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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

48   MARCO POLO.

postal station near those of K'ie-t'ai, Che-ch'an and Wo-tuan.

Wo-tuan is Khotan. Che-ch'an, the name of which reappears in

other paragraphs, is Charchan. As to K'ie-t'ai, a postal station

between those of Lob and Charchan, it seems probable that it is

the Kätäk of the Tariklz-i-Rashidi." (PELLIOT.)

See in the Journ. Asiatique, Jan.—Feb., 1916, pp. 117—I19,

Pelliot's remarks on Lob, Navapa, etc.

VOL. I. BK. I.

XXXIX., pp. 196-7.

THE GREAT DESERT.

After reproducing the description of the Great Desert in Sir

Henry Yule's version, Stein adds, Ruins of Desert Cathay, I.,

p. 518 :

It did not need my journey to convince me that what

Marco here tells us about the risks of the desert was but a

faithful reflex of old folklore beliefs he must have heard on the

spot. Sir Henry Yule has shown long ago that the dread of

being led astray by evil spirits haunted the imagination of all

early travellers who crossed the desert wastes between China

and the oases westwards. Fa-hsien's above-quoted passage clearly

alludes to this belief, and so does Hivan Tsang, as we have seen,

where he points in graphic words the impressions left by his

journey through the sandy desert between Niya and Charchan.

" Thus, too, the description we receive through the Chinese

historiographer, Ma Tuan-lin, of the shortest route from China

towards Kara-shahr, undoubtedly corresponding to the present

track to Lop-nor, reads almost like a version from Marco's book,

though its compiler, a contemporary of the Venetian traveller,

must have extracted it from some earlier source. ` You see

nothing in any direction but the sky and the sands, without the

slightest trace of a road ; and travellers find nothing to guide

them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of

camels. During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds,

sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing ; and it has often

happened that travellers going aside to see what these sounds

might be have strayed from their course and been entirely lost ;

for they were voices of spirits and goblins.' . . .

" As Yule rightly observes, ` these Goblins are not peculiar to

the Gobi.' Yet I felt more than ever assured that Marco's

stories about them were of genuine local growth, when I had

travelled over the whole route and seen how closely its topo-

graphical features agree with the matter-of-fact details which the