"The City With Twelve Thousand Bridges, Has Twelve
Principal Gates, And In Advance From Each Of These A Detached Town,
Or
great city, extends for three or four miles." Though he pretends to have
resided three years in Cambalu, he
Does not seem to have known the name of
the khan, whom he served for fifteen months against the king of Mangi.
Leaving Cathay he goes into Tharsis, Turquescen, Corasine, and Kommania, in
which he seems to have transcribed from Oderic; and makes Prester John
emperor of India, a country divided into many islands by the great torrents
which descend from Paradise! He gives also an account of a sea of sand and
gravel, entirely destitute of water, the Mare arenosum of Oderic; to which
he adds that it moves in waves like the ocean. Though he makes Prester John
sovereign of India, he assigns Susa in Persia for his residence; constructs
the gates of his palace of sardonyx, its bars of ivory, its windows of rock
crystal, and its tables of emeralds; while numerous carbuncles, each one
foot in length, served infinitely better than lamps to illuminate the
palace by night. To many absurdities, apparitions, and miracles, copied and
disguised from Oderic, he adds two islands in the middle of the continent,
one inhabited by giants thirty feet high, while their elder brethren in the
other are from forty-five to fifty feet.
He borrows many fabulous stories from Pliny, and from the romances of the
middle, ages, yet so ignorantly as to reverse the very circumstances of his
authors.
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