Travelogue of the so-called Mandeville Lore Books

Description

On the wonders of the land of India.

Text

India
About the beautiful land

From the land of the Moors one travels to India by way of countries and mountains of various sizes. And the Indian lands are divided into three: the first is called the Greater, which has in it too much heat; the second the Middle, which is not so hot; the third is called the Lesser and is so cold that the water there turns to crystals and rock. And these are the crystals that the merchants bring here.

In India there are many different kingdoms, strange customs and passions, people and animals. It is called India after the River Indus, which flows through it, and the people who live beside this waterway are wise and ugly and they hunt eels in the river that are more than thirty feet long! There are as many as five thousand islands in the sea, on each of which different laws and customs prevail and each of them is a whole country with a king and his subjects and there are thousands of castles and towns and countless people, though they are unknown to us, for few people travel out of India, because wherever they should go, they would be homesick for their country, and also because on your travels you will encounter many cutthroats and also there live there many terrible beasts and poisonous worms and the oceans are so dangerous that one would hardly swim therein and in some places is the heat so great that in the daytime people are burned to death by the sun.

People here are sick, too, and from the heat the intestines come out of their bodies. And in this land no iron or other metal is allowed, for in the land are many magnetic rocks, and therefore if a ship should have such metals on it, it would be drawn onto the cliffs and everyone on board would die.