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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
1
56
MARCO POLO Boox II.
~►
i
(h
as lions, bears, wolves, stags, bucks and roes, exist in great
numbers ; and there are also vast quantities of fowl of
every kind. Wine of the vine they have none, but they
make a wine of wheat and rice and sundry good spices,
and very good drink it is.6 There grows also in this
country a quantity of clove. The tree that bears it is a
small one, with leaves like laurel but longer and narrower,
and with a small white flower like the clove.? They
have also ginger and cinnamon in great plenty, besides
other spices which never reach our countries, so we need
say nothing about them.
Now we may leave this province, as we have told you
all about it. But let me tell you first of this same
country of Caindu that you ride through it ten days,
constantly meeting with towns and villages, with people
of the same description that I have mentioned. After
riding those ten days you come to a river called BRIUS,
which terminates the province of Caindu. In this river
is found much gold-dust, and there is also much cinnamon
on its banks. It flows to the Ocean Sea.
There is no more to be said about this river, so I
will now tell you about another province called Carajan,
as you shall hear in what follows.
NOTE I.—Ramusio's version here enlarges : " Don't suppose from my saying towards the west that these countries really lie in what we call the west, but only that we have been travelling from regions in the east-north-east towards the west, and hence we speak of the countries we corne to as lying towards the west."
NOTE 2. —Chinese authorities quoted by Ritter mention mother-o'-pearl as a product of Lithang, and speak of turquoises as found in Djaya to the west of Bathang. (Ritter, IV. 235-236.) Neither of these places is, however, within the tract which we believe to be Caindu. Amyot states that pearls are found in a certain river of Yun-nan. (See Trans. R. A. Soc. II. 91.)
NOTE 3.—This alleged practice, like that mentioned in the last chapter but one, is ascribed to a variety of people in different parts of the world. Both, indeed, have a curious double parallel in the story of two remote districts of the Himalaya which was told to Bernier by an old Kashmiri.. (See Amst. ed. II. 304-305.) Polo has told nearly the same story already of the people of Kamul. (Bk. I. ch. xli.) It is related by Strabo of the Massaget e ; by Eusebius of the Geli and the Bactrians ; by Flphinstone of the Hazaras ; by Mendoza of the Ladrone Islanders ; by other
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