Note {1} — Chapter XXIV

Note 1.—No city or district is now known by the name of Ely, but the name survives in that of Mount Dely, properly Monte d’Ely, the Yeli-mala of the Malabar people, and called also in the legends of the coast Sapta-shaila, or the Seven Hills. This is the only spur of the Gháts that reaches the sea within the Madras territory. It is an isolated and very conspicuous hill, or cluster of hills, forming a promontory some 16 miles north of Cananore, the first Indian land seen by Vasco da Gama, on that memorable August morning in 1498, and formerly very well known to navigators, though it has been allowed to drop out of some of our most ambitious modern maps. Abulfeda describes it as “a great mountain projecting into the sea, and descried from a great distance, called Ras Haili”; and it appears in Fra Mauro’s map as Cavo de Eli.