protection of the Knights Templars, and scuttled back to the coast and safety as fast as they could go, leaving the Polos, ’undismayed by perils and difficulties, to which they had long been inured,’ to proceed alone.  Assuredly, St Francis crows over St Dominic somewhere in the courts of Heaven; his friars never feared for their skins, as they travelled blithely into the heat of India and the cold of central Asia; and it is easy to imagine the comments of fat William of Rubruck upon the flight of the profound theologians.

The account of this second journey of the Polos may be read in the wonderful book which Marco afterwards wrote to describe the wonders of the world.  They went from Lajazzo through Turcomania, past Mount Ararat, where Marco heard tell that Noah’s ark rested, and where he first heard also of the oil wells of Baku and the great inland sea of Caspian.  Past Mosul and Bagdad they went, through Persia, where brocades are woven and merchants bring caravan after caravan of treasures, to Hormuz, on the Persian Gulf, into which port put the ships from India, laden with spices, drugs, scented woods, and jewels, gold tissues and elephants’ teeth.  Here they meant to take ship, but they desisted, perhaps because they feared to trust themselves to the flimsy nailless vessels in which the Arabs braved the dangers of the Indian Ocean.  So they turned north again and prepared to make the journey by land.  They traversed the salt desert of Kerman, through Balk and Khorassan to Badakhshan, where there are horses bred from Alexander the Great’s steed Bucephalus, and ruby mines and lapis lazuli.  It is a land of beautiful mountains and wide plains, of trout streams and good hunting, and here the brothers sojourned for nearly a year, for young Marco had fallen ill in the hot plains:  a breath of mountain air blows through the page in which he describes how amid the clean winds his health came back to him.  When he was well, they went on again, and ascended the upper Oxus to the highlands of Pamir, ‘the roof of the world’ as it has been called in our own time, a land of icy cold, where Marco saw and described the great horned sheep which hunters and naturalists still call after him the Ovis Poli,[17] a land which no traveller (save Benedict Goes, about 1604) described again, until Lieutenant John Wood of the Indian Navy went there in 1838.  Thence they descended upon Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan, where jade is found, regions which no one visited again until 1860.  From Khotan they pushed on to the vicinity of Lake Lob, never to be reached again until a Russian explorer got there in 1871.  They halted there to load asses and camels with provisions, and then, with sinking hearts, they began the terrible thirty days’ journey across the Gobi Desert.  Marco gives a vivid description of its terrors, voices which seem to call the traveller by name, the march of phantom cavalcades, which lures them off the road at night, spirits which fill the air with sounds of music, drums and gongs and the clash of arms—­all those illusions which human beings have heard and seen and feared in every desert and in every age.