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 THE POET OF CALICUT 75 headlands out of the ocean, and justify their name as the colossal " landing-stairs " from the deep. It was on this shut-off western coast that the Portu- guese alighted, and it was destined to remain the sole theatre of their conquests within India. Its chief port, Calicut, off which Da Gama anchored in May, 1498, was the cap- ital of one of many rajas who had seized the fragments of the prehistoric kingdom of Chera. According to native tradition the last Hindu sover- eign of Chera, on his conversion to Islam in the ninth century A. D., had divided out his dominions and piously sailed for Me- c *^ dina. The main part COCOANUT PALMS NEAR BOMBAY. of his territories went to form the Hindu kingdom of Yijayanagar in the interior of the peninsula. Out of the residue, Mussulman adventurers from the north carved for themselves inland states, which had coalesced under the Bahmanid dynasty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries A. D. The coast-strip of Malabar, excluded from these larger kingdoms by the mountain wall of the Ghats, was left to be scuffled for by seaport rajas, of whom the Zamorin of Calicut became the chief. The size of Calicut