And because there are many great and strange things in that book, which are reckoned past all credence, he was asked by his friends on his death-bed to correct the book, by removing everything that went beyond the facts.

To which his reply was that he had not told _one half_ of what he had really seen.'[35] How well one can see that last indignant flash of the dying observer, who in the long years of his youth had taken notes of strange tribes and customs for the wise and gracious Kublai Khan, and whom little men now dared to doubt.

Indeed, modern discovery has entirely confirmed the exactitude of Marco Polo's observation.

It is true that he sometimes repeated some very tall stories which had been told to him, of dog-faced men in the Andaman Islands and of the 'male and female islands' so beloved of medieval geographers.

These were sailors' yarns, and where Marco Polo reports what he has seen with his own eyes, he reports with complete accuracy, nor does he ever pretend to have seen a place which he had not visited.