and where men still told tales of great Alexander and Darius.  There they took leave of their princess, who had come on the long voyage to love them like fathers, so Marco says, and wept sorely when they parted.  It was while they were still in Persia, where they stayed for nine months after handing over the princess, that the Polos received news of the death of the Great Khan whom they had served so faithfully for so many years.  He died at the ripe age of eighty, and with his death a shadow fell over central Asia, darkening the shining yellow roofs of Cambaluc,

the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With sails and wind their cany waggons light,

the minarets of Persia, and the tents of wild Kipchak Tartars, galloping over the Russian steppes.  So wide had been the sway of Kublai Khan.  A shadow fell also upon the heart of Marco Polo.  It was as though a door had clanged to behind him, never to open again.  ’In the course of their journey,’ he says, ’our travellers received intelligence of the Great Khan having departed this life, which entirely put an end to all prospects of their revisiting those regions.’  So he and his elders went on by way of Tabriz, Trebizond, and Constantinople to Venice, and sailed up to the city of the lagoons at long last at the end of 1295.

A strange fairy-tale legend has come down to us about the return of the Polos.  ‘When they got thither,’ says Ramusio, who edited Marco’s book in the fifteenth century, ’the same fate befell them as befell Ulysses, who when he returned after his twenty years’ wanderings to his native Ithaca was recognized by nobody.’  When, clad in their uncouth Tartar garb, the three Polos knocked at the doors of the Ca’ Polo, no one recognized them, and they had the greatest difficulty in persuading their relatives and fellow-Venetians that they were indeed those Polos who had been believed dead for so many years.  The story goes that they satisfactorily established their identity by inviting all their kinsmen to a great banquet, for each course of which they put on a garment more magnificent than the last, and finally, bringing in their coarse Tartar coats, they ripped open the seams and the lining thereof, ’upon which there poured forth a great quantity of precious stones, rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds, which had been sewn into each coat with great care, so that nobody could have suspected that anything was there....  The exhibition of such an extraordinary and infinite treasure of jewels and precious stones, which covered the table, once more filled all present with such astonishment that they were dumb and almost beside themselves with surprise:  and they at once recognized these honoured and venerated gentlemen in the Ca’ Polo, whom at first they had doubted and received them with the greatest honour and reverence.[29] Human nature has changed little since the thirteenth century.  The precious stones are a legend, but no doubt the Polos brought many