grass-pasture, and abundance of fruits, and all other products. Armies are glad to take up their quarters here on account of the plenty that exists. This kind of country extends for six days' journey, with a goodly number of towns and villages, in which the people are worshippers of Mahommet. Sometimes also you meet with a tract of desert extending for 50 or 60 miles, or somewhat less, and in these deserts you find no water, but have to carry it along with you. The beasts do without drink until you have got across the desert tract and come to watering places. So after travelling for six days as I have told you, you come to a city called SAPURGAN. It has great plenty of everything, but especially of the very best melons in the world. They preserve them by paring them round and round into strips, and drying them in the sun. When dry they are sweeter than honey, and are carried off for sale all over the country. There is also abundance of game here, both of birds and beasts." NOTE 1.-SAPURGAN may closely express the pronunciation of the name of the city which the old Arabic writers call Sabúrķán and Shabúrkán, now called Shibrgán, lying some 90 miles west of Balkh : containing now some 12,000 inhabitants, and situated in a plain still richly cultivated, though on the verge of the desert.* But I have seen no satisfactory solution of the difficulties as to the time assigned. This in the G. T. and in Ramusio is clearly six days. The point of departure is indeed uncertain, but even if we were to place that at Sharakhs on the extreme verge of cultivated Khorasan, which would be quite inconsistent with other data, it would have taken the travellers something like double the time to reach Shibrgan. Where I have followed the G. T. in its reading "quant l'en a chevauches six jornée tel che je vos ai contés, adunc treuve l'en une cité," &c., Pauthier's text has " Et quant l'en a chevauchié les vi cités si treuve l'en une cité qui a nom Sapurgan," and to this that editor adheres. But I suspect that cités is a mere lapsus for journées, as in the reading in one of his three MSS. What could be meant by "chevauchier les vi cités"? * The oldest form of the name is Asapuragán, which Rawlinson thinks traceable to its being an ancient seat of the Asa or Asagartii (J. R. A. S. XI. 63). Whether the true route be, as I suppose, by Nishapur and Meshid, or, as Khanikoff supposes, by Herat and Badghis, it is strange that no one of those famous cities is mentioned. And we feel constrained to assume that something has been misunderstood in the dictation, or has dropt out of it. As a probable conjecture I should apply the six days. to the extent of pleasing country described in the first lines of the chapter, and identify it with the tract between Sabzawur and the cessation of fertile country beyond Meshid. The distance would agree well, and a comparison with Fraser or Ferrier will show that even now the description, allowing for the compression of an old recollection, would be well founded ; e. g. on the first march beyond Nishapur: "Fine villages, with plentiful gardens full of trees, that bear fruit of the highest flavour, may be seen all along the foot of the hills, and in the little recesses formed by the ravines whence issues the water that irrigates them. It was a rich and pleasing scene, and out of question by far the most populous and cultivated tract that I had seen in Persia. . . . . Next morning we quitted Derrood. . . . by a very indifferent but interesting road, the glen being finely wooded with walnut, mulberry, poplar, and willow-trees, and fruit-tree gardens rising one above the other upon the mountain-side, watered by little rills. . . . . These gardens extended for several miles up the glen; beyond them the bank of the stream continued to be fringed with white sycamore, willow, ash, mulberry, poplar, and woods that love a moist situation," and so on, describing a style of scenery not common in Persia, and expressing diffusely (as it seems to me) the same picture as Polo's two lines. In the valley of Nishapúr, again (we quote Arthur Conolly): "This is Persia!' was the vain exclamation of those who were alive to the beauty of the scene; this is Persia! Bah! Bah! What grass, what grain, what water! Bah! Bah! ['If there be a Paradise on the face of the Earth, (See Fraser, 405, 432-3, 434, 436.) With reference to the dried melons of Shibrgan, Quatremère cites a history of Herat, which speaks of them almost in Polo's words. Ibn Batuta gives a like account of the melons of Khárizm : The surprising thing about these melons is the way the people have of slicing them, drying them in the sun, and then packing them in baskets, just as Malaga figs are treated in our part of the world. In this state they are sent to the remotest parts of India and China. There is no dried fruit so delicious, and all the while I lived at Delhi, when the travelling dealers came in, I never missed sending for these dried strips of melon." (Q. R. 169; I. B. III. 15.) Here, in the 14th century, we seem to recognise the Afghan dealers arriving in the cities of Hindustan with their annual camel-loads of dried fruits, just as we have seen them in our own day. CHAPTER XXVII. OF THE CITY OF BALC. BALC is a noble city and a great, though it was much greater in former days. But the Tartars and other nations have greatly ravaged and destroyed it. There were formerly many fine palaces and buildings of marble, and the ruins of them still remain. The people of the city tell that it was here that Alexander took to wife the daughter of Darius. Here, you should be told, is the end of the empire of the Tartar Lord of the Levant. And this city is also the limit of Persia in the direction between east and northeast.' Now, let us quit this city, and I will tell you of another country called DOGANA. When you have quitted the city of which I have been speaking, you ride some 12 days between north-east and east, without finding any human habitation, for the people have all taken refuge in fastnesses among the mountains, on account of the banditti and armies that harassed them. There is plenty of water on the road, and abundance of game; there are lions too. You can get no provisions on the road, and must carry with you all that you require for these 12 days.3 NOTE 1.-BALKH, "the mother of cities," suffered mercilessly from Chinghiz. Though the city had yielded without resistance, the whole population was marched by companies into the plain, on the usual Mongol pretext of counting them, and then brutally massacred. The city and its gardens were fired, and all buildings capable of defence were levelled. The province long continued to be harried by the Chaghataian inroads. Ibn Batuta, sixty years after Marco's visit, describes the city as still in ruins, and as uninhabited: "The remains of its mosques and colleges," he says, are still to be seen, and the painted walls traced with azure." It is no doubt the Vaeq (Valg) of Clavijo, "very large, and surrounded by a broad earthen wall, thirty paces across, but breached in many parts." He describes a large portion of the area within as sown with cotton. The account of its modern state in Burnes and Ferrier is much the same as Ibn Batuta's, except that they found some population; two separate towns within the walls according to the latter. Burnes estimates the circuit of the ruins at twenty miles. The bulk of the population has been moved since 1858 to Takhtapul, 8 miles east of Balkh, where the Afghan government is placed. (Erdmann, 404-5; I. B. III. 59; Clavijo, p. 117; Burnes. II. 204-6; Ferrier, 206-7.) According to the legendary history of Alexander, the beautiful Roxana was the daughter of Darius, and her father in a dying interview with Alexander requested the latter to make her his wife :— "Une fille ai mult bele; se prendre le voles, Vus en seres de l'mont tout li mius maries," &c. 骨 -Lambert Le Court, p. 256. NOTE 2. The country called Dogana in the G. Text is a puzzle. In the former edition I suggested Juzgána, a name which till our author's time was applied to a part of the adjoining territory, though not to that traversed in quitting Balkh for the east. Sir H. Rawlinson is inclined to refer the name to Dehgán, or 'villager,' a term applied in Bactria, and in Kabul, to Tajik peasantry.' I may also refer to certain passages in Baber's Memoirs,' in which he speaks of a place, and apparently a district, called Dehánah, which seems from the context to have lain in the vicinity of the Ghori, or Aksarai River. There is still a village in the Ghori territory, called Dehánah. Though this is worth mentioning. where the true solution is so uncertain, I acknowledge the difficulty of applying it. I may add also that Baber calls the River of Ghori or Aksarai, the Dogh-ábah. (Sprenger, P. und R. Route, p. 39 and Map; Anderson in J. A. S. B. XXII. 161; Ilch. II. 93; Baber, pp. 132, 134, 168, 200, also 146.) NOTE 3.-Though Burnes speaks of the part of the road that we suppose necessarily to have been here followed from Balkh towards Taican, as barren and dreary, he adds that the ruins of aqueducts and houses proved that the land had at one time been peopled, though now destitute of water, and consequently of inhabitants. The country would seem to have reverted at the time of Burnes's journey, from like causes, nearly to the state in which Marco found it after the Mongol devastations. Lions seem to mean here the real king of beasts, and not tigers, as hereafter in the book. Tigers, though found on the S. and W. shores of * It may be observed that the careful Elphinstone distinguishes from this general application of Dehgán or Dehkán, the name Deggán applied to a tribe "once spread over the north-east of Afghanistan, but now as a separate people only in Kunar and Laghman." the Caspian, do not seem to exist in the Oxus valley. On the other hand, Rashiduddin tells us that, when Hulaku was reviewing his army after the passage of the river, several lions were started, and two were killed. The lions are also mentioned by Sidi 'Ali, the Turkish Admiral, further down the valley towards Hazárasp: "We were obliged to fight with the lions day and night, and no man dared to go alone for water." Moorcroft says of the plain between Kunduz and the Oxus: "Deer, foxes, wolves, hogs, and lions are numerous, the latter resembling those in the vicinity of Hariana" (in Upper India). Wood also mention lions in Kuláb, and at Kila'chap on the Oxus. Q. Curtius tells how Alexander killed a great lion in the country north of the Oxus towards Samarkand. (Burnes, II. 200; Q. R. 155; Ilch. I. 90; J. As. IX. 217; Moorcroft, II. 430; Wood, ed. 1872, pp. 259, 260; Q. C. VII. 2.) CHAPTER XXVIII. OF TAICAN, AND THE MOUNTAINS OF SALT. ALSO OF THE PROVINCE OF CASEM. AFTER those twelve days' journey you come to a fortified place called TAICAN, where there is a great corn market.' It is a fine place, and the mountains that you see towards the south are all composed of salt. People from all the countries round, to some thirty days' journey, come to fetch this salt, which is the best in the world, and is so hard that it can only be broken with iron picks. "Tis in such abundance that it would supply the whole world to the end of time. [Other mountains there grow almonds and pistachioes, which are exceedingly cheap.]? When you leave this town and ride three days further between north-east and east, you meet with many fine tracts full of vines and other fruits, and with a goodly number of habitations, and everything to be had very cheap. The people are worshippers of Mahommet, and are an evil and a murderous generation, whose great delight is in the wine shop; for they have good wine (albeit it be boiled), and are great topers; in truth, they are constantly |