Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/624

Rh sultan s camp, lie was allowed to join the cortege of one of the Khatuns, who was a Greek princess by birth (probably an illegitimate one), and who was about to visit her own people. In her train he travelled to Constantinople, where he had an interview with the emperor Andronicus the Elder, whom he calls Jirjis (George). He tells us how, as he passed the city gates in the lady s train, he heard the guards muttering ftarakinu ! Sarakinu ! Returning to the court of Uzbek, at Sarai on the Volga, he took his way across the steppes to Khwarizm and Bokhara, and thence through Khorasan and Cab ill. On this journey he crossed the HINDU KUSH (q.v.), to which he gives that name, its first occurrence. Travelling on, he reached the Indus, according to his own statement, in September 1333. This closes the first part of his narrative.

From Sind, which he traversed to the sea and back again, he proceeded by Multan, and eventually, on the invitation of Mahommed Tughlak, the reigning sovereign, to Delhi. Mahommed was a singular character, full of pretence at least to many accomplishments and virtues, the founder of public charities, and a profuse patron of scholars, but a parricide, a fratricide, and as madly capricious, bloodthirsty, and unjust as Caligula. As Ibn Batuta pithily sums up the contradictions of his character, &quot; there was no day that the gate of his palace failed to witness alike the elevation of some object to affluence and the torture and murder of some living soul.&quot; He appointed the traveller to be kazi of Delhi, with a present of 12,000 silver dinars (rupees) and an annual salary of the same amount, besides an assignment of village lands. In the sultan s service he remained eight years ; but his good fortune only stimulated his natural extravagance, and at an early period his debts amounted to four or five times his salary. At last he fell into disfavour, and retired from the court, only to be summoned again on a congenial duty, The emperor of China, the last of the Mongol dynasty, had sent a mission to Delhi which was to be reciprocated, and the Moor was to go as one of the envoys. The account of the journey through Central India to Cambay is full of interest, Thence the party went by sea to Calicut, which is classed by the traveller with the neighbouring Kaulam (Quilon), Alexandria, Sud;ik in the Crimea, and Zayton (or CHINCHEW, q.v.) in China, as one of the greatest trading havens in the world, an interesting enumeration from one who had seen them all. The mission party was to embark in Chinese junks (the word used) and smaller vessels, but that carrying the other envoys and the presents, which started before he was ready, was wrecked totally ; the vessel that he had engaged went off with his property, and he was left on the beach of Calicut. Not daring to return to Delhi with such a tale, he remained about Honore and other cities of the western coast, taking part in various adventures, among others the capture of Sindabur (or Goa), till he took it into his head to visit the Maldive Islands. There he was made welcome, was nominated kazi, married four wives, and remained some months. But before long he was deep in quarrels and intrigues, and in August 1344 he left for Ceylon. In this island he made the pilgrimage to Adam s Peak (&quot;The Footmark of our Father Adam,&quot; he calls it), of which he gives an interesting account. Thence hebetook himself to Ma abar (the Coromandel coast), where he joined a Musulman adventurer who had made himself master of much of that region, with his residence at Madura. After once more visiting Malabar, Canara, and the Maldives, he departed for Bengal, a voyage of forty-threo days, landing at Sadkawan (Chittagong). &quot; The chief circumstance of his sojourn in Bengal was a visit made to a Musulman saint of singular character and pre tensions, Shaikh Jah ilucldin, who dwelt in a hermitage among the Silhet hills, and where his shrine (at Silhet) is still maintained as a place of sanctity under the name of Shah Jaldl. Returning to the delta, he took ship at Sunarganw (near Dacca) on a junk bound for Java (i.e.&amp;gt; Java Minor of Marco Polo, or Sumatra). Touching on the coast of Arakan or Burmah, he reached Sumatra in forty days, and was hospitably received at the court of Malik al-Dhdhir, a zealous disciple of Islam, which had then recently spread among the states on the northern coast of that island. The king provided him with a junk in which to prosecute his voyage to China. Some of the places which he describes on this line are hard to identify, but apparently one of them was the coast of Camboja. The port which received him in China was Zayton, famous in Marco Polo s book, and identified with the modern Chinchew. He also visited Sin-Kalun (&quot;Great China&quot; or Machin), a name by which Canton was then known to the Arabs, and professes to have visited also Khansa (Kinsay of Marco Polo, i.e., Hangchau), and Khanbalik (Camlaluc or Peking). The truth of his visit to these two cities, and especially to the last, is very questionable. The traveller s own history singularly illustrates the power of the free masonry of Mahometanism in carrying him with a wel come over all the known world, and some anecdotes of his adventures in China illustrate this even more forcibly.

We cannot follow in detail his voyage back, or tell how he saw the great bird Rukh (evidently, from his descrip tion, an island lifted by refraction). Revisiting Sumatra, Malabar, Oman, Persia, Baghdad, he crossed the great desert to Tadmor and Damascus, where he got his first news of home, and heard of his father s death fifteen years before. Diverging to Hamath and Aleppo, on his return to Damascus he found the Black Death raging, so that two thousand four hundred died in one day. Revisiting Jeru salem and Cairo, he made the linj for a fourth time, and finally turned westward, reaching Fez, the capital of his native country, 8th November 1349, after an absence of twenty-four years. It was, he says, after all, the best of all countries. &quot;The dirhems of the West are but little ones, tis true ; but then you get more for them.&quot;

After going home to Tangier, he crossed into Spain and made the round of Andalusia, including Gibraltar, which had just then stood a siege from Alphonso XL (whom the traveller calls &quot;the Roman tyrant Adfunus&quot;). In 1352 the restless man started for Central Africa, passing by the oases of the Sahara (where the houses were built of rock-salt, as Herodotus tells, and roofed with camel skins) to Tim- btictoo and Gogo on the Niger, a river which he calls the Nile, believing it to flow down into Egypt, an opinion maintained by some up to the date of Lander s discovery. Being then recalled by his own king, he returned by Takadda, Hogar, and Tawat to Fez, which he reached in the beginning of 1354. This is the end of his recorded wanderings, which extended over a space of twenty-eight years, and in their main lines alone exceeded 75,000 miles.

By royal order his history was written down from his dictation by Mahommed Ibn Juzai, the king s secretary, a work concluded on the 13th December 1355. This editor ends the work with this appropriate colophon : &quot; Hero ends what I have put into shape from the memoranda of the Shaikh Abu-Abdallah Mahommed Ibn Batuta, whom may God honour ! No person of sense can fail to sec that this Shaikh is the Traveller of Our Age ; and he who should call him The Traveller of the whole Body of Islam would not exceed the truth ! &quot; The traveller died in 1377-78, aged seventy-three.

Ibn Batuta s travels have only been known in Europe during the present century, and were known then for many years only by Arabic abridgments existing in the Gotha and Cambridge libraries. Notices or extracts had been published by Seetzen (c. 1808), Kozcgarten (1818), Apetz (1819), and Burcklmrdt (1819), when in 1829 Dr S. Lee published for the Oriental Translation Fund a version 