but China is inhabited and peopled throughout
its whole extent. The Chinese are handsomer than the Indians, and come
nearer the Arabs, not only in countenance, but in dress, in their way
of riding, in their manners, and in their ceremonies. They wear long
garments and girdles in form of belts. The Chinese are dressed in silk
both winter and summer, and this kind of dress is common to the prince
and the peasant. Their food is rice, which they often eat with a broth
which they pour upon the rice. They have several sorts of fruits, apples,
lemons, quinces, figs, grapes, cucumbers, walnuts, almonds, plums,
apricots, and cocoanuts."

[Illustration: A CHINESE EMPEROR GIVING AUDIENCE, NINTH CENTURY. From
an old Chinese MS. at Paris, showing an Emperor of the dynasty that
was ruling when the two Mohammedans visited China in 831.]

Here, too, we get the first mention of tea, which was not introduced
into Europe for another seven hundred years, but which formed a Chinese
drink in the ninth century. This Chinese drink "is a herb or shrub,
more bushy than the pomegranate tree an of a more pleasant scent, but
somewhat bitter to the taste. The Chinese boil water and pour it in
scalding hot upon this leaf, and this infusion keeps them from all
distempers."

Here, too, we get the first mention of china ware. "They have an
excellent kind of earth, wherewith they make a ware of equal fineness
with glass and equally transparent."

There is no time here to tell of all the curious manners and customs
related by these two Mohammedans. One thing struck them as indeed it
must strike us to-day. "The Chinese, poor and rich, great and small,
learn to read and write. There are schools in every town for teaching
the poor children, and the masters are maintained at public charge....
The Chinese have a stone ten cubits high erected in the public squares
of their cities, and on this stone are engraved the names of all the
medicines, with the exact price of each; and when the poor stand in
need of physic they go to the treasury where they receive the price
each medicine is rated at."

It was out of such travels as these that the famous romance of "Sindbad
the Sailor" took shape--a true story of Arab adventures of the ninth
and tenth centuries in a romantic setting. As in the case of Ulysses,
the adventures of many voyages are ascribed to one man and related
in a collection of tales which bears the title of _The Arabian Nights_.

Of course, Sindb