Fa-Hsien's Above-Quoted Passage Clearly Alludes To
This Belief, And So Does Hiuan Tsang, As We Have Seen, Where He Points In
Graphic Words The Impressions Left By His Journey Through The Sandy Desert
Between Niya And Charchan.
"Thus, too, the description we receive through the Chinese
historiographer, Ma Tuan-lin, of the shortest route from China
Towards
Kara-shahr, undoubtedly corresponding to the present track to Lop-nor,
reads almost like a version from Marco's book, though its compiler, a
contemporary of the Venetian traveller, must have extracted it from some
earlier source. 'You see nothing in any direction but the sky and the
sands, without the slightest trace of a road; and travellers find nothing
to guide them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of camels.
During the passage of this wilderness you hear sounds, sometimes of
singing, sometimes of wailing; and it has often happened that travellers
going aside to see what these sounds might be have strayed from their
course and been entirely lost; for they were voices of spirits and
goblins.'...
"As Yule rightly observes, 'these Goblins are not peculiar to the Gobi.'
Yet I felt more than ever assured that Marco's stories about them were of
genuine local growth, when I had travelled over the whole route and seen
how closely its topographical features agree with the matter-of-fact
details which the first part of his chapter records. Anticipating my
subsequent observations, I may state here at once that Marco's estimate of
the distance and the number of marches on this desert crossing proved
perfectly correct.
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