So they turned north again and prepared to make the journey by land.

They traversed the salt desert of Kerman, through Balk and Khorassan to Badakhshan, where there are horses bred from Alexander the Great's steed Bucephalus, and ruby mines and lapis lazuli.

It is a land of beautiful mountains and wide plains, of trout streams and good hunting, and here the brothers sojourned for nearly a year, for young Marco had fallen ill in the hot plains: a breath of mountain air blows through the page in which he describes how amid the clean winds his health came back to him.

When he was well, they went on again, and ascended the upper Oxus to the highlands of Pamir, 'the roof of the world' as it has been called in our own time, a land of icy cold, where Marco saw and described the great horned sheep which hunters and naturalists still call after him the _Ovis Poli_,[17] a land which no traveller (save Benedict Goes, about 1604) described again, until Lieutenant John Wood of the Indian Navy went there in 1838.

Thence they descended upon Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan, where jade is found, regions which no one visited again until 1860.