Sindbad’s adventures with the Rukh are too well known for quotation.  A variety of stories of the same tenor hitherto unpublished, have been collected by M. Marcel Devic from an Arabic work of the 10th century on the “Marvels of Hind,” by an author who professes only to repeat the narratives of merchants and mariners whom he had questioned.  A specimen of these will be found under Note 6.  The story takes a peculiar form in the Travels of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela.  He heard that when ships were in danger of being lost in the stormy sea that led to China the sailors were wont to sew themselves up in hides, and so when cast upon the surface they were snatched up by great eagles called gryphons, which carried their supposed prey ashore, etc.  It is curious that this very story occurs in a Latin poem stated to be at least as old as the beginning of the 13th century, which relates the romantic adventures of a certain Duke Ernest of Bavaria; whilst the story embodies more than one other adventure belonging to the History of Sindbad.[5] The Duke and his comrades, navigating in some unknown ramification of the Euxine, fall within the fatal attraction of the Magnet Mountain.  Hurried by this augmenting force, their ship is described as crashing through the rotten forest of masts already drawn to their doom:—­

  “Et ferit impulsus majoris verbere montem
  Quam si diplosas impingat machina turres.”

There they starve, and the dead are deposited on the lofty poop to be carried away by the daily visits of the gryphons:—­

  —­“Quae grifae membra leonis
  Et pennas aquilae simulantes unguibus atris
  Tollentes miseranda suis dant prandia pullis.”

When only the Duke and six others survive, the wisest of the party suggests the scheme which Rabbi Benjamin has related:—­

  —­“Quaeramus tergora, et armis
  Vestiti prius, optatis volvamur in illis,
  Ut nos tollentes mentita cadavera Grifae
  Pullis objiciant, a queis facientibus armis
  Et cute dissuta, nos, si volet, Ille Deorum
  Optimus eripiet.”

Which scheme is successfully carried out.  The wanderers then make a raft on which they embark on a river which plunges into a cavern in the heart of a mountain; and after a time they emerge in the country of Arimaspia inhabited by the Cyclopes; and so on.  The Gryphon story also appears in the romance of Huon de Bordeaux, as well as in the tale called ’Hasan of el-Basrah’ in Lane’s Version of the Arabian Nights.

It is in the China Seas that Ibn Batuta beheld the Rukh, first like a mountain in the sea where no mountain should be, and then “when the sun rose,” says he, “we saw the mountain aloft in the air, and the clear sky between it and the sea.  We were in astonishment at this, and I observed that the sailors were weeping and bidding each other adieu, so I called out, ‘What is the matter?’ They replied, ’What we took for a mountain is