and captive Tartars were held of all the slaves the strongest and best.
So his life passed; and in 1324 Marco Polo died, honoured much by his
fellow-citizens, after making a will which is still preserved in the
library of St Mark's.

A characteristic story of his death-bed is related by a Dominican friar,
one Jacopo of Acqui, who wrote some time later. 'What he told in the
book,' says Jacopo, 'was not as much as he had really seen, because of
the tongues of detractors, who being ready to impose their own lies on
others, are over hasty to set down as lies what they in their perversity
disbelieve or do not understand. And because there are many great and
strange things in that book, which are reckoned past all credence, he
was asked by his friends on his death-bed to correct the book, by
removing everything that went beyond the facts. To which his reply was
that he had not told _one half_ of what he had really seen.'[35] How
well one can see that last indignant flash of the dying observer, who in
the long years of his youth had taken notes of strange tribes and
customs for the wise and gracious Kublai Khan, and whom little men now
dared to doubt. Indeed, modern discovery has entirely confirmed the
exactitude of Marco Polo's observation. It is true that he sometimes
repeated some very tall stories which had been told to him, of dog-faced
men in the Andaman Islands and of the 'male and female islands' so
beloved of medieval geographers. These were sailors' yarns, and where
Marco Polo reports what he has seen with his own eyes, he reports with
complete accuracy, nor does he ever pretend to have seen a place which
he had not visited. The explorers of our own day, Aurel Stein, Ellsworth
Huntington, and Sven Hedin, travelling in central Asia, have
triumphantly vindicated him. 'It is,' says an eminent French historian,
'as though the originals of very old photographs had been suddenly
rediscovered: the old descriptions of things which were unchanged could