Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume I.
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CHAPTER XXII.

OF A CERTAIN DESERT THAT CONTINUES FOR EIGHT DAYS' JOURNEY.

When you depart from this City of Cobinan, you find yourself again in a Desert of surpassing aridity, which lasts for some eight days; here are neither fruits nor trees to be seen, and what water there is is bitter and bad, so that you have to carry both food and water. The cattle must needs drink the bad water, will they nill they, because of their great thirst. At the end of those eight days you arrive at a Province which is called TONOCAIN. It has a good many towns and villages, and forms the extremity of Persia towards the North.[NOTE 1] It also contains an immense plain on which is found the ARBRE SOL, which we Christians call the Arbre Sec; and I will tell you what it is like. It is a tall and thick tree, having the bark on one side green and the other white; and it produces a rough husk like that of a chestnut, but without anything in it. The wood is yellow like box, and very strong, and there are no other trees near it nor within a hundred miles of it, except on one side, where you find trees within about ten miles' distance. And there, the people of the country tell you, was fought the battle between Alexander and King Darius.[NOTE 2]

The towns and villages have great abundance of everything good, for the climate is extremely temperate, being neither very hot nor very cold. The natives all worship Mahommet, and are a very fine-looking people, especially the women, who are surpassingly beautiful.

NOTE 1.—All that region has been described as "a country divided into deserts that are salt, and deserts that are not salt." (Vigne, I. 16.) Tonocain, as we have seen (ch. xv. note 1), is the Eastern Kuhistan of Persia, but extended by Polo, it would seem to include the whole of Persian Khorasan. No city in particular is indicated as visited by the traveller, but the view I take of the position of the Arbre Sec, as well as his route through Kuh-Banán, would lead me to suppose that he reached the Province of TUN-O-KAIN about Tabbas.

["Marco Polo has been said to have traversed a portion of (the Dash-i-Kavir, great Salt Desert) on his supposed route from Tabbas to Damghan, about 1272; although it is more probable that he marched further to the east, and crossed the northern portion of the Dash-i-Lut, Great Sand Desert, separating Khorasan in the south-east from Kermán, and occupying a sorrowful parallelogram between the towns of Neh and Tabbas on the north, and Kermán and Yezd on the south." (Curzon, Persia, II. pp. 248 and 251.) Lord Curzon adds in a note (p. 248): "The Tunogan of the text which was originally mistaken for Damghan, is correctly explained by Yule as Tun-o- (i.e. and) Káin." Major Sykes writes (ch. xxiii.): "The section of the Lut has not hitherto been rediscovered, but I know that it is desert throughout, and it is practically certain that Marco (...)

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