[NOTE 1] you ride ten days
between north-east and east, and in all that way you find no human
dwelling, or next to none, so that there is nothing for our book to speak
of.

At the end of those ten days you come to another province called SUKCHUR,
in which there are numerous towns and villages. The chief city is called
SUKCHU.[NOTE 2] The people are partly Christians and partly Idolaters, and
all are subject to the Great Kaan.

The great General Province to which all these three provinces belong is
called TANGUT.

Over all the mountains of this province rhubarb is found in great
abundance, and thither merchants come to buy it, and carry it thence all
over the world.[NOTE 3] [Travellers, however, dare not visit those
mountains with any cattle but those of the country, for a certain plant
grows there which is so poisonous that cattle which eat it lose their
hoofs. The cattle of the country know it and eschew it.[NOTE 4]] The
people live by agriculture, and have not much trade. [They are of a brown
complexion. The whole of the province is healthy.]

NOTE 1.--Referring apparently to Shachau; see Note 1 and the closing words
of last chapter.

NOTE 2.--There is no doubt that the province and city are those of
SUHCHAU, but there is a great variety in the readings, and several texts
have a marked difference between the name of the province and that of the
city, whilst others give them as the same. I have adopted those to which
the resultants of the readings of the best texts seem to point, viz.
_Succiur_ and _Succiu_, though with considerable doubt whether they should
not be identical. Pauthier declares that _Suctur_, which is the reading of
his favourite MS., is the exact pronunciation, after the vulgar Mongol
manner, of _Suh-chau-lu_, the _Lu_ or circuit of Suhchau; whilst Neumann
says that the Northern Chinese constantly add an euphonic particle _or_ to
the end of words. I confess to little faith in such refinements, when no
evidence is produced.

[Suhchau had been devastated and its inhabitants massacred by Chinghiz
Khan in 1226.--H. C.]

Suhchau is called by Rashiduddin, and by Shah Rukh's ambassadors,
_Sukchu_, in exact correspondence with the reading we have adopted for the
name of the city, whilst the Russian Envoy Boikoff, in the 17th century,
calls it "_Suktsey_, where the rhubarb grows"; and Anthony Jenkinson, in
Hakluyt, by a slight metathesis, _Sowchick_. Suhchau lies just within the
extreme north-west an