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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
CxAr. XVI.
THE GREAT KAAN'S PRESENTS
395
are also worth a great sum of money. All this the Great
Lord bath ordered, that be may attach the more of
grandeur and dignity to bis festivals.
And now I must mention another thing that I had
forgotten, but which you will be astonished to learn from
this Book. You must know that on the Feast Day a
great Lion is led to the Emperor's presence, and as soon
as it sees him it lies down before him with every sign
of the greatest veneration, as if it acknowledged him for
its lord ; and it remains there lying before him, and en-
tirely unchained. Truly this must seem a strange story
to those who have not seen the thing !
NOTE 1.--On the Keshican, see note I to chap. xii., and on the changes of raiment note 3 to chap. xiv., and the remarks there as to the number of distributions. I confess that the stress laid upon the number 13 in this chapter makes the supposition of error more difficult. But there is something odd and unintelligible about the whole of the chapter except the last paragraph. For the 12,000 Keshican are here all elevated to Barons ; and at the same time the statement about their changes of raiment seems to be merely that already made in chapter xiv. This repetition occurs only in the French MSS., but as it is in all these we cannot reject
it.
NOTE 2.—The words Gamut and Borgal appear both to be used here for what we call Russia-Leather. The latter word in one form or another, Bolglzár, Borglzáli, or Bulkál, is the term applied to that material to this day nearly all over Asia. Ibn Batuta says that in travelling during winter from Constantinople to the Wolga he had to put on three pairs of boots, one of wool (which we should call stockings), a second of wadded linen, and a third of Borg háli, " i.e. of horse-leather lined with wolf-skin." Horse-leather seems to be still the favourite material for boots among all the Tartar nations. The naine was undoubtedly taken from Boltihar on the Wolga, the people of which are traditionally said to have invented the art of preparing skins in that manner. This manufacture is still one of the staple trades of Kazan, the city which in position and importance is the nearest representative of Boighar now.
Camut is explained by Klaproth to be " leather made from the back-skin of a camel." It appears in Johnson's Persian Dictionary as Kánzú, but I do not know from what language it originally comes. The word is in the Latin column of the Petrarchian Vocabulary with the Persian rendering Sagri. i. This shows us what is meant, for Saglirí is just our word Shagreen, and is applied to a fine leather granulated in that way, which is much used for boots and the like by the people of Central Asia. [In Turkish sághri or saghri is the name both for the buttocks of a horse and the leather called shagreen prepared with them. (See Devic, Dici. Ëtym. )--H. C.] In the commercial lists of our Indian north-west frontier we find as synonymous Saglzri or Kfmukht, " Horse or Ass-hide." No doubt this latter word is a form of Kámú or Canzut. It appears (as Keimuklzt, " a sort of leather ") in a detail of imports to Aden given by Ibn al Wardi, a geographer of the 13th century.
Instead of Camut, Ramusio has Ca;noscia, i.e. Chamois, and the same seems to be in all the editions based on Fra Pipino's version. It may be a misrendering of
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