NOTE 1.—­The readings differ as to the length of the journey.  In Pauthier’s text we seem to have first a journey of forty days from near Karakorum to the Plain of Bargu, and then a journey of forty days more across the plain to the Northern Ocean.  The G. T. seems to present only one journey of forty days (Ramusio, of sixty days), but leaves the interval from Karakorum undefined.  I have followed the former, though with some doubt.

NOTE 2.—­This paragraph from Ramusio replaces the following in Pauthier’s text:  “In the summer they got abundance of game, both beasts and birds, but in winter, there is none to be had because of the great cold.”

Marco is here dealing, I apprehend, with hearsay geography, and, as is common in like cases, there is great compression of circumstances and characteristics, analogous to the like compression of little-known regions in mediaeval maps.

The name Bargu appears to be the same with that often mentioned in Mongol history as BARGUCHIN TUGRUM or BARGUTI, and which Rashiduddin calls the northern limit of the inhabited earth.  This commenced about Lake Baikal, where the name still survives in that of a river (Barguzin) falling into the Lake on the east side, and of a town on its banks (Barguzinsk).  Indeed, according to Rashid himself, BARGU was the name of one of the tribes occupying the plain; and a quotation from Father Hyacinth would seem to show that the country is still called Barakhu.

[The Archimandrite Palladius (Elucidations, 16-17) writes:—­“In the Mongol text of Chingis Khan’s biography, this country is called Barhu and Barhuchin; it is to be supposed, according to Colonel Yule’s identification of this name with the modern Barguzin, that this country was near Lake Baikal.  The fact that Merkits were in Bargu is confirmed by the following statement in Chingis Khan’s biography:  ’When Chingis Khan defeated his enemies, the Merkits, they fled to Barhuchin tokum.’ Tokum signifies ‘a hollow, a low place,’ according to the Chinese translation of the above-mentioned biography, made in 1381; thus Barhuchin tokum undoubtedly corresponds to M. Polo’s Plain of Bargu.  As to M. Polo’s statement that the inhabitants of Bargu were Merkits, it cannot be accepted unconditionally.  The Merkits were not indigenous to the country near Baikal, but belonged originally,—­according to a division set forth in the Mongol text of the Yuan ch’ao pi shi,—­to the category of tribes living in yurts, i.e. nomad tribes, or tribes of the desert.  Meanwhile we find in the same biography of Chingis Khan, mention of a people called Barhun, which belonged to the category of tribes living in the forests; and we have therefore reason to suppose that the Barhuns were the aborigines of Barhu.  After the time of Chingis Khan, this ethnographic name disappears from Chinese history; it appears again in the middle of the 16th century.  The author of the Yyu (1543-1544), in enumerating the tribes inhabiting Mongolia and the adjacent countries, mentions the Barhu, as a strong tribe, able to supply up to several tens of thousands (?) of warriors, armed with steel swords; but the country inhabited by them is not indicated.  The Mongols, it is added, call them Black Ta-tze (Khara Mongols, i.e.  ’Lower Mongols’).