“Muh-sueh-urh-tah-fan (= Muzart), that is Ice Mountain [Snowy according to Prjevalsky], is situated between Ili and Ushi....  In case that one happens to be travelling there close to sunset, he should choose a rock of moderate thickness and lay down on it.  In solitary night then, he would hear the sounds, now like those of gongs and bells, and now like those of strings and pipes, which disturb ears through the night:  these are produced by multifarious noises coming from the cracking ice.”

Kumagusu Minakata has another note on remarkable sounds in Japan in Nature, LIV., May 28, 1896, p. 78.

Sir T. Douglas Forsyth, Buried Cities in the Shifting Sands of the Great Desert of Gobi, Proc.  Roy.  Geog.  Soc., Nov. 13, 1876, says, p. 29:  “The stories told by Marco Polo, in his 39th chapter, about shifting sands and strange noises and demons, have been repeated by other travellers down to the present time.  Colonel Prjevalsky, in pp. 193 and 194 of his interesting Travels, gives his testimony to the superstitions of the Desert; and I find, on reference to my diary, that the same stories were recounted to me in Kashghar, and I shall be able to show that there is some truth in the report of treasures being exposed to view.”

P. 201, Line 12.  Read the Governor of Urumtsi founded instead of found.

XL., p. 203.  Marco Polo comes to a city called Sachiu belonging to a province called Tangut.  “The people are for the most part Idolaters....  The Idolaters have a peculiar language, and are no traders, but live by their agriculture.  They have a great many abbeys and minsters full of idols of sundry fashions, to which they pay great honour and reverence, worshipping them and sacrificing to them with much ado.”

Sachiu, or rather Tun Hwang, is celebrated for its “Caves of Thousand Buddhas”; Sir Aurel Stein wrote the following remarks in his Ruins of Desert Cathay, II., p. 27:  “Surely it was the sight of these colossal images, some reaching nearly a hundred feet in height, and the vivid first impressions retained of the cult paid to them, which had made Marco Polo put into his chapter on ‘Sachiu,’ i.e.  Tun-huang, a long account of the strange idolatrous customs of the people of Tangut....  Tun-huang manifestly had managed to retain its traditions of Buddhist piety down to Marco’s days.  Yet there was plentiful antiquarian evidence showing that most of the shrines and art remains at the Halls of the Thousand Buddhas dated back to the period of the T’ang Dynasty, when Buddhism flourished greatly in China.  Tun-huang, as the westernmost outpost of China proper, had then for nearly two centuries enjoyed imperial protection both against the Turks in the north and the Tibetans southward.  But during the succeeding period, until the advent of paramount Mongol power, some two generations before Marco Polo’s visit, these marches had been exposed to barbarian inroads of all sorts.  The splendour of the temples and the number of the monks and nuns established near them had, no doubt, sadly diminished in the interval.”