TO CATHAY. 565
more valuable is got out of the river of Cotan, not far from the capital, almost in the same way in which divers fish for gems, and this is usually extracted in pieces about as big as large flints. The other and inferior kind is excavated from the mountains ; the larger masses are split into slabs some two ells broad and these are then reduced to a size adapted for carriage. That mountain is some twenty days' journey from this capital (i.e., Yarkand) and is called CANSANGHI ÇASCIO, i.e., the Stone Mountain, being very probably the mountain which is so termed in some of the geographical descriptions of this empire. The extraction of these blocks is a work involving immense labour, owing to the hardness of the substance as well as to the remote and lonely position of the place. They say that the stone is sometimes softened by the application of a blazing fire on the surface. The right of quarrying here is also sold by the king at a high price to some merchant, without whose license no other speculators can dig there during the term of the lease. When a party of workmen goes thither they take a year's provisions along with them, for they do not usually revisit the populated districts at a shorter interval.
Our brother Benedict went to pay his respects to the king, ,whose name was Mahomed Khan.' The present that he
fectly in accordance with the Chinese authorities, one kind being fished up in boulder form by divers, from the rivers on each side of the chief city of Khotan, which are called respectively Yurung-Kash and Kara-Kash (White Jade and Black Jade), and the other kind quarried in large masses from the mountain called 11Th jai, which is stated by a Chinese writer to be two hundred and thirty li (about seventy miles) from Yarkand. From the mention of a jade quarry by Mir Izzet Ullah, about half-way from the Kara Korum Pass to Yarkand it is probable that the Mirjai mountain is to be sought thereabouts (see Ritter vii, 380-389). Ritter will have the Can-sangui-Cascio of our text to be a mistake for Karangui-Tagh, the name which he finds applied to the range in which the rivers of Khotan spring, probably a part of the Kuen-Lun. But the words are Persian, Kccn-sangi-Kash, "The mine of Kash (or Jade) Stone," Kash being the Turki word for that mineral.
1 In orig. i11 ahamethin, for Al ahamethan. A letter which Goës wrote to Xavier from Yarkand, 2d February, 1604, mentioned that the excitement
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