find the way much better than their riders could do.
[NOTE 2]

Those people have vast quantities of valuable peltry; thus they have those
costly Sables of which I spoke, and they have the Ermine, the Arculin, the
Vair, the Black Fox, and many other valuable furs. They are all hunters by
trade, and amass amazing quantities of those furs. And the people who are
on their borders, where the Light is, purchase all those furs from them;
for the people of the Land of Darkness carry the furs to the Light country
for sale, and the merchants who purchase these make great gain thereby, I
assure you.[NOTE 3]

The people of this region are tall and shapely, but very pale and
colourless. One end of the country borders upon Great Rosia. And as there
is no more to be said about it, I will now proceed, and first I will tell
you about the Province of Rosia.

NOTE 1.--In the Ramusian version we have a more intelligent representation
of the facts regarding the _Land of Darkness_: "Because for most part of
the winter months the sun appears not, and the air is dusky, as it is just
before the dawn when you see and yet do not see;" and again below it
speaks of the inhabitants catching the fur animals "in summer when they
have continuous daylight." It is evident that the writer of this version
_did_ and the writer of the original French which we have translated from
_did not_ understand what he was writing. The whole of the latter account
implies belief in the perpetuity of the darkness. It resembles Pliny's
hazy notion of the northern regions:[1] "pars mundi damnata a rerum natura
et densa mersa caligine." Whether the fault is due to Rustician's
ignorance or is Polo's own, who can say? We are willing to debit it to the
former, and to credit Marco with the improved version in Ramusio. In the
_Masalak-al-Absar_, however, we have the following passage in which the
conception is similar: "Merchants do not ascend (the Wolga) beyond
Bolghar; from that point they make excursions through the province of
Julman (supposed to be the country on the Kama and Viatka). The merchants
of the latter country penetrate to Yughra, which is the extremity of the
North. Beyond that you see no trace of habitation except a great Tower
built by Alexander, after which there is nothing but Darkness." The
narrator of this, being asked what he meant, said: "It is a region of
desert mountains, where frost and snow continually reign, where the sun
never shines, no plant v