62 short curved swords arefinely adorned with gold and silver, depending on the owner, and which are held for them by their pages. They have very beautiful and fair women, who are well-dressed. They can marry as many as they can keep, since they honour Mohammed. Many of them have four orfive wives, all of them recognised and maintained. TheseMouros fromCambay speakmany different languages:Arabic; Turkish, and Gujarat. They eat excellent wheat bread; rice; many kinds of good meat, except pork which their religion forbids them from eating. They are virile men, who enjoy good living, they are spendthrifts; their heads are always shaven, and their women have beautiful hair. When they leave their houses, they go in covered horse-carts, so that nobody can see who is inside, because they are extremely jealous; they can end their marriages whenever they want, by paying the wife a certain sum of money as promised when they wed, should they regret their marriage at some point, and the woman enjoys the same right. This King of Cambay is known as Sultan Moordafaa and he has only been king for a short time. His father was known as Sultan Mahmud, who was brought up on poison and fed it as a boy; it was his father who wanted to raise him like this, so that he could not be killed by poison, because Mouros kings tend to have each other killed by it. He started by eating it in such small quantities that it could do him no harm, and thus he became so full of poison that whenever a fly touched him, as soon as it reached his flesh, it would die and bloat immediately. All the women he slept with died and so for this reason, he had a ring of such great virtue that whenever he put it in a women’s mouth before he carried on with her, the poison would have no effect on her. He could no longer stop taking the poison, because were he to do so he would have died immediately, as we have seen with the opium that the majority of Mouros and Indians eat. For if they were to stop eating it, they would die, and if those who had never eaten it were to start, they too would
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