XXxiv ADDITIONAL NOTES.
Chinese envoy visited a city of the Roman empire (presumably
Antioch), and wrote a favourable report on the conditions of
government and of trade in the western empire. (Extracts from
this document are given in Schoff, The Ptriplus of the Erythraean
Sea, pp. 275 ff.) Eariy in the second century a Greek trader named
Maes Titianus visited Kashgar and Tashkurgan; others proceeded
as far as Lop-Nor and Miran at the eastern edge of the Tarim
plateau, where Sir Aurel Stein has found frescoes and many smaller
art-objects of Graeco-Roman style, These travellers brought back
a general idea of the mountain system of Central Asia, but China
remained a closed book to them, Hence ancient geographers did
not discover that the'Seres' at the end of the trans-continental
route and the 'Thinae' on the sea track beyond Malaya were one
and the same people, On Chinese exploration, see F. Hirth,
China and the Roman Orient,
P. 352, The Nile and the Mountains of the Moon
Ptolemy's source of information about the East African lakes
and the sources of the Nile was probably a traveller named
Diogenes, who had followed the coast to the neighbourhood of
Zanzibar and perhaps penetrated from this point as far as the lakes
themselves (Ptolemy, i, 9,3), The erroneous idea of a mountain
range extending some five hundred miles across Africa was perhaps
begotten by a vague knowledge of the great glacier ridge of Mt
Ruwenzori beyond the lakes, The Ruwenzori range, however, is
separated from the Kenya and Kilimanjaro systems by a deep rift
valley.