Volume 2 / Part 3 — CHAPTER XXI.
Henry Yule translation
Concerning the Land of Darkness.
Still further north, and a long way beyond that kingdom of which I have spoken, there is a region which bears the name of Darkness, because neither sun nor moon nor stars appear, but it is always as dark as with us in the twilight. The people have no king of their own, nor are they subject to any foreigner, and live like beasts. [They are dull of understanding, like half-witted persons.{1}]
The Tartars however sometimes visit the country, and they do it in this way. They enter the region riding mares that have foals, and these foals they leave behind. After taking all the plunder that they can get they find their way back by help of the mares, which are all eager to get back to their foals, and find the way much better than their riders could do.{2}
Those people have vast quantities of valuable peltry; thus they have those costly Sables of which I spoke, and they have the Ermine, the Arculin, the Vair, the Black Fox, and many other valuable furs. They are all hunters by trade, and amass amazing quantities of those furs. And the people who are on their borders, where the Light is, purchase all those furs from them; for the people of the Land of Darkness carry the furs to the Light country for sale, and the merchants who purchase these make great gain thereby, I assure you.{3}
The people of this region are tall and shapely, but very pale and colourless. One end of the country borders upon Great Rosia. And as there is no more to be said about it, I will now proceed, and first I will tell you about the Province of Rosia.
The story also found its way into some of the later Greek forms of the Alexander Legends. Alexander, when about to enter the Land of Darkness, takes with him only picked young men. Getting into difficulties, the King wants to send back for some old sage who should advise. Two young men had smuggled their old father with them in anticipation of such need, and on promise of amnesty they produce him. He gives the advice to use the mares as in the text. (See Müller’s ed. of Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. II. ch. xxxiv.)
[“Ibn Batuta’s account of the market of the ‘Land of Darkness’ ... agrees almost word for word with Dr. Mirth’s account of the ‘Spirit Market, taken from the Chinese.’” (Parker, China Review, XIV. p. 359.)—H. C.]
Abulfeda gives exactly the same account of the trade; and so does Herberstein. Other Oriental writers ascribe the same custom to the Wisu, a people three months’ journey from Bolghar. These Wisu have been identified by Fraehn with the Wesses, a people spoken of by Russian historians as dwelling on the shores of the Bielo Osero, which Lake indeed is alleged by a Russian author to have been anciently called Wüsu, misunderstood into Weissensee, and thence rendered into Russian Bielo Osero (“White Lake”). (Golden Horde, App. p. 429; Büsching, IV. 359–360; Herberstein in Ram. II. 168 v.; Fraehn, Bolghar, pp. 14, 47; Do., Ibn Fozlan, 205 seqq., 221.) Dumb trade of the same kind is a circumstance related of very many different races and periods, e.g., of a people beyond the Pillars of Hercules by Herodotus, of the Sabaean dealers in frankincense by Theophrastus, of the Seres by Pliny, of the Sasians far south of Ethiopia by Cosmas, of the people of the Clove Islands by Kazwini, of a region beyond Segelmessa by Mas’udi, of a people far beyond Timbuctoo by Cadamosto, of the Veddas of Ceylon by Marignolli and more modern writers, of the Poliars of Malabar by various authors, by Paulus Jovius of the Laplanders, etc. etc.
Pliny’s attribution, surely erroneous, of this custom to the Chinese [see supra, H. C.], suggests that there may have been a misunderstanding by which this method of trade was confused with that other curious system of dumb higgling, by the pressure of the knuckles under a shawl, a masonic system in use from Peking to Bombay, and possibly to Constantinople.
The term translated here “Light,” and the “Light Country,” is in the G. T. “a la Carte,” “a la Cartes.” This puzzled me for a long time, as I see it puzzled Mr. Hugh Murray, Signor Bartoli, and Lazari (who passes it over). The version of Pipino, “ad Lucis terras finitimas deferunt,” points to the true reading;—Carte is an error for Clarté.
The reading of this chapter is said to have fired Prince Rupert with the scheme which resulted in the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company.