Note {1} — Chapter XXXVI

Note 1.—This is from Pauthier’s text, which is here superior to the G. T. The latter has: “They put the goods in small vessels, which proceed on a river about seven days.” Ram. has, “in other smaller vessels, with which they make a voyage on a gulf of the sea for 20 days, more or less, as the weather may be. On reaching a certain port they load the goods on camels, and carry them a 30 days’ journey by land to the River Nile, where they embark them in small vessels called Zerms, and in these descend the current to Cairo, and thence by an artificial cut, called Calizene, to Alexandria.” The last looks as if it had been edited; Polo never uses the name Cairo. The canal, the predecessor of the Mahmúdíah, is also called Il Caligine in the journey of Simon Sigoli (Frescobaldi, p. 168). Brunetto Latini, too, discoursing of the Nile, says:—