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SEPTEMBER, 1884.) EARLY NOTICES OF METALS AND GEMS IN INDIA.
241
HOMH
this tradition will be found in Colonel Yule's closed with the fifteenth century-at least in edition of Marco Polo. Its origin, as first so far as regards the diamond fable-was the suggested by me, I shall discuss in connexion Venetian, Nicolo Conti, an account of whose with the account given by Nicolo Conti.
voyage is given by Baptista Ramusio" in his Third : This method, which may be described book of Voyages and Travels, on the authority as a corollary of the second, consisted in search- of Messer Pogio, Fiorentino. The locality ing the birds' droppings and intestines for where the diamonds were found was at Abnidiamonds which they had swallowed with the garo, fifteen days' journey northwards from meat.
Bisnagar." As to its identity, I am not yet Marco Polo, in various parts of his book, quite satisfied. We are told that the moun. refers to other precious stones, especially to the tain which produced the diamonds was Balas rubies and "azure" or lapis-lazuli of inaccessible, being infested with serpents, but Badakshân. The value of the former was kept was commanded by another mountain someup by a limit being imposed by the king on the what higher. “Here, at a certain period of out-turn. The latter, he says, occurred in a the year, men bring oxen, which they drive to vein like silver, and was the finest in the world. the top, and having cut them into pieces, cast
In reference to gold and silver there are the warm and bleeding fragments upon the several important facts recorded ; among others, summit by means of machines which they the enormous extent of the accumulation of construct for the purpose. The diamonds stick gold in the treasuries of the princes of South-| to these pieces of flesh. Then come vultures ern India, apon which Colonel Yule remarks, and eagles flying to the spot, which seizing the after speaking of the spoil carried off by meat for their food, fly away to places where Alau'd-din, that "some years later, Muhammad they may be safe from the serpents. To these Tuglak loads two hundred elephants and seve- places the men afterwards come and collect ral thousand bullocks with the precious spoil the diamonds which have fallen from the of a single temple." And a further statement, flesh.” He then describes a different process, given on the authority of Wassaf, is, that which is simply that of washing for diamonds "Kales Dewar, Raja of Malabar, about the in the beds of rivers. For as far back as we year 1309, had accumulated 1,200 crores of gold, have any certain knowledge of them, the diai.e. 12,000 millions of dinars."56
mond miners have all belonged to one or other Marco Polo distinctly mentions copper, gold, of the non-Aryan or aboriginal tribes, who and silver as being imports into Malabar and regard the mines as being the special property Cambay from Eastern countries in his time. of the blood-thirsty goddess, Lakshmi, whose
FERISHTA.–Our next authority is the Indian cruel nature requires much propitiation. To historian, Ferishta, who wrote in 1425. What this day sacrificial offerings are made to her on he says on the subject is chiefly of importance the opening up of mines, of whatever sort, and as confirming other evidence of the great occasionally the meat is placed on an altarwealth possessed by the princes of Southern like scaffold; and in India, as a matter of India in the form of stores of precious stones course, vultures and kites, with other raptorial and bullion. It has already been partly quoted birds, would carry away and devour whatever on page 238. He refers to now long-deserted portions of meat they could seize upon. Out diamond mines in the Central Provinces of of this custom it seems to me most probable India," which I have been able to identify as that the tradition grew which has now attained having been situated at Wairagarh, in the to such a respectable antiquity. Lookers-on, Central Provinces.
unacquainted with the semi-savage rites, regard Nicolo Conti.-The last writer of what them as essential parts of the search for dia. may be called the fabulous period, which monds.
• Vol. II, p. 298. 5* Jour. As. Society, Bengal, vol. L, pt. ii, p. 31.
55 Yule's Marco Polo, 1st ed. vol. II, pp. 276, 284; and pp. 325 and 327.
56 Marco Polo, vol. II, p. 284, note 6.
57 History, Ed. by J. Briggs (London: 1819), vol. II, p. 261. Delle Navigations et Viaggi. Venice : 1613.
50 These two nanos are so written in Ramusio's vo. lume, but in a translation of the passage, published by the Hakluyt Society, they are given as Albenigaras and Bizengulia.
