Machine summary:
Travelling on land or sailing on the seas he keenly observed · the various phenomena, geographical or other, and recorded his experi• ences and collected new and unique information.
Sulayman's description of the first two seas is missing from the extant account, but from references to the first sea in other parts of the work, it is clear that it differed from that 'given by al-Mas'udi as regards the routes and practices followed by the merchant .
2 He went to the city of Balkh, where he mentions having met an aged traveller who had visited China many times, always making the journey by land, and never by sea.
Abu 'l-fida' mentions Qambalu Island as being the last point reached by the sailors in the Barbary Gulf (the sea stretching along the east coast of Africa from the Gulf of Aden upto the Mozambique Channel) and that it belonged to the Zanj (Negroes) people and had a Muslim population in it (Reinaud, Aboulfeda, Arabic text, Paris, 1840, pp.
4 Al-Mas'udi visited many other towns in Syria and Jordan, including Nazareth,5 and spent a considerable amount of time on the northern border, the frontier between Byzantine and Islamic · lands.
Al-Mas'udi gives us considerable information about : the climate, physical features, ancient and contemporary historical places and monuments of the country, and about the river Nile, arid" describes 'the .
There were land and sea routes up to China,1 although in al-Mas'udi's time Arab ships did not sail up to China as they had done a century earlier.