A whole year's time to pass all those great deserts
and mighty rivers. Indeed that the difficulty of travelling to Cathay
was so much greater than that of reaching the New World, and the route
so much longer and more perilous, may be gathered from the fact that,
since those gentlemen twice made this journey, no one from Europe has
dared to repeat it,[3] whereas in the very year following the discovery
of the Western Indies many ships immediately retraced the voyage
thither, and up to the present day continue to do so, habitually and in
countless numbers. Indeed those regions are now so well known, and so
thronged by commerce, that the traffic between Italy, Spain, and England
is not greater.
[Sidenote: Recounts a tradition of the travellers' return to Venice.]
5. Ramusio goes on to explain the light regarding the first part or
prologue of Marco Polo's book that he had derived from a recent piece of
luck which had made him partially acquainted with the geography of
Abulfeda, and to make a running commentary on the whole of the preliminary
narrative until the final return of the travellers to Venice: -
"And when they got thither the same fate befel them as befel Ulysses,
who, when he returned, after his twenty years' wanderings, to his native
Ithaca, was recognized by nobody.
