Mirabilia descripta: The wonders of the East

by active 1302-1330 Bishop of Columbum Catalani Jordanus

4. The days and nights do not vary there more than by two hours at the most.

5. There be always fruits and flowers there, divers trees, and fruits of divers kinds; for (example) there are some trees which bear very big fruit, called Chaqui; and the fruit is of such size that one is enough for five persons.[76]

6. There is another tree which has fruit like that just named, and it is called Bloqui, quite as big and as sweet, but not of the same species. These fruits never grow upon the twigs, for these are not able to bear their weight, but only from the main branches, and even from the trunk of the tree itself, down to the very roots.

7. There is another tree which has fruit like a plum, but a very big one, which is called Aniba. This is a fruit so sweet and delicious as it is impossible to utter in words.[77]

8. There be many other fruit trees of divers kinds, which it would be tedious to describe in detail.

9. I will only say this much, that this India, as regards fruit and other things, is entirely different from Christendom; except, indeed, that there be lemons there, in some places, as sweet as sugar, whilst there be other lemons sour like ours.[78] There be also pomegranates, but very poor and small. There be but few vines, and they make from them no wine, but eat the fresh grapes; albeit there are a number of other trees whose sap they collect, and it standeth in place of wine to them.

10. First of these is a certain tree called Nargil;[79] which tree every month in the year sends out a beautiful frond like [that of] a [date] palm-tree, which frond or branch produces very large fruit, as big as a man’s head. There often grow on one such stem thirty of those fruits as big as I have said. And both flowers and fruits are produced at the same time, beginning with the first month and going up gradually to the twelfth; so that there are flowers and fruit in eleven stages of growth to be seen together. A wonder! and a thing which cannot be well understood without being witnessed.[80] From these branches and fruits is drawn a very sweet water. The kernel [at first] is very tender and pleasant to eat; afterwards it waxeth harder, and a milk is drawn from it as good as milk of almonds; and when the kernel waxeth harder still, an oil is made from it of great medicinal virtue. And if any one careth not to have fruit, when the fruit-bearing stem is one or two months old he maketh a cut in it, and bindeth a pot to this incision; and so the sap, which would have been converted into fruit, drops in; and it is white like milk, and sweet like must, and maketh drunk like wine, so that the natives do drink it for wine; and those who wish not to drink it so, boil it down to one-third of its bulk, and then it becometh thick, like honey; and ’tis sweet, and fit for making preserves, like honey and the honeycomb.[81] One branch gives one potful in the day and one in the night, on the average throughout the year:[82] thus five or six pots may be found hung upon the same tree at once. With the leaves of this tree they cover their houses during the rainy season.[83] The fruit is that which we call nuts of India; and from the rind of that fruit is made the twine with which they stitch their boats together in those parts.[84]

11. There is another tree of a different species, which like that gives all the year round a white liquor pleasant to drink, which tree is called Tárí.[85] There is also another, called Belluri, giving a liquor of the same kind, but better.[86] There be also many other trees, and wonderful ones; among which is one which sendeth forth roots from high up, which gradually grow down to the ground and enter it, and then wax into trunks like the main trunk, forming as it were an arch; and by this kind of multiplication one tree will have at once as many as twenty or thirty trunks beside one another, and all connected together. ’Tis marvellous! And truly this which I have seen with mine eyes, ’tis hard to utter with my tongue. The fruit of this tree is not useful, but poisonous and deadly.[87] There is [also] a tree harder than all, which the strongest arrows can scarcely pierce.