Those people have vast quantities of valuable peltry; thus they have those costly Sables of which I spoke, and they have the Ermine, the Arculin, the Vair, the Black Fox, and many other valuable furs.  They are all hunters by trade, and amass amazing quantities of those furs.  And the people who are on their borders, where the Light is, purchase all those furs from them; for the people of the Land of Darkness carry the furs to the Light country for sale, and the merchants who purchase these make great gain thereby, I assure you.[NOTE 3]

The people of this region are tall and shapely, but very pale and colourless.  One end of the country borders upon Great Rosia.  And as there is no more to be said about it, I will now proceed, and first I will tell you about the Province of Rosia.

NOTE 1.—­In the Ramusian version we have a more intelligent representation of the facts regarding the Land of Darkness:  “Because for most part of the winter months the sun appears not, and the air is dusky, as it is just before the dawn when you see and yet do not see;” and again below it speaks of the inhabitants catching the fur animals “in summer when they have continuous daylight.”  It is evident that the writer of this version did and the writer of the original French which we have translated from did not understand what he was writing.  The whole of the latter account implies belief in the perpetuity of the darkness.  It resembles Pliny’s hazy notion of the northern regions:[1] “pars mundi damnata a rerum natura et densa mersa caligine.”  Whether the fault is due to Rustician’s ignorance or is Polo’s own, who can say?  We are willing to debit it to the former, and to credit Marco with the improved version in Ramusio.  In the Masalak-al-Absar, however, we have the following passage in which the conception is similar:  “Merchants do not ascend (the Wolga) beyond Bolghar; from that point they make excursions through the province of Julman (supposed to be the country on the Kama and Viatka).  The merchants of the latter country penetrate to Yughra, which is the extremity of the North.  Beyond that you see no trace of habitation except a great Tower built by Alexander, after which there is nothing but Darkness.”  The narrator of this, being asked what he meant, said:  “It is a region of desert mountains, where frost and snow continually reign, where the sun never shines, no plant vegetates, and no animal lives.  Those mountains border on the Dark Sea, on which rain falls perpetually, fogs are ever dense, and the sun never shows itself, and on tracts perpetually covered with snow.” (N. et Ex. XIII. i. 285.)