Now I have told you something of Baudas. I could easily indeed have told you first of the affairs and the customs of the people there. But it would be too long a business, looking to the great and strange things that I have got to tell you, as you will find detailed in this Book. So now I will tell you of the noble city of Tauris. NOTE 1.—We may remember that at a date only three years before Marco related this story (viz. in 1295), the cottage of Loreto is asserted to have changed its locality for the third and last time by moving to the site which it now occupies. Some of the old Latin copies place the scene at Tauris. And I observe that a missionary of the 16th century does the same. The mountain, he says, is between Tauris and Nakhshiwan, and is called _Manhuc_. (_Gravina_, _Christianità nell’Armenia_, etc., Roma, 1605, p. 91.) The moving of a mountain is one of the miracles ascribed to Gregory Thaumaturgus. Such stories are rife among the Mahomedans themselves. “I know,” says Khanikoff, “at least half a score of mountains which the Musulmans allege to have come from the vicinity of Mecca.” Ramusio’s text adds here: “All the Nestorian and Jacobite Christians from that time forward have maintained a solemn celebration of the day on which the miracle occurred, keeping a fast also on the eve thereof.” F. Göring, a writer who contributes three articles on Marco Polo to the _Neue Züricher-Zeitung_, 5th, 6th, 8th April, 1878, says: “I heard related in Egypt a report which Marco Polo had transmitted to Baghdad. I will give it here in connection with another which I also came across in Egypt.