ONE of the greatest of mediaeval travellers was Ibn Battuta,
of Tangier, 'the Traveller of Islam' who, in the fourteenth century, journeyed through Cen- tral Asia to India, crossed the Sahara, visited every Muslim State of the time, and Ceylon, China and Constantinople into the bargain. The first of four volumes of his travels, in the familiar dowdy livery of the Hakluyt Society, records the earliest, pious journeyings to the Holy Places of Islam and, half buried under the slag-heaps of scholarship— footnotes, variants, unpronounceable pedantries instead of familiar place-names—are to be found revealing pictures of the Mecca and Medina of the middle ages. The women of Mecca, though devout and chaste, were much given to scenting themselves. At the time of the Great Plague in Damascus, Jews with their Taimuds and Gentiles with their Gospels prayed alongside Muslims with their Korans at the Mosque of the Foot- prints. These were things that Ibn Battuta had seen (or smelled) for himself, but he was avid, too, for hearsay marvels and miracles, and his book is a peephole on to an inquiring and
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