Our traveller’s information is here, I think, certainly at second hand, though no doubt he had seen the negroes whom he describes with such disgust, and apparently the sheep and the giraffes.

NOTE 2.—­These sheep are common at Aden, whither they are imported from the opposite African coast.  They have hair like smooth goats, no wool.  Varthema also describes them (p. 87).  In the Cairo Museum, among ornaments found in the mummy-pits, there is a little figure of one of these sheep, the head and neck in some blue stone and the body in white agate. (Note by Author of the sketch on next page.)

NOTE 3.—­A giraffe—­made into a seraph by the Italians—­had been frequently seen in Italy in the early part of the century, there being one in the train of the Emperor Frederic II.  Another was sent by Bibars to the Imperial Court in 1261, and several to Barka Khan at Sarai in 1263; whilst the King of Nubia was bound by treaty in 1275 to deliver to the Sultan three elephants, three giraffes, and five she-panthers. (Kington, I. 471; Makrizi, I. 216; II. 106, 108.) The giraffe is sometimes wrought in the patterns of mediaeval Saracenic damasks, and in Sicilian ones imitated from the former.  Of these there are examples in the Kensington Collection.

I here omit a passage about the elephant.  It recounts an old and long-persistent fable, exploded by Sir T. Brown, and indeed before him by the sensible Garcia de Orta.

NOTE 4.—­The port of Zanzibar is probably the chief ivory mart in the world.  Ambergris is mentioned by Burton among miscellaneous exports, but it is not now of any consequence.  Owen speaks of it as brought for sale at Delagoa Bay in the south.

NOTE 5.—­Mas’udi more correctly says:  “The country abounds with wild elephants, but you don’t find a single tame one.  The Zinjes employ them neither in war nor otherwise, and if they hunt them ’tis only to kill them” (III. 7).  It is difficult to conceive how Marco could have got so much false information.  The only beast of burden in Zanzibar, at least north of Mozambique, is the ass.  His particulars seem jumbled from various parts of Africa.  The camel-riders suggest the Bejas of the Red Sea coast, of whom there were in Mas’udi’s time 30,000 warriors so mounted, and armed with lances and bucklers (III. 34).  The elephant stories may have arisen from the occasional use of these animals by the Kings of Abyssinia. (See Note 4 to next chapter.)

[Illustration:  Ethiopian Sheep.]

NOTE 6.—­An approximation to 12,000 as a round number seems to have been habitually used in reference to the Indian Islands; John of Montecorvino says they are many more than 12,000; Jordanus had heard that there were 10,000 inhabited.  Linschoten says some estimated the Maldives at 11,100.  And we learn from Pyrard de Laval that the Sultan of the Maldives called himself Ibrahim Sultan of Thirteen Atollons (or coral groups) and of 12,000 Islands!  This is probably the origin of the proverbial number.  Ibn Batuta, in his excellent account of the Maldives, estimates them at only about 2000.  But Captain Owen, commenting on Pyrard, says that he believes the actual number of islands to be treble or fourfold of 12,000. (P. de Laval in Charton, IV. 255; I.B. IV. 40; J.R.G.S. II. 84.)