near the French ; at any rate like French of Cyprus.' Thence you come to Damascus, to Mount Lebanon, to Galilee, to Samaria, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and to the Sepulchre of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Then follows a chapter Concerning the Trees of Paradise, from which I extract a few lines.
[The trees] are there still in existence, as the Pantheon says ;2 and this is shown by the fruits and leaves which are sometimes carried forth by those rivers, and are known by their medicinal virtue and fragrant odours. Nor is this incredible ; for in the adjoining provinces of India likewise there are trees which produce fruit of a marvellous kind every month.3
From the chapter On the Transgression of our First Parents by Temptation of the Serpent.
And they took the leaves of the fig-tree or plantain,4 and
1 Loquuntur linguam quasi Gallicam, scilicet quasi de Cipro."
" And French she spake both fayre and fetisely, French of the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe, For French of Paris was to her unknowe."
French no doubt was much spoken at Cyprus under the Lusignans.
°- The Pantheon is the Universal Chronicle, so called, by Godfrey of Viterbo, an ecclesiastical writer who died in 1186. The work is to be seen in " German. Scriptorum, etc., Tomus Alter, ex Bibl. Joannis Pistorii Nidarii, Hanov., 1613." It is a very prolix affair, beginning with De Diviwl Essenti8, ante omnem creationem, and is largely interspersed with semidoggrel hexameters and pentameters.
3 According to Masudi some leaves of Paradise covered Adam's body when cast out. These were scattered by the winds over India, and gave birth to all the perfumes of that country. He also bore with him wheat, and thirty branches of the trees of the Garden, and from these come all our good fruits (French Trans., i, 61). St. Athanasius also accounts for the aromatics of India by the spicy breezes from Paradise adjoining. (Opera, Paris, 1698, ii, 279.)
4 Ficus seu musarum." That the leaves used for girdles by Adam and Eve were plantain leaves, is a Mahomedan tradition ; and it is probably from this that the plantain has been called a fig in European languages, a name which seems to havé little ground in any resemblance of the
fruits, but which misled Milton perhaps to make the banyan the tree of the girdles.
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