soon obtained the permission to cross the Great Wall and to proceed to Suzhou (now Jiuquan City center), the first city within the Ming Empire, which they entered near the end of 1605. After three years and of arduous travel, Bento and Isaac had 13 horses, five hired servants, and two boys that Bento had redeemed out of slavery. They carried plenty of precious jade with them, and, most importantly, both travelers were in good health. However, here his luck ran out. The Ming Empire had fairly restrictive rules for foreigners' entry into the country, and it would take many months before the Central Asian merchants/"ambassadors" would be allowed to proceed into the interior of the country. In the meantime, Bento and Isaac, virtually imprisoned in the border city, had to spend their assets to feed themselves at the exorbitant prices prevailing there. Góis wrote a letter to the Jesuits in Beijing asking them to find a way to get him out of Suzhou, but it was not delivered, as he did not know the address of his colleagues in Beijing, and apparently he could not even ask anyone to have the letter addressed in Chinese. On their end, the Beijing Jesuits (informed about Góis's expedition by his Goa superiors) were making inquiries about him from people coming from the west, but they could not learn anything either since they did not know his "Armenian" name, or they asked the wrong people. Góis's second letter, sent around Easter 1606, made it to Beijing in mid-November. Despite the winter weather, Ricci promptly sent a Chinese Jesuit Lay Brother, Giovanni Fernandes to his rescue. Despite inclement weather and the theft of many of his supplies by his servant in Xi'an, Fernandes made it to Suzhou, Gansu in late March 1607 and found Bento sick and almost at the point of death. (Ricci says that he may have been poisoned.) The intrepid traveler died 11 days after Fernandes's arrival on 11 April, and the other members of his caravan, pursuant to their "diabolical custom", divided his property among themselves. It took several months of legal efforts for Giovanni and Isaac to recover some of Góis's property and papers from his former caravan travellers. Unfortunately, his travel journal, which he was said to have kept meticulously, had been destroyed by the "Saracen" caravan people, supposedly because it also contained records of the amounts of