In
Fact, Any One Unused To This Noise, Who Should Hear It Unexpectedly, Might
Easily Go Into A Swound Or Die Of Fright.
But those who are used to it
care nothing about it.
Hence those who are not used to it stuff their ears
well with cotton, and wrap up their heads and faces with all the clothes
they can muster; and so they get along until they have become used to the
sound. 'Tis just the same with horses. Those which are unused to these
noises are so alarmed by them that they break away from their halters and
heel-ropes, and many a man has lost his beasts in this way. So those who
would avoid losing their horses take care to tie all four legs and peg the
ropes down strongly, and to wrap the heads and eyes and ears of the
animals closely, and so they save them. But horses also, when they have
heard the noise several times, cease to mind it. I tell you the truth,
however, when I say that the first time you hear it nothing can be more
alarming. And yet, in spite of all, the lions and bears and other wild
beasts will sometimes come and do much mischief; for their numbers are
great in those tracts.[NOTE 2]
You ride for 20 days without finding any inhabited spot, so that
travellers are obliged to carry all their provisions with them, and are
constantly falling in with those wild beasts which are so numerous and so
dangerous. After that you come at length to a tract where there are towns
and villages in considerable numbers.[NOTE 3] The people of those towns
have a strange custom in regard to marriage which I will now relate.
No man of that country would on any consideration take to wife a girl who
was a maid; for they say a wife is nothing worth unless she has been used
to consort with men. And their custom is this, that when travellers come
that way, the old women of the place get ready, and take their unmarried
daughters or other girls related to them, and go to the strangers who are
passing, and make over the young women to whomsoever will accept them; and
the travellers take them accordingly and do their pleasure; after which
the girls are restored to the old women who brought them, for they are not
allowed to follow the strangers away from their home. In this manner
people travelling that way, when they reach a village or hamlet or other
inhabited place, shall find perhaps 20 or 30 girls at their disposal. And
if the travellers lodge with those people they shall have as many young
women as they could wish coming to court them! You must know too that the
traveller is expected to give the girl who has been with him a ring or
some other trifle, something in fact that she can show as a lover's token
when she comes to be married.
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