202 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XIX, 
tigers (?)' and the serpents which are called ‘denterses’ (%). 
In our country is caught the fish whose blood is used for the 
purple dye. e have many castles (munitiones) and very 
strong and difform tribes. We rule over the Amazons® an 
also over the Brahmans. The palace in which our sublimity 
resides is like that built by St. Thomas for Gondoforus, King 
of the Indians; + its workshops and the rest of the structure 
is like it entirely; the ceilings, beams, and epistyles (epistylia) 
are of sethym wood; the roof of the same palace is of ebony, 
by day and the carbuncles by night.6 The chief gates of the 
palace are of sardonyx mixed with the horn of the cerastes,° 




! The werd in the Latin text is « tiros, which I cannot find in the 
best dictionaries at my disposal. 
2 The word ‘denterses’ does not occur in my Latin dictionaries. 
Both Layard and Huc omit translating parts of the text, this one 
included. 
* Probably many places in India, understood in the vaguest sense, 
had Amazons or legends about them. There were bodies of fighting 
omen at several South Indian courts, as among the later Moghul 
Emperors of India. In 1581, on the Afghanistan side of the Khaibar 
Pass, Father Anthony Monserrate, S.J., was told stories of Indian 
Amazons in connection with Landi Khana (Landi Kotal). Cf. Monser- 
irs As, 3, No. 9, p. j 
Jehan e of travels was published between 
1357 and 1371, says he travelled great part of Ethiopia, Chaldaea, Ama- 
zonia, India the less, the greater, and the middle, and many countries 
about India. Note the three divisions of India. Cf. Encycl. Britann., 9th 
ed., XV (1883), p. 473. The article.on Amazons in the Encyclopedia 
Britannica speaks only of Amazons outside India proper. : 
+ A curious reminiscence of the stories in the Acta S. Thomae, 
which shows what vogue it had both in the West and in the East. The 
°. Yton, his contem :. Friar 
Jordanus, Andrea Corsali (1515) and a Chinese work are still quotec 
this connection for Ceylon by Yule (Marco Polo, II (1875), 297-298). 
5 The Egyptian horned viper. 
