the Islands, as he well might, considering what he had been plotting against them, but encouraged by a new cast of the
Sortes he went and was civilly received. His expectations however, or his caprices, were disappointed, for he seems to have stayed but five days and then went on to Bengal.
Ibn Batuta's account of what he saw in Bengal, and on his subsequent voyage through the Archipelago, will be given in extracts or in more detailed abstract, in connexion with the full text of bis travels in China. We now therefore take up this short account of his adventures from the time of his return from the latter country.
After coming back from China he proceeded direct from Malabar to the coast of Arabia, visiting again Dhafar, Maskat, Hormuz, Shiraz, Ispahan, Tuster, Basrah, Meshid Ali and Baghdad, and thence went to Tadmor and Damascus, where he had left a wife and child twenty years before, but both apparently were now dead. Here also he got his first news from home, and heard of his father's death fifteen years previously. He then went on to Hamath and Aleppo, and on his return to Damascus found the Black Death raging to such an extent that two thousand four hundred died in one day. Proceeding by Jerusalem to Egypt he repeated the Mecca pilgrimage for the last time, and finally turned his face away from the East. Travelling by land to Tunis he embarked in a ship of Catalonia. They touched at Sardinia (Jazirah Sarrdetniah), where they were threatened with capture, and thence proceeded to Tenes on the Algerine coast, whence he reached Fez, the capital of his native country, on the 8th November 1349, after an absence of twenty-four years.
Here he professes to have rejoiced in the presence of his own Sultan, whom he declares to surpass all the mighty monarchs of the East ; in dignity him of Irak, in person him of India, in manner him of Yemen, in. courage the king of the Turks, in long-suffering the Emperor of Constantinople, in devotion him of Turkestan, and in knowledge him of Java !2 a list of corn-
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