ARAB GEOGRAPHERS 



since there are no [other] flying creatures there on account of the severity of 

 the frost. The skin of these bears is soft, and it is brought to the Egyptian 

 lands as a gift." 



He speaks of the women's island and the men's island which 

 are separated by a strait ten miles across, over which the men 

 row once a year and stay each with his woman for one month. 

 If the child is a boy, she brings it up until it reaches maturity, 

 and then sends it to the men's island; the girls stay on the 

 women's island. 



" To the east of these two islands is the great Saqlab island [i.e., the Slavs' 

 island, which is Edrisi's Norwaga], behind which there is nothing inhabited in 

 the ocean either on the east or north, and its length is about 700 miles, and its 

 width in the middle about 330 miles." Then he says a good deal about the in- 

 habitants, among other things that they are still heathens and worship fire, 

 and on account of the severity of the cold do not regard anything as of greater 

 utility than it. This is evidently the same error as in Ibn Dihya, due to the 

 designation of Magus" ( = Magian) for heathen (cf. p. 201). 



Zakariya Ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini (ob. 1283) has in his 

 cosmography ^ several statements about the North, some of 

 which have already been referred to (Vol. I, pp. 187, 284; Vol. 

 II, 144). Of the northern winter he has very exaggerated ideas. 

 Even of the land of " Rum " (the Roman, especially the Eastern 

 Roman Empire ; in a wider sense the countries of central Europe) 

 he says that winter there has become a proverb, so that a poet 

 says of it : 



"Winter in Rum is an affliction, a punishment and a plague; during it 

 the air becomes condensed and the ground petrified; it makes faces to fade, 

 eyes to weep, noses to run and change color; it causes the skin to crack and 

 kills many beasts. Its earth is like flashing bottles, its air like stinging wasps; 

 its night rids the dog of his whimpering, the lion of his roar, the birds of their 

 twittering and the water of its murmur, and the biting cold makes people long 

 for the fires of Hell." 



He says of the people of Rum (i.e., the Germanic peoples of central Eu- 

 rope) that " their complexion is for the most part fair on account of the cold 

 and the northern situation, and their hair red; they have hardy bodies, and for 

 the most part are given to cheerfulness and jocularity, wherefore the astrono- 

 mers place them under the influence of the planet Venus." 



1 Al-Qa2wini, 1848, ii. pp. 356, 334, 412. 



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