_ 224 _ midday we arrived at a settlement vcalled Xibabeque of about forty or fifty citizens, very cool with fruit, good water and livestock of every kind, situated to the north-northeast, and inhabited by very fair skinned handsome Persian Moors, who looked like Portuguese, as did the women. They live by selling all this and a kind of cape (which are like large garments, and blankets which they make from the wool of sheep, of which they have many, with caps lined with leather to the caravans which pass that way. There we stayed that day and the next, and I was assailed by some sick people of whom I could not wear on their heads, and other illnesses; and what most irritated rid myself, with an illness of the eyes a very general infirmity in these parts, caused by the great heat of the leather caps they always me was that they were looking for a dragoman who would tell them the remedies he had taught them, but never completed telling them. Here I came across a foot soldier of the Gauzil of Ormuz who was returning there from the city of Yazd with the answers to letters he had taken for his master. So I wrote one to the Governor, in which I gave him an account of all that had happened so far, and of the great displeasure I felt at the slowness of our progress. I told him, too, of the death of the Mother Superior, of what she had left, and that
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