last they began to feel upon them a longing to see Venice and the lagoons again, and to hear Mass once more beneath the majestic roof of St Mark’s before they died.  Moreover, Kublai Khan was growing old himself, and the favour which he had always shown to them had excited some jealousy among his own people, and they feared what might happen when he died.  But the old Khan was adamant to all their prayers; wealth and honours were theirs for the asking, but he would not let them go.  They might, indeed, have died in China, and we of the West might never have heard of Marco Polo or of Kublai Khan, but for a mere accident, a stroke of fate, which gave them their chance.  In 1286 Arghun, the Khan of Persia, lost by death his favourite wife Bolgana, and, according to her dying wish, he sent ambassadors to the Court of Peking to ask for another bride from her own Mongol tribe.  Their overland route home again was endangered by a war, and they therefore proposed to return by sea.  Just at that moment, Marco Polo happened to return from a voyage on which he had been sent, and spoke with such assurance of the ease with which it had been accomplished, that the three ambassadors conceived a strong desire to take with them all three of these ingenious Venetians, who seemed to know so much about ships.  Thus it was that the great Khan was prevailed upon, very reluctantly, to let them go.

Early in 1292 they set sail from the busy port of Zaiton in fourteen big Chinese junks (of which Marco, writing of the shipping of the Indian and China seas, has left an excellent description),[28] with the three envoys, the princess, a beautiful girl of seventeen, ’moult bele dame at avenant,’ says Marco, who had an eye for pretty ladies, and a large suite of attendants.  One version of Marco’s book says that they took with them also the daughter of the king of Mansi, one of those Sung princesses who in happier days had wandered beside the lake in Hangchow, and who had no doubt been brought up at Cambaluc by the care of Kublai Khan’s favourite queen, the Lady Jamui.  The voyage was a long and difficult one; they suffered lengthy delays in Sumatra, Ceylon, and Southern India, occupied by Marco in studying the sea charts of the coast of India which the Arab pilots showed him, and adding to his knowledge of these parts, which he had already visited.  Thus it was over two years before the junks reached Persia, and two of the three envoys and a large number of their suite had died by the way.  When at last they landed, it was found that Arghun, the prospective bridegroom, had meanwhile died too, leaving his throne in the charge of a regent for his young son.  But on the regent’s advice a convenient solution of the difficulty was found by handing the princess over to this prince, and Marco and his uncles duly conducted her to him in the province of Timochain, where Marco Polo noticed that the women were ’in my opinion the most beautiful in the world’, where stood the famed and solitary arbor secco,