and whose origin was so dark; of Java the Pearl of Islands;
of Sumatra with its many kings, its strange costly products,
and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of Nicobar
and Andaman; of Ceylon, the Isle of Gems, with its Sacred
Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a
dreamland of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and
partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene
ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their
acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl and its powerful sun; the
first in modern times to give any distinct account of the
secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, to speak, though
indeed dimly, of Zanzibar with its negroes and its ivory and
of the vast and distant Madagascar, bordering on the Dark
Ocean of the South, with its Ruc and other monstrosities; and
in a remotely opposite region, of Siberia and the Arctic
Ocean, of dog-sledges, white bears and reindeer-riding
Tunguses.[37]

The knowledge which Marco Polo had thus brought to Europe, the
intercourse between East and West which his experience had shown to be
so desirable, continued to grow after him. Merchants and missionaries
alike travelled by land or sea eastward to Cathay.[38] Another of those
indomitable Franciscan friars, John of Monte Corvino, went out at the
age of fifty and became Archbishop of Peking. Churches and houses of
friars were founded in some of the Chinese cities. Odoric of Pordenone,
another friar, and a very good observer too, set forth in 1316 and
sailed round India and through the Spice Islands by the same sea route
by which the Polos had brought their Tartar princess back to Persia, and
so reached Canton, 'a city as big as three Venices ... and all Italy
hath not the amount of craft that this one city hath.' He left a