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 Goës, 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.