ease and leisure for the dissipating of sharp grief. For this reason he returned to the shore of the Persian Gulf, and embarked at Gombroon on board of an English ship for India, taking along with him the body of his wife, and a little orphan Georgian girl whom he and Maani had adopted at Ispahan. As even a father cannot remove his daughter, or a husband his wife, from the shah's dominions without an especial permission, which might not be granted without considerable delay, Pietro determined to elude the laws, and disguising the Georgian in the dress of a boy, contrived to get her on board among the ship's crew in the dusk of the evening, on the 19th of January, 1623.
Traversing the Indian Ocean with favourable winds, he arrived on the 10th of February at Surat, where he was hospitably entertained by the English and Dutch residents. He found Guzerat a pleasant country, consisting, as far as his experience extended, of rich, green plains, well watered, and thickly interspersed with trees. From Surat he proceeded to Cambay, a large city situated upon the extremity of a fine plain at the bottom of the gulf of the same name. Here he adopted the dress, and as far as possible the manners of the Hindoos, and then, striking off a little from the coast, visited Ahmedabad, travelling thither with a small cafila or caravan, the roads being considered dangerous for solitary individuals. At a small village on the road he observed an immense number of beautiful yellow squirrels, with fine large tails, leaping from tree to tree; and a little farther on met with a great number of beggars armed with bows and arrows, who demanded charity with sound of trumpet. His observations in this country, though sufficiently curious occasionally, were the fruit of a too hasty survey, which could not enable him to pierce deeply below the exterior crust of manners. Indeed, he seems rather to have amused himself with strange
