Such weather conjurings as we have spoken of are ascribed by Ovid to Circe: 

  “Concipit illa preces, et verba venefica dicit;
  Ignotosque Deos ignoto carmine adorat,
       * * * *
  Tunc quoque cantato densetur carmine caelum,
  Et nebulas exhalat humus.”—­Metam. XIV. 365.

And to Medea:—­

  —­“Quum volui, ripis mirantibus, amnes
  In fontes rediere suos ... (another feat of the Lamas)
      ... Nubila pello,
  Nubilaque induco; ventos abigoque, vocoque.”—­Ibid.  VII. 199.

And by Tibullus to the Saga (Eleg. I. 2, 45); whilst Empedocles, in verses ascribed to him by Diogenes Laertius, claims power to communicate like secrets of potency:—­

      “By my spells thou may’st
  To timely sunshine turn the purple rains,
  And parching droughts to fertilising floods.”

(See Cathay, p. clxxxvii.; Erdm. 282; Oppert, 182 seqq.; Erman, I. 153; Pallas, Samml. II. 348 seqq.; Timk. I. 402; J.  R. A. S. VII. 305-306; D’Ohsson, II. 614; and for many interesting particulars, Q.  R. p. 428 seqq., and Hammers Golden Horde, 207 and 435 seqq.)

NOTE 9.—­It is not clear whether Marco attributes this cannibalism to the Tibetans and Kashmirians, or brings it in as a particular of Tartar custom which he had forgotten to mention before.

The accusations of cannibalism indeed against the Tibetans in old accounts are frequent, and I have elsewhere (see Cathay, p. 151) remarked on some singular Tibetan practices which go far to account for such charges.  Della Penna, too, makes a statement which bears curiously on the present passage.  Remarking on the great use made by certain classes of the Lamas of human skulls for magical cups, and of human thigh bones for flutes and whistles, he says that to supply them with these the bodies of executed criminals were stored up of the disposal of the Lamas; and a Hindu account of Tibet in the Asiatic Researches asserts that when one is killed in a fight both parties rush forward and struggle for the liver, which they eat (vol. xv).

[Carpini says of the people of Tibet:  “They are pagans; they have a most astonishing, or rather horrible, custom, for, when any one’s father is about to give up the ghost, all the relatives meet together, and they eat him, as was told to me for certain.”  Mr. Rockhill (Rubruck, p. 152, note) writes:  “So far as I am aware, this charge [of cannibalism] is not made by any Oriental writer against the Tibetans, though both Arab travellers to China in the ninth century and Armenian historians of the thirteenth century say the Chinese practised cannibalism.  The Armenians designate China by the name Nankas, which I take to be Chinese Nan-kuo, ‘southern country,’ the Manzi country of Marco Polo.”—­H.  C.]