A Jolly Traveller
ro Tafur. Travels and Adventures, 1435-1439. Translated and edited with an Introduction by Malcolm Letti. (Routledge. 12s. 6d. net.) E that would travel for the entertainment of others," te Johnson; "-should remember that the great object of ark is human life." Pero Tafur, a well-to-do Spaniard who e a journey towards the en&. of the Middle -Ages through y, Palestine and Egypt, who visited the Emperor .Joha lacologus at Constantinople and returned home through nice, the Low Countries and Germany was not forgetful this maxim. A sound instinct makes him refrain, for tame, from embarking -upon any kind of archaeological cription of Home. He prefers to give us the reason for the lesion of-women from the chapel called the Sancta Saner turn : "They say, that a woman once uttered such things at she- burst asunder." - Not that Pero Tafur is merely ossip. There is an 'impressiveness about his plain, straight7 rivard style (for which his translator should no doubt have Inc share of credit) especially in his aceciunt of the Holy ad. Occasionally his laconic method has Its humours : ' Them is here a great valley -and a vast plain throngh which the er Jordan flows to the place where Our Lord baptized St. John Baptist, and -was baptized- of hint: - A stone cross in the water Is the spot. Here we all bathed, and a German gentleman
belonging to our 2arty perished by -drowning. This is a place of the greatest sem-0;f."
In Egypt he saw crocodiles, hippopotami, elephants and the game of polo. He climbed Mount Sinai and at Rhodes
witnessed the burial of a Master of the Knights of Rhodes. But it was at Constance that he became most humanly enthusiastic :
"I saw there the most beautiful woman it has ever been my lot to see. . . If she was as good as she was beautiful, they should make much of her in Paradise."
Let us hope that Pero Tafur has met her again. S. C. R.
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