ns."

Thence back to China, the richest and most famous country of all the
East, where was "peace so absolute that shops could be left open full of
wares all night and travellers and strangers could walk day and night
through every part, untouched and fearing none."

But the Polos wearied even of the Court favours and their celestial
home; they longed to come back to earth, to Frankland and Christendom,
where life was so rough, and poor, and struggling, but for whose sake
they had come so far and braved so much. But the Khan was hurt at the
least hint of their wishes, and it was only a fortunate chance that
restored them to Europe. Twenty years after their outward start, they
were dismissed for a time and under solemn promise of return, as the
guides of an embassy in charge of a Mongol bride for a Persian Khan,
living at Tabrez and related to Kublai himself. So, in 1292, they
embarked for India at Zaitum, "one of the fairest ports in the world,
where is so much pepper that what comes by Alexandria to the West is
little to it, and, as it were, one of a hundred." Then striking across
the Gulf of Cheinan, for fifteen hundred miles, and passing "infinite
islands, with gold and much trade,"--a gulf "seeming in all like another
world"--they reached Ziambar and, after another run of the same
distance, Java, then supposed by mariners to be the greatest island in
the world, "above three thousand miles round and under a king who pays
tribute to none, the Khan himself not offering to subject it, because of
the length and danger of the voyage."

One hundred miles south-east the fleet touched at Java the Less "in
compass about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices,
ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be
seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great
fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals
and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced to stay for
five months by stress of weather--till they got away into the Bay of
Bengal, the extreme point of European knowledge until this time, "where
there are savages living in the deep sea islands with dogs' heads and
teeth, as I was told, all naked, both men and women, and living the life
of beasts (Andamans)."[26]

[Footnote 26: Probably the Andamans.]

Sailing hence a thousand miles to the west, adds Marco, is Ceylon, "the
finest island in the world, 2400 miles in circui