In Their, Long-Continued Summer[8], These Northern People Take Many Of The Finest Furs, Some Of Which Are Carried Into Russia, Which Is A Great Country Near That Northern Land Of Darkness.

The people in Russia have fair complexions, and are Greek Christians, paying tribute to the king of the Tartars in the west, on whom they border.

In the eastern parts of Russia there is abundance of fine furs, wax, and mines of silver; and I am told the country reaches to the northern ocean, in which there are islands which abound in falcons and ger-falcons.

[1] This concluding section may be considered as a kind of appendix, in which Marco has placed several unconnected hearsay notices of countries where he never had been personally. - E.

[2] Mandeigascar in the Trevigi edition, and certainly meant for Madagascar. - E.

[3] Madagascar has no pretensions to riches or trade, and never had; so that Marco must have been imposed upon by some Saracen or Arab mariner. Its size, climate, and soil certainly fit it for becoming a place of vast riches and population; but it is one almost continued forest, inhabited by numerous independent and hostile tribes of barbarians. Of this island, a minute account will appear in an after part of this work. - E.

[4] There are no elephants in Madagascar, yet these teeth might have been procured from southern Africa. - E.

[5] By India Minor he obviously means what is usually called farther India, or India beyond the Ganges, from the frontiers of China to Moabar, or the north part of the Coromandel coast, including the islands. - E.

[6] Abyssinia, here taken in the most extended sense, including all the western coast of the Red Sea, and Eastern Africa. - E.

[7] This paragraph obviously alludes to the Tartar kingdom of Siberia. - E.

[8] The summer in this northern country of the Samojeds is extremely short; but the expression here used, must allude to the long-continued summer day, when, for several months, the sun never sets. - E.

CHAP. XII.

Travels of Oderic of Portenau, into China and the East, in 1318[1].

INTRODUCTION.

Oderic of Portenau, a minorite friar, travelled into the eastern countries in the year 1318, accompanied by several other monks, and penetrated as far as China. After his return, he dictated, in 1330, the account of what he had seen during his journey to friar William de Solona, or Solangna, at Padua, but without order or arrangement, just as it occurred to his memory. This traveller has been named by different editors, Oderic, Oderisius, and Oldericus de Foro Julii, de Udina, Utinensis, or de Porto Vahonis, or rather Nahonis. Porto-Nahonis, or Portenau, is the Mutatio ad nonum, a station or stage which is mentioned in the Itinerarium Hierosolymitanum, or description of the various routes to Jerusalem, a work compiled for the use of pilgrims; and its name is apparently derived from the Kymerian language, apparently a Celtic dialect, in which port signifies a stage, station, or resting-place, and nav or naou signifies nine; Port-nav, Latinized into Portus naonis, and Frenchified into Portenau, implies, therefore, the ninth station, and is at present named Pordanone in the Friul.

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