t, and once 3600, as is
seen in old maps, but the north winds have made great part of it sea."

Again west for sixty miles, to Malabar, "which is firm continent in
India the Greater," and where the Polos re-entered as it were the
horizon of Western knowledge, at the shrine of St. Thomas, the Apostle
of India.

Here we must leave the Venetians, with only a bare mention of their
homeward route from Malabar by Murfili and the Valley of Diamonds, by
Camari, where they had a glimpse of the Pole-Star once more, and by
Guzerat and Cambay to Socotra, where Marco, in his stay, heard and wrote
down the first news ever brought to Europe of the "great isle Magaster,"
or Madagascar, and of Zensibar or Zanzibar.[27]

[Footnote 27: This new knowledge had been really gained from the gradual
spread of the Arab settlements down the south-east coast of Africa,
during four centuries, from Guardafui, the Cape of spices, to the
Channel of Mozambique.]

Of Polo's account of Hindu customs,--self-immolation and especially
Suttee, of Caste, of the Brahminical "thread with one hundred and four
beads by which to pray"; of their etiquette in eating, drinking, birth,
marriage, and death--only the simple fact can be noticed here, that the
first serious and direct Christian account of India, as of China, is
also among the most accurate and well judged, and that both in what he
says and what he leaves unsaid, Messer Marco is a true Herodotus of the
Middle Ages.

But not only does his account discover for Europe the extreme east and
south of Asia; in his last chapter he returns to the Tartars, and after
adding a few words on the nomades of the central plains, gives us our
first "Latin" account of Siberia, "where are found great white bears,
black foxes, and sables; and where are great lakes, frozen except for a
few months in the year, and crossed in sledges by the fur-traders."

Beyond this the Obscure Land reaches to the furthest North, "near which
is Russia, where for the most of winter the sun appears not, and the air
is thick and dark as betimes in the morning with us, where the men are
pale and squat and live like the beasts, and where on the East men come
again to the Ocean Sea and the islands of the Falcons."

The work of Marco Polo is the high-water mark of mediaeval land travel;
the extension of Christendom after him was mainly by the paths of the
sea; the Roman missions to the Tartars and to Malabar, vigorously and
stubbornly pressed a