Furthermore, there was abundant opportunity for the numerals of the East to reach Europe through the journeys of travelers and ambassadors. It was from the records of Suleim[=a]n the Merchant, a well-known Arab trader of the ninth century, that part of the story of Sindb[=a]d the Sailor was taken.[397] Such a merchant would have been particularly likely to know the numerals of the people whom he met, and he is a type of man that may well have taken such symbols to European markets. A little later, {101} Ab[=u] 'l-[H.]asan `Al[=i] al-Mas`[=u]d[=i] (d. 956) of Bagdad traveled to the China Sea on the east, at least as far south as Zanzibar, and to the Atlantic on the west,[398] and he speaks of the nine figures with which the Hindus reckoned.[399] There was also a Bagdad merchant, one Ab[=u] 'l-Q[=a]sim `Obeidall[=a]h ibn A[h.]med, better known by his Persian name Ibn Khord[=a][d.]beh,[400] who wrote about 850 A.D. a work entitled _Book of Roads and Provinces_[401] in which the following graphic account appears:[402] "The Jewish merchants speak Persian, Roman (Greek and Latin), Arabic, French, Spanish, and Slavic. They travel from the West to the East, and from the East to the West, sometimes by land, sometimes by sea. They take ship from France on the Western Sea, and they voyage to Farama (near the ruins of the ancient Pelusium); there they transfer their goods to caravans and go by land to Colzom (on the Red Sea). They there reembark on the Oriental (Red) Sea and go to Hejaz and to Jiddah, and thence to the Sind, India, and China. Returning, they bring back the products of the oriental lands.... These journeys are also made by land. The merchants, leaving France and Spain, cross to Tangier and thence pass through the African provinces and Egypt. They then go to Ramleh, visit Damascus, Kufa, Bagdad, and Basra, penetrate into Ahwaz, Fars, Kerman, Sind, and thus reach India and China." Such travelers, about 900 A.D., must necessarily have spread abroad a knowledge of all number {102} systems used in recording prices or in the computations of the market. There is an interesting witness to this movement, a cruciform brooch now in the British Museum. It is English, certainly as early as the eleventh century, but it is inlaid with a piece of paste on which is the Mohammedan inscription, in Kufic characters, "There is no God but God." How did such an inscription find its way, perhaps in the time of Alcuin of York, to England? And if these Kufic characters reached there, then why not the numeral forms as well? Even in literature of the better class there appears now and then some stray proof of the important fact that the great trade routes to the far East were never closed for long, and that the customs and marks of trade endured from generation to generation. The _Gulist[=a]n_ of the Persian poet Sa`d[=i][403] contains such a passage: