Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 1).djvu/39

 cruelty of the predatory hordes, who roamed over the vast fields which greater robbers had reaped, gleaning the scanty plunder which had escaped their powerful predecessors. Though the land was well watered and fertile, and abounding in game, lions and other wild beasts had begun to establish their dominion over it, man having disappeared; and therefore, such travellers as ventured across this new wilderness were constrained to carry along with them all necessary provisions, nothing whatever being to be found on the way.

When they had passed this desert, they arrived in a country richly cultivated and covered with corn, to the south of which there was a ridge of high mountains, where such prodigious quantities of salt were found that all the world might have been supplied from those mines. The track of our travellers through the geographical labyrinth of Tartary it is impossible to follow. They appear to have been prevented by accidents from pursuing any regular course, in one place having their passage impeded by the overflowing of a river, and on other occasions being turned aside by the raging of bloody wars, by the heat or barrenness, or extent of deserts, or by their utter inability to procure guides through tracts covered with impervious forests or perilous morasses.

They next proceeded through a fertile country, inhabited by Mohammedans, to the town of Scasom, perhaps the Koukan of Arrowsmith, on the Sirr or Sihon. Numerous castles occupied the fastnesses of the mountains, while the shepherd tribes, like the troglodytes of old, dwelt with their herds and flocks in caverns scooped out of the rock. In three days' journey from hence they reached the province of Balascia, or Balashghan, where, Marco falling sick, the party were detained during a whole year, a delay which afforded our illustrious traveller ample