the majority of its inhabitants are foreign merchants, who continually build there beautiful houses and wonderful mosques -- an achievement in which they endeavour to surpass each other."An Italian traveler, Marino Sanudo, said that Cambeth was one of India's main two ocean ports. Another Italian, visiting in about 1440, Niccolò de' Conti, mentions that the walls of the city were twelve miles in circumference. The Kothi gateway traditionally believed to be constructed by an English factory is in fact a 14th-century gate, probably dating to the 1330s, of Tughluq era. The Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa visited the city, which he calls Cambaia, in the early sixteenth century. His description of the city is very full. He states: "Entering by Guindarim [Gandhar port, Bharuch], which is within on the river, there is a great and fair city called Cambaia in which dwell both 'mouros' [Muslims] and 'gentios' [Hindus]. Therein are many fair houses, very lofty, with windows and roofed with tiles in our manner, well laid out with streets and fine open places, and great buildings of stone and mortar."(translation of )He describes the city as very busy and affluent, with merchants coming frequently by sea from the world around. Duarte Barbosa also noted that many ships from the Kingdom of Cambaya sailed to the Sultanate of Mogadishu in the Horn of Africa with cloths and spices for which they in return received gold, wax and ivory. Owing principally to the gradually increasing difficulty of access by water by the silting up of the gulf, its commerce has long since fallen away, and the City became poor and dilapidated. The spring tides rise upwards of 30 ft (10 m) and in a channel usually so shallow that it is a serious danger to shipping. By 1900, the trade was chiefly confined to the export of cotton. The City was celebrated for its manufacture of agate and carnelian ornaments, of reputation, principally in China. The houses in many instances are built of stone (a circumstance which indicates the former wealth of the city, as the material had to be brought from a very considerable distance); and remains of a brick wall, three miles (five km) in circumference, which formerly surrounded the City, enclose four large reservoirs of good water and three bazaars. To the southeast there are very extensive ruins of subterranean temples and other buildings half-buried in the sand by which