spring night. Go rather to the island of Ceylon, and see the King's
Ruby, which is the greatest jewel in the world. I stopped there and
at Coromandel for the pearls the divers go down in the sea for, and
there are no clothes on that island, so that every one goes naked
as a fish. And there is the shrine of Saint Thomas. I was there.

"Gujarat, Tana, I stopped there. The Male and Female Islands I put
into for ambergris. Svestra, which is full of magicians -- I was there,
too. Madagascar and Zanzibar, where they live on camel flesh, I was
there. And from Zanzibar I came north to Abyssinia, because I had
to get an ostrich there for the King of Siam. And there was a letter
and a parcel for the Sultan of Egypt. So I went to Cairo. I had a
month on my hands, so I thought I'd run over and see Venice, because
it's a hobby of mine, you might say, to see the world.

"Now let me reckon. Four and three makes seven, and four more are
eleven, and six are seventeen, and let us say nine with that, and
you have twenty-six. And the month I'm forgettng on the rocks of
Aden is twenty-seven, and a week here and a week there for bad winds
and such like. It would be safe to put that at three months. So it's
two years and a half since I left China."

"You never," says young Marco, "met anybody in China by the name
of Polo?"

"Poh-lo? Poh-lo? China's a bigger place nor you would imagine,
laddie. There's half a hundred million people there."

"These were foreigners," Marco explained, "traders. They were
at the court of the great Khan."