(De Barros, Dec. II.
Liv. i. cap. 3; Bartoli, H. della Comp. di Gesu, Asia, I. p. 37; P.
Vincenzo, p. 443.)
The story was, I imagine, a mere ramification of the ancient and
wide-spread fable of the Amazons, and is substantially the same that
Palladius tells of the Brahmans; how the men lived on one side of the
Ganges and the women on the other. The husbands visited their wives for 40
days only in June, July, and August, "those being their cold months, as the
sun was then to the north." And when a wife had once borne a child the
husband returned no more. (Mueller's Ps. Callisth. 105.) The Mahabharata
celebrates the Amazon country of Rana Paramita, where the regulations were
much as in Polo's islands, only male children were put to death, and men if
they overstayed a month. (Wheelers India, I. 400.)
Hiuen Tsang's version of the legend agrees with Marco's in placing the
Woman's Island to the south of Persia. It was called the Kingdom of
Western Women. There were none but women to be seen. It was under Folin
(the Byzantine Empire), and the ruler thereof sent husbands every year; if
boys were born, the law prohibited their being brought up. (Vie et
Voyages, p. 268.) Alexander, in Ferdusi's poem, visits the City of Women
on an island in the sea, where no man was allowed.
