s to the
mares, which make the best of their way to rejoin their foals. In their,
long-continued summer[8], these northern people take many of the finest
furs, some of which are carried into Russia, which is a great country near
that northern land of darkness. The people in Russia have fair complexions,
and are Greek Christians, paying tribute to the king of the Tartars in the
west, on whom they border. In the eastern parts of Russia there is
abundance of fine furs, wax, and mines of silver; and I am told the country
reaches to the northern ocean, in which there are islands which abound in
falcons and ger-falcons.

[1] This concluding section may be considered as a kind of appendix, in
which Marco has placed several unconnected hearsay notices of
countries where he never had been personally.--E.

[2] Mandeigascar in the Trevigi edition, and certainly meant for
Madagascar.--E.

[3] Madagascar has no pretensions to riches or trade, and never had; so
that Marco must have been imposed upon by some Saracen or Arab
mariner. Its size, climate, and soil certainly fit it for becoming a
place of vast riches and population; but it is one almost continued
forest, inhabited by numerous independent and hostile tribes of
barbarians. Of this island, a minute account will appear in an after
part of this work.--E.

[4] There are no elephants in Madagascar, yet these teeth might have been
procured from southern Africa.--E.

[5] By India Minor he obviously means what is usually called farther India,
or India beyond the Ganges, from the frontiers of China to Moabar, or
the north part of the Coromandel coast, including the islands.--E.

[6] Abyssinia, here taken in the most extended sense, including all the
western coast of the Red Sea, and Eastern Africa.--E.

[7] This paragraph obviously alludes to the Tartar kingdom of Siberia.--E.

[8] The summer in this northern country of the Samojeds is extremely short;
but the expression here used, must allude to the long-continued summer
day, when, for several months, the sun never sets.--E.

CHAP. XII.

_Travels of Oderic of Portenau, into China and the East, in_ 1318[1].

INTRODUCTION.

Oderic of Portenau, a minorite friar, travelled into the eastern countries
in the year 1318, accompanied by several other monks, and penetrated as far
as China. After his return, he dictated, in 1330, the account of what he
had seen