But It Appearing To Baatu, That His Affairs Suffered Detriment By This Intercourse With The Mahometans, We Learnt On Our Return, That He Had Commanded Berta To Remove From The Iron-Gate To The East Side Of The Volga.

For the space of four days which we spent in the court of Sartach, we had no victuals allowed

Us, except once a little cosmos; and during our journey to the residence of his father Baatu, we travelled in great fear, on account of certain Russian, Hungarian, and Alanian servants of the Tartars, who often assemble secretly in the night, in troops of twenty or thirty together, and being armed with bows and arrows, murder and rob whoever they meet with, hiding themselves during the day. These men are always on horseback, and when their horses tire, they steal others from the ordinary pastures of the Tartars, and each man has generally one or two spare horses to serve as food in case of need. Our guide therefore was in great fear lest we might fall in with some of these stragglers. Besides this danger, we must have perished during this journey, if we had not fortunately carried some of our biscuit along with us. We at length reached the great river Etilia or Volga, which is four times the size of the Seine, and of great depth. This river rises in the north of Greater Bulgaria, and discharges itself into the Hircanian Sea, called the Caspian by Isidore, having the Caspian mountains and the land of Persia on the south, the mountains of Musihet, or of the Assassins on the east, which join the Caspian mountains, and on the north is the great desert now occupied by the Tartars, where formerly there dwelt certain people called Canglae, or Cangitae, and on that side it receives the Etilia, or Volga, which overflows in summer like the Nile in Egypt.

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