The Gravely See

I took a night train along the edge of the Gobi Desert last year. The bunks were hard and I spent a good deal of the night standing between cars looking out at the vast wasteland under the stars. Apparently "Gobi" means “gravel,” or in any event, it certainly should. Boulders, in all direction boulders. Not the kind of place you want to wake up after a bad drunk.

The Voyage and Travel of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, is perhaps the granddaddy of all modern travel literature. He is commonly understood as a pack of lies—the source, inter alia, of the stories that Othello used to woo Desdemona:

And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

--Shakespeare, Othello, I, 3

On the other hand...

….In this contree, is the See that men clepen the Gravely See, that is alle Gravelle and Sond, with outen any drope of Watre: And it ebbeth and flowethe in grete Wawes, as other Sees don: and it is never stille ne in pes, in no mater cesoun. And no man may passé that See be Navye, ne be no maner of craft: and therefore may ne man knowe, what Lond is beyond that See. . . .

And a 3 iourneys long fro that See, ben gret Mountaynes; out of the whiche gothe out a gret Flood, that comethe out of Paradys: and it is fulle of precious Stones, with outen ony drope of Water: and it rennethe throghe the Desert, on that o side; so that it makethe the See gravely: and it berethe into that See, and there it endethe. . . . And anon as thei ben entred in to the gravely See, thei ben seyn no more; but lost for evere more.

--Chapter XXVII Of the Ryall Estate of Prestre John
Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Mandeville, Kt.