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78 they gladly opened their harbours to strangers. Those harbours, sometimes mere roadsteads, had formed the regular meeting marts of Indo-European commerce from prehistoric times. After touching at Ceylon the junks from farther Asia met the Arab ships at Quilon, Cochin, Calicut, and Cannanore, all on the Malabar strip. Even the merchantmen from Egypt, who traded direct with Ceylon and Malacca, usually crept up the Malabar shore before striking across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and the Bed Sea. Malabar had thus an unbroken policy of commerce with the West, more ancient even than its appearance in Indicopleustes as " Male, where the pepper grows. " If the Peutinge- rian Tables represent the facts about 226 A. D., Rome had two cohorts stationed at Cranganore (now called Kodungalur) on the Malabar coast to protect her trade at that early date, and had already erected a local tem- ple to Augustus. In the heroics of the seventh canto of the Lusiad as rendered by Sir Richard Burton: " Great is the country, rich in every style Of goods from China sent by sea to Nyle." The Malabar chiefs were tolerant of the religions of the many nations who traded at their ports. Indeed, the native population itself professed widely diverse forms of faith. Hinduism, which made northern India its own, had more slightly impressed itself on that secluded southern coast. The lower classes and hill- tribes still clung to their primitive pre-Hindu rites; the military race of Nairs proudly asserted, as they