streets of Hangchow. This is in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries, in the despised and hidebound Middle Ages. _È sichurissimo_!
It takes some of the gilt off Columbus and Vasco da Gama and the age
(forsooth) of 'discovery'.

But a change came over everything in the middle of the fourteenth
century. Darkness fell again and swallowed up Peking and Hangchow, the
great ports, the crowding junks, the noble civilization. No longer was
the great trade route _sichurissimo_, and no longer did Christian friars
chant their Masses in Zaiton. The Tartar dynasty fell and the new rulers
of China reverted to the old anti-foreign policy; moreover, Islam spread
its conquests all over central Asia and lay like a rampart between the
far east and west, a great wall of intolerance and hatred stronger by
far than the great wall of stone which the Chinese had once built to
keep out the Tartars. All Marco Polo's marvels became no more than a
legend, a traveller's tale.

But that great adventurer was not done for yet. Nearly a century and a
half after Marco's death a Genoese sea captain sat poring over one of
the new printed books, which men were beginning to buy and to hand
about among themselves. The book which he was reading was the Latin
version of Marco Polo's travels. He was reading it with intentness and
indeed with passion. As he read he made notes in the margin; on over
seventy pages he made his notes.[40] From time to time he frowned and
turned back and read again the tale of those great ports of Cathay and
the gold-roofed palaces of Cipangu; and always he wondered how those
lands might be reached, now that the wall of darkness covered central
Asia, and anarchy blocked the road to the Persian Gulf. One day (may we
not see him?) he lifted his head and smote his hand upon the table. 'I
will sail west', he said. 'Maybe I shall find the lost island of Antilha