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CHAPTER XIII

CHRYSE THE GOLDEN AS IT STANDS REVEALED TO-DAY

THE story of the exploration of south-eastern Asia by Europeans—and Europeans, for our purposes, are the only true explorers—has now been told. We have seen the first dim dawning of the idea that the Gangetic Valley was not in truth the most easterly limit of the habitable world that beyond it lay other lands, to which distance lent the glamour of mys- tery and of romance. We have seen how Chryse the Golden, the earliest conception of which was an island of paltry extent lying over against the mouths of the Ganges, began at last to find a place upon the maps of the ancient geographers; how later this germ of truth developed into the Golden Chersonese of Ptolemy and Marinus of Tyre. Thereafter we have watched the growth of knowledge of south-castern Asia, fostered first. by the adventurous Arabian and Persian traders, who so long held the commercial empire of the East after the rise of the Power of Islâm, then extended little by little by the tales brought home to Europe by the medieval. wanderers of Italy. Next, with the dawning of the six- teenth century, came the invasion of the East by the Portuguese, the events of which, in so far as they affect Chyrse the Golden, have been examined in so much de- tail in a section of this work. After that period of

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