uninhabited in the 13th century. But I think it is highly probable that the inhabitants were not Hindus, but of Indo-Chinese race, like those occupying the adjoining hills and part of Cachar. This is implied in Ibn Batuta's account of the people, though in strictness he speaks only of the hill people. These, however, in the adjoining mountains, have not been converted to Mahomedanism. They retain their original character, and have the Mongolian type of features in the highest development. As regards their powers of work, of which the traveller speaks so highly, I may observe that, when I was in that region, porters of the Kasia nation used often to carry down from the coal mines of Cherra Punji to the plains, a distance of eleven miles, loads of two maunds or 165 lbs. of coal. Their strength and bulk of leg were such as I have never seen elsewhere.
On the map at the end of this book I have inserted a sketch from such imperfect materials as are available, to make Ibn Batuta's travels in Bengal more intelligible. No decent map of Silhet yet exists, but my friend Colonel Thuillier informs me that the survey is finished, so a correct representation of that remarkable country may be expected before long.
NOTE F. (SEE PAGE 468.)
ON THE MUL-JAVA OF IBN BATUTA.
This 111112-Java is made by all the commentators, professed or incidental (see Lee, Dulaurier, Defrémery, Gildemeister, Walckenaer, Reinaud, Lassen), to be the Island of Java, and by help of Sanscrit the appellation is made with more or less of coercion to signify " Primitive or Original Java." Setting aside the questionable application of Sanscrit etymologies to explain names which were probably conferred by Arab sailors, surely it is not hard to see that if by Mul-Java, where elephants were kept by every petty shopkeeper, and eagle-wood was used to serve the kitchen fires, the traveller did mean JAVA, then he lied so egregiously that it is not worth considering what he meant. There are no elephants in Java, except such few as are imported to swell the state of the native princes,—at present, perhaps, considerably fewer than we could muster in England,—and there is no eagle-wood.
These circumstances taken alone would lead us to seek for the country in question on some part of the Continent bordering the Gulf of Siam, probably in or near Cambodia. There elephants are still almost as common as Ibn Batuta represents them, and the country is also, and has been for ages, the great source of supply of aloes or eagle-wood. When formerly suggesting this view (in a note on Jordanus, p.33), I applied to a learned Arabic scholar to know if there were no term like mul in that language which might bear some such sense as Terra forma. The answer was unfavourable. But I have since lighted on a solution. In vol. xxix of the Jour. of the R.G.S. p. 30, Capt. Burton mentions that the Arabs having in latter times confined the name of Zanjibar to the island and city now so called, they generally distinguish the mainland as Bar-el-MoLi, or " Continent," in
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