Journeying across Asia Minor and over Mount Taurus, he took ship at last for Cyprus. Here he learnt that S. Louis, who had been in the Holy Land at the time of his departure, had gone back to France. He would very much have wished to deliver his letters and presents of silk pelisses and furs to the king in person; but this was not granted him. The provincial of his order, whom he met at Cyprus, desired him to write his account and send his gifts to the king; and as in those days there was creeping in among the monks a habit of restless wandering, his superior, who was, it seems, a reformer and strict disciplinarian, tried the obedience and humility of the famous traveller by sending him to his convent at Acre, whence, by the king’s order, he had started. Rubruquis stood the test, but could not forbear imploring the king, by writing, to use his influence with the provincial to allow him a short stay in France and one audience of his royal master. Little is known of the great traveller and pioneer after this; and whether he ever got leave to see the king is doubtful. He fell back into obscurity, and it is presumed that Marco Polo did not even know of his previous travels over the same ground as the Polos explored. No record of his embassy remained but the Latin letter addressed to S. Louis, and even in France his fame was unknown for many centuries. It was not till after the invention of printing that his adventures became fairly known to the literary world, although Roger Bacon, one of his own order, had given a spirited abstract of his travels in one of his works. This, too, was in Latin, and after a time became a sealed book to the vulgar; so that it was not at least till the year 1600 that the old traveller’s name was again known. Hakluyt’s _Collection of Voyages and Travels_ contains an English translation of Rubruquis’ letter, and twenty-five years later Purchas reproduced it _in toto_ from a copy found in a college library at Cambridge. Bergeron, a French priest, put it into French, not from the original, but from Purchas’ English version. Since then Rubruquis has taken his place among the few famous voyagers of olden times; but from the vagueness of his language, the lack of geographical science in his day, and perhaps also the mistakes of careless copyists, it is not easy to trace his course upon the map. One fact, however, he ascertained and insisted upon, which a geographical society, had it existed in his time, would have been glad to register, together with an honorable mention of the discoverer--_i.e._, the nature of the great lake called the Caspian Sea. The old Greeks had correctly called it an _inland_ sea, but an idea had since prevailed that it possessed some communication with the Northern Ocean. Rubruquis proved the contrary, but no attention was paid to his single assertion, and books of geography, compiled at home from ancient maps and MSS., without a reference, however distant, to the _facts_ recorded by adventurous