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
INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 433
confounds the celebrated trading places of Siraf and Kais, or Kish :1 and in his description of the Pyramids, he distinctly ascribes to them a conical form, i.e., with a circular base. Various other instances of the looseness of his observation, or statements, will occur in that part of his travels which we are about to set forth in full. Sometimes, again, he seems to have forgotten the real name of a place, and to have substituted another, as it would seem, at random, or perhaps one having some resemblance in sound. Thus, in describing the disastrous campaign of the Sultan's troops in the Himalya, he speaks of them as, in the commencement, capturing Warangal, a city high up in the range. Now, Warangal was in the Dekkan, the capital of Telingana, and it seems highly improbable that there could have been a city of the name in the Himalya. (See iii, 326). One suspects something of the same kind when he identifies Kataka (Cuttack P) with the Mahratta country (ib., p. 182), but in this I may easily be wrong ; even if I be right, however, the cases of this kind are few.
Of his exaggeration we have a measurable sample in his account of the great Kutb Minai' at Dehli, which we have still
before our eyes, to compare with his description :—" The site of
this mosque [the JamaMasjid, or Cathedral Mosque of old Dehli] was formerly a Buclkh.dmah, or idol-temple, but after the con-
quest of the city it was converted into a mosque. In the northern
court of the mosque stands the minaret, which is without parallel in all the countries of Islam. It is built of red stone, in this
differing from the material of the rest of the mosque, which is white ; moreover, the stone of the minaret is wrought in sculpture. It is of surpassing height ; the pinnacle is of milk-white marble, and the globes which decorate it of pure gold. The
1 See ii, 244, and French editors' note, p. 456.
See i, p. 81. He gives a curious story about the opening of the great pyramid by the Khalif MV miin, and how he pierced its solid base with Hannibal's chemistry, first lighting a great fire in contact with it, then sluicing it with vinegar, and battering it with shot from a mangonel. Though Ibn Batuta passes the site of Thebes three times, and indeed names Luxor as one of his halting places, " where is to be seen the tomb of the pious hermit Abu'l Hajâj Alaksori," he takes no notice of the vast remains there or elsewhere on the Nile.
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