Ibn Batuta

Ibn Batuta, a famous Mohammedan traveller, who appears to have been born at Tangier in 1304, and to have died there at the age of seventy-three. From 1325 to 1355 he was incessantly engaged in travel, and the record of his adventures, if marked here and there by apocryphal incidents, bears the stamp of truth in the main. His itinerary begins along the south coast of the Mediterranean and, striking inland to Cairo, extends to Damascus, Mecca, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aden, Mombassa, Quiloa, and the Persian Gulf. He then worked his way back to Egypt and thence through Syria and Asia Minor to the Black Sea. Joining the chief, Mahommed Usbez, he saw a good deal of Russia, visited Constantinople, and then starting from Sarai struck across the steppes, traversed Khorassan and Cabul, climbed the Hindu Kush, and reached the Indus. He next found his way to Delhi, of which city he was for eight years Kadi, and being despatched on a mission to China, professed, after wanderings which took him through much of India and the Eastern Archipelago, to have got as far as Cambaluc or Pekin. Coming home at last, after an absence of twenty-four years, he finished up with et little trip to Timbuctoo and the Niger, and then settled down to write his adventures.