. The story of Marco Polo . y Marco as used forbuilding material were bamboo, of which- he mightwell say that it serves also for a great variety ofother useful purposes. An intelligent native of Arakan, who accompaniedColonel Yule in Burmah in 1853, used to ask himmany questions about Europe, and seemed able tounderstand almost everything except the possibilityof existence in a country without bamboos. Thesebamboo huts are all of bamboo—posts and walls,wall-plates and rafters, floor and thatch, and thewithes that bind them. Indeed, it might almost besaid that, among the Indo-Chinese nations, t
. The story of Marco Polo . y Marco as used forbuilding material were bamboo, of which- he mightwell say that it serves also for a great variety ofother useful purposes. An intelligent native of Arakan, who accompaniedColonel Yule in Burmah in 1853, used to ask himmany questions about Europe, and seemed able tounderstand almost everything except the possibilityof existence in a country without bamboos. Thesebamboo huts are all of bamboo—posts and walls,wall-plates and rafters, floor and thatch, and thewithes that bind them. Indeed, it might almost besaid that, among the Indo-Chinese nations, the staff oflife is a bamboo. At any rate, they eat the greenshoots, and of the canes in various stages of growththey make an immense number of articles, a few ofwhich are scaffolding and ladders, fishing apparatus,oars, masts, yards, sails, cables, spears, arrows, bows,oil-cans, cooking-pots, musical instruments, footballs,bellows, paper. And in China, to sum up the whole,the bamboo maintains order throughout the empire !. A PAVILION OF THE SUMMER PALACE. CHAPTER XII. THE TRICKS OF CHINESE CONJURERS—FLYING CUPS ANDAIR-CLIMBERS. *]\ T ARCO gives a full account of the wonderful ±VX tricks of conjuring which he witnessed at the court of Kublai Khan. No doubt he saw, or thought he saw the feats which he says were done before his eyes. He intended to be strictly truthful, and says, with some notion that he may be disbelieved, that these things are true, and no lie. Other and later travellers have described the same tricks, and have given no explanation of them, except to say that the spectators were probably hypnotised—that is to say, they were made to believe that they saw what did not exist. At the present day weather-conjuring is practised in China, Tatary, and India; and there are so-called conjurers, who pretend to be able to make fogs and clouds come and go. Not many years since, a Chinese emperor found it necessary to forbid his people to offer prayers for rain after h
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectvoyagesandtravels
