[FN#53] Bresl. Edit. “Khwájah,” our “Howajee,” meaning a schoolmaster, a man of letters, a gentleman. [FN#54] And he does repeat at full length what the hearers must have known right well. I abridge. [FN#55] Island of the Bell (Arab. “Nákús”=a wooden gong used by Christians but forbidden to Moslems). “Kala” is written “Kela,” “Kullah” and a variety of ways. Baron Walckenaer places it at Keydah in the Malay peninsula opposite Sumatra. Renaudot identifies it with Calabar, “somewhere about the point of Malabar.” [FN#56] Islands, because Arab cosmographers love to place their speciosa miracula in such places. [FN#57] Like the companions of Ulysses who ate the sacred oxen (Od. xii.). [FN#58] So the enormous kingfisher of Lucian’s True History (lib. ii.). [FN#59] This tale is borrowed from Ibn Al-Wardi, who adds that the greybeards awoke in the morning after eating the young Rukh with black hair which never turned white. The same legend is recounted by Al-Dimiri (ob. A.H. 808=1405–6) who was translated into Latin by Bochart (Hierozoicon ii. p. 854) and quoted by Hole and Lane (iii. 103). An excellent study of Marco Polo’s Rukh was made by my learned friend the late Prof. G. G. Bianconi of Bologna, “Dell’Uccello Ruc,” Bologna, Gamberini, 1868. Prof. Bianconi predicted that other giant birds would be found in Madagascar on the East African Coast opposite; but he died before hearing of Hildebrand’s discovery. [FN#60] Arab. “Izár,” the earliest garb of Eastern man; and, as such preserved in the Meccan pilgrimage. The “waist-cloth” is either tucked in or kept in place by a girdle. [FN#61] Arab. “Líf,” a succedaneum for the unclean sponge, not unknown in the “Turkish Baths” of London. [FN#62] The Persians have a Plinian monster called “Tasmeh-pá”=Strap-legs without bones. The “Old Man” is not an ourang-outang nor an Ifrít as in Sayf al-Mulúk, Night dcclxxi., but a jocose exaggeration of a custom prevailing in parts of Asia and especially in the African interior where the Tsetse-fly prevents the breeding of burden-beasts. Ibn Batútah tells us that in Malabar everything was borne upon men’s backs. In Central Africa the kinglet rides a slave, and on ceremonious occasions mounts his Prime Minister. I have often been reduced to this style of conveyance and found man the worst imaginable riding: there is no hold and the sharpness of the shoulder-ridge soon makes the legs ache intolerably. The classicists of course find the Shaykh of the Sea in the Tritons and Nereus, and Bochart (Hiero. ii. 858, 880) notices the homo aquaticus, Senex Judćus and Senex Marinus. Hole (p. 151) suggests the inevitable ouran-outan (man o’ wood), one of “our humiliating copyists,” and quotes “Destiny” in Scarron’s comical romance (Part ii. chapt. i) and “Jealousy” enfolding Rinaldo. (O.F. lib. 42).