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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75759 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE COASTS OF ILLUSION
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+
+                 [Illustration: THE BOYHOOD OF RALEIGH
+
+                        _By_ Sir John Millais]
+
+
+
+
+                                  THE
+                          COASTS OF ILLUSION
+
+                        A Study of Travel Tales
+
+                                  BY
+
+                          CLARK B. FIRESTONE
+
+
+                          _With Drawings by_
+
+                             RUTH HAMBIDGE
+
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+
+              “_Westward of Valhalla grows a plant called
+            The mistletoe; it seemed too young to swear._”
+
+                                --FRIGG
+
+
+                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
+                                MCMXXIV
+
+
+
+
+                        THE COASTS OF ILLUSION
+
+                 Copyright, 1924, by Harper & Brothers
+                Printed in the United States of America
+
+                            _First Edition_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                          PAGE
+
+        MARCO TALKS WITH HIS NEIGHBORS      ix
+
+        PREFACE                             xi
+
+                                       CHAPTER
+
+      I THE WORLD THAT WAS                   1
+
+     II THE EARTH ITSELF                     5
+
+    III INANIMATE NATURE                    14
+
+     IV THE ANIMAL KINGDOM                  27
+
+      V THE FABULOUS BEASTS                 49
+
+     VI FABLE UPON WINGS                    68
+
+    VII THE DRAGON                          79
+
+   VIII DENIZENS OF THE DEEP                89
+
+     IX THE PEOPLES OF PRODIGY             103
+
+      X THE SATYRS                         121
+
+     XI THE PYGMIES                        132
+
+    XII THE AMAZONS OF LEGEND              151
+
+   XIII THE AMAZONS OF HISTORY             169
+
+    XIV THE FOLK OF TRADITION              190
+
+     XV THE HORIZON LANDS                  201
+
+    XVI LANDS OF LEGEND                    223
+
+   XVII ISLANDS OF ENCHANTMENT             251
+
+  XVIII THE TERRIBLE OCEAN                 262
+
+    XIX THE SARGASSO SEA                   274
+
+     XX ATLANTIS                           281
+
+    XXI THE GILDED MAN                     298
+
+   XXII THE DREAM QUESTS OF SPAIN          312
+
+  XXIII THE FABRIC OF ILLUSION             334
+
+   XXIV THE TRAVEL TALES OF MANKIND        348
+
+    XXV THE GAINS OF FABLE                 371
+
+        BIBLIOGRAPHY                       379
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  THE BOYHOOD OF RALEIGH. _By Sir John Millais_          _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                           FACING PAGE
+
+  A VOYAGE TO THESE STRANGELY PEOPLED COUNTRIES OF
+  THE WORLD’S YESTERDAYS WOULD BE A VOYAGE
+  ALONG THE BAYS, GULFS, AND PROMONTORIES OF THE
+  HUMAN MIND IN ITS STATES OF DREAM                                  2
+
+  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AT THE COURT OF FERDINAND
+  THE CATHOLIC AND ISABELLA OF CASTILE. _By V. von
+  Brozik_                                                           10
+
+  ACCORDING TO TRADITION, A PUTRID STREAM FLOWS
+  FROM THE ROOTS OF THE TREE AND THE VAPORS
+  THEREOF KILL                                                      24
+
+  IN CALDILHE THERE GROWETH A MANNER OF FRUIT, AND
+  MEN FIND WITHIN A LITTLE BEAST AS THOUGH IT
+  WERE A LAMB WITHOUT WOOL                                          58
+
+  THE FIRST PEOPLE ENGAGED IN SUCH COSMIC ADVENTURES
+  AS WARFARE AGAINST STONE GIANTS                                  116
+
+  A SATYR. _By Jacob Jordaens_                                     122
+
+  MEN FEARED THEM, AS EMBODYING THE LONELINESS OF
+  WASTE PLACES                                                     128
+
+  THE SWARTHY MEN CALLED PYGMIES                                   142
+
+  THUSNELDA AT THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY OF GERMANICUS
+  INTO ROME. _By C. T. von Piloty_                                 172
+
+  THE STEEPS OVERHEAD SEEMED FIT ABODE FOR GIANTS
+  AND DWARFS AND GRIFFINS--FOR CITIES OF ENCHANTMENT               206
+
+  THE ENCHANTED WOODS OF ROMANCE WITH THEIR
+  GOBLIN GLOOMS AND TALKING TREES FADED FROM THE
+  MINDS OF MEN                                                     216
+
+  “BUILD US, O DOUL-KARNAIN,” THEY BEGGED, “A RAMPART
+  BETWEEN US AND THEM”                                             236
+
+  IN ISLANDS MEN PLACED THEIR IDEAL STATES.... TO
+  REACH FELICITY ONE MUST CROSS WATER                              254
+
+  ROARING FORTIES. _By F. J. Waugh_                                268
+
+  THE THINGS OF THE SPIRIT ANIMATED SPAIN IN SOME OF
+  THE QUESTS IT FOLLOWED BESIDE THE STILL WATERS
+  OF THE LAKES OF DREAM                                            314
+
+  THE GARGOYLES OF STONE WHICH KEPT WATCH DAY
+  AND NIGHT                                                        338
+
+
+
+
+MARCO TALKS WITH HIS NEIGHBORS
+
+
+  THE TIME: 1295 A.D.
+  THE PLACE: Venice, the Rialto.
+  THE SPEAKER: Marco Polo.
+  THE CHORUS: Citizens of Venice.
+
+
+  _“I fared,” said Marco, “as far as one may----
+  From Astrakhan to the ports of Cathay,
+    And sailed two years on the Pitch Dark Sea;
+  And something I learned of the ways of man.
+  There is a place that they call Japan,
+    And Russia lies where the north winds be;
+  The plain of Lop is haunted by dragons;
+  Dark are the damsels and fierce the flagons
+    In the Thousand Islands of Spicery.”_
+
+  “_Far are these lands and fair is their sheen,
+  But tell us, Polo, what have you seen?”_
+
+  _“I saw,” said Marco, “the pagans at masses
+  And Tibetan dogs the size of asses,
+    And oil from the ground, and black stones, blazing.
+  I saw pink pearls from an unknown strand,
+  And ten-pound peaches of China-land,
+    And bales of silk that were past appraising.
+  I saw the Malabar pepper farmers
+  And cannibal sharks subdued by charmers,
+    But the grunting ox was most amazing.”_
+
+  “_Much have you seen where the wild capes curve,
+  But tell us, Polo, whom did you serve?”_
+
+  _“I served,” said Marco, “the Khan of Khans.
+  His edict runs with the caravans
+    As far as the east is from the west.
+  The Turk and the Hindu hold his charters,
+  He sways Cathaians, Persians, and Tartars,
+    Yet Kublai welcomes the stranger guest.
+  His deeds are writ upon purple pages,
+  A shepherd king but a sage of sages,
+    And his thousand damsels are Asia’s best.”_
+
+  “_Him must a thousand matters perplex,
+  But, Polo, speak yet more of the sex.”_
+
+  _“The men of Gobi,” said Marco, “require
+  Their dames to sit by the stranger’s fire,
+    And make his favor the tribal boast.
+  Frail are the women in Pin-yang-fu,
+  And delicate quin-sai wenches woo
+    Ambassadors from the Pepper Coast.
+  Though maids with feet as swift as the wind
+  May dance, all bare, for the gods of Ind,
+    The women of Persia please the most.”_
+
+  “_Whimsical, Marco, your travel word.
+  Is there aught else that you saw or heard?”_
+
+  _“I heard,” said Marco, “but do not know,
+  That Tartar shamans summon the snow,
+    And suns shine not for the Samoyed.
+  In southern countries its fabled horn
+  Means less than its tongue to the unicorn,
+    Which licks its victims until they are dead.
+  Here is a text for songs or sermons:
+  When babes are born to the female Burmans,
+    Their foolish husbands hie them to bed.”_
+
+  _Rose, then, a shout from a hundred lips:
+  “Marco, the tar of a thousand trips,
+  Marco the man of a million quips,
+    Marco, Marco, Milioni!”
+  And they who would hold the East in fee,
+  Men of the pitiful midland sea,
+  Nobles and commons, laughed shamelessly.
+    “Which the catcher, and who the coney?
+  What I have seen is truly averred,
+  But what I have heard is--what I have heard!”
+    Thus to himself, with a secret mirth,
+    The only man who had seen the earth._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The book gives a view of the earth and its inhabitants as seen through
+the haze of distance, whether of space or of time. Its purpose is to
+present those myths and half-myths of geography which are loosely and
+yet significantly called travel tales. It treats of various countries
+and races and animals which are, or were, or might have been. Although
+their true domain is the imagination, their supposed domain is, or was,
+somewhere on the earth. The Coasts of Illusion, as glimpsed here, are
+nowhere the shores of the supernatural.
+
+Always the two tend to merge and the problem has been to keep them
+apart. The travel tales of the race have grown out of, or become
+entangled with, myths in which men sought to figure the creation of the
+world, the journeys of the sun from dawn to darkness, the conflicts of
+light with storm and night and winter, the high places of the gods and
+their incarnations and agents. Yet the tales are touched with reality,
+while the myths are unearthly.
+
+Ulysses tarried among the Phacakians, and these were a cloud people;
+but he skirted the land of the lotus-eaters, and these were a mundane
+folk. Who were the lotus-eaters? Achilles fought with Memnon, son of
+the Dawn, but also with Penthesilea, the Amazon queen. Who were the
+Amazons? Hercules was of the progeny of Olympian Zeus, but wandering on
+earth he passed through the land of the pygmies. Who were the pygmies?
+What reality lies back of the fabulous animals and Deformed Folk that
+peopled the mountains and deserts?
+
+For thousands of years men accepted the realms and races of prodigy. It
+was only about a century ago that these disappeared from the maps and
+natural histories. The frontiers of ignorance had been pushed back so
+far that the never-never countries dropped off into the sea. There was
+no longer room for the phœnix to flap its wings, the dragon to hiss and
+roar, the giants to stalk, the kangaroo-men to hop.
+
+The countries and creatures of legend passed from the scene without
+the parting word that every passing merits, without even a gesture of
+farewell. Is it more than a tardy courtesy to summon them back for a
+word that shall be both appraisal and remembrance?
+
+These are the stories wanderers told in hall when the world was young;
+and in out-of-the-way places still they tell them, and men believe.
+These are stories the lad Raleigh heard along wharves where sailors
+in outlandish garb recited the wonders of countries below the rim of
+the sea. If one could recapture Raleigh’s boyish faith, and the faith
+of ages of listeners before him, it might still be possible to behold
+the King of Is in state beside the menacing ocean, to traverse the
+streets of the lost Atlantis, to win to the cities of gold which Spain
+could not find, and to repeople the waste places with their strange
+inhabitants. So might one achieve the purpose of these pages and regain
+a picture of things as they were supposed to be.
+
+This is a survey of the world through the stained glass of men’s
+imaginings.
+
+C. B. F.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE COASTS OF ILLUSION
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I. The World That Was
+
+
+The geography, anthropology, and natural history of this volume present
+a world a little different from that which is outlined in modern
+text-books and yet one that is familiar. It is the traditional world
+of wonder, which until yesterday was believed to be the real world. A
+map of it would show the same continents, and some of the same races of
+men and species of animals that are delineated in any atlas of to-day;
+but there would be changes. Asia would bear far away into the unknown
+spaces of the East. A shadowy continent would stretch across the open
+waters of the Indian Ocean. The clouds and darkness of supernatural
+terrors, or dimly remembered fates, would shroud the Atlantic, the
+Green Sea of Gloom of the Arab geographers. Looming vaguely in the
+mists southwest of Gibraltar one would discern a lost continent. One
+would see there, also, smaller bodies of land which on a second glance
+are seen no more.
+
+Within the contours of continents and islands there would be countries
+which seem to belong both to fable and to fact. The Incense Kingdom
+would be there on both sides of the Red Sea, but its sumptuous ritual
+and swooning odors would suggest little now to be found in southern
+Arabia and Somaliland. The Spice Islands would be there, but wearing
+the splendor of a world-desire of which no trace is left to the
+Moluccas. There would be seen the haughty realm of Prester John and the
+vast pastures of Gog and Magog; but on a modern map of Asia one does
+not find the country of the priest king and must look under other names
+for the terrifying races of Hebrew and Moslem legend.
+
+On the map would appear the gold port of Ophir and the golden land of
+Havilah, but the Arab haven was silted up ages ago, and the abandoned
+mine-workings of Rhodesia minister no more to the pride of kings.
+The Arcadia that it would picture, of pastoral innocence and bucolic
+song, has faded from the central uplands of the Morea, and the rugged
+mountain land hears no longer the pipes of Pan. There are other regions
+of enchantment--deserts where demon-voices tempted the traveler from
+his track, mountains where cymbals clashed and lights gleamed at night,
+countries of serene charm which were placed so far away that few people
+ever reached them. Of these regions the modern maps know nothing.
+
+If the map of the traditional world were pictorial, as such maps ought
+to be, it would show strange races of men in Asia, in Africa, in South
+America, in the sea-washed islands, and in the seas themselves. There
+would be Amazons sweeping down upon the Mediterranean settlements,
+pygmies battling with cranes in Upper Egypt, satyrs pursuing women in
+African woodlots, troglodytes of Arabia looking on with indifference
+while strangers maltreated their offspring. The vistas of Asia and
+Africa would disclose men taking their siestas beneath the shade of
+their own gigantic feet, sleeping at night under the cover of their
+elephant-like ears, supporting life by smelling flowers rather than
+eating food. Sixteenth-century charts of the Spanish Americas would
+reveal the unsuspected fact that these creatures dwelt also in the new
+world, and that mermaids sang upon its coasts, as upon those of the old.
+
+A pictorial map of the traditional world would show that it was a
+menagerie of strange animals as well as a museum of prodigious peoples.
+The lairs and roosts of heraldry would return their tenants to its
+blank spaces. The phœnix would be seen winging its way from Araby the
+Blest, or mounting its own funeral pyre in the City of the Sun in Lower
+Egypt. The Desert of Gobi would show the griffin, a formidable guard
+for its stores of fabled gold. The unicorn would be sketched doing the
+elephant to death in the jungles of Asia and Africa. The baleful glare
+of the basilisk would be staged in the recesses of Libya. The dragon’s
+breath would poison earth and air and water alike. The harpies and the
+Stymphalian birds would raise their shrill clamor beside the brink of
+sea or marsh. Among other creatures in the ocean would be depicted the
+monstrous orc, the kraken of the northern deeps, and the ubiquitous,
+immemorial, and enigmatic sea serpent. The familiar animals of natural
+history would share with the fabled creatures the forests, pastures,
+and waters of the mimic world of the map, but the text would point out
+novel things about them.
+
+[Illustration: _A Voyage to These Strangely Peopled Countries of
+the World’s Yesterdays Would Be a Voyage Along the Bays, Gulfs, and
+Promontories of the Human Mind in Its States of Dream_]
+
+A voyage to these strangely peopled countries of the world’s yesterdays
+would be a voyage along the bays, gulfs, and promontories of the human
+mind in its states of dream.
+
+There are three chambers in the house of the mind. One of them is a
+place where pleasant bedtime stories are told. Another is the art
+gallery of hope and memory. The third is a museum where runs the law of
+topsy-turvy. The name of the house is Illusion.
+
+A glance through a few of the older books of travel will show illusion
+weaving its careless spells over plain records of wandering. “We fared
+on,” says Sindbad, “from sea to sea and from island to island and city
+to city in all delight and contentment, buying and selling wherever we
+touched, and taking our solace and our pleasure.” The words prepare
+the reader for enchantments. One of the Hakluyt narratives speaks of
+“Zanzibar, on the backeside of Africa.” This is geography somehow
+touched with magic. When Drake was cruising around South America,
+his chronicler recites that on a certain day “wee had a very sweet
+smell from off the land.” Simple as are the words, their quality is
+dreamlike. The account of Raleigh’s third voyage to Guiana has this
+passage: “There being divers whales playing about our pinnesse, one of
+them crossed our stemme and going under, rubbed her backe against our
+keele.” The lines unlock the frolic wonder of the sea.
+
+The same quality illuminates reports of other lands and peoples taken
+almost at random. The ancient Cimbri, says Strabo, explained their
+wandering life and piracy by the fact that once they had dwelt on a
+peninsula and had been driven out by a very high tide. The ancient
+Getae wept at births and laughed at funerals; and in the _Arabian
+Nights_ Abdallah of the Sea broke off his friendship with Abdallah of
+the Land, when he learned that his people mourned rather than rejoiced
+over their dead. Purchas tells of a Livonian people, ignorant but
+unashamed, that “aske who learne the Hares in the woods their prayers.”
+The same writer declares that Ethiopians hold their color in such
+estimation that they paint the saints and angels black, but “the Divell
+and wicked persons they paint white.” Pinkerton describes a tribe of
+white Indians east of the Andes, whose naked and beautiful women use
+a guttural speech and emphasize every remark by striking their thighs
+with great force. The Eskimos attributed the Northern Lights to the
+merriment of the ghosts. A Florida tribe made a cult of the devil
+because the Spaniards feared him.
+
+The thing these statements have in common is that perhaps none of them
+is quite true, and yet one wishes to believe all of them.
+
+The shaping influence in the traditional world is the power of wish.
+The poets may seem to use it more than other men, and children more
+than grown-ups, but it is the province of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II. The Earth Itself
+
+
+Enveloping old stories of legendary lands and peoples as with an outer
+husk are beliefs which relate to the world as a whole. These concern
+the shape of the earth, the texture of the heavens, the distribution of
+land and water, the contours of continents, and the precise number of
+islands, countries, and cities. What they disclose is the instinct of
+men working through the apparent confusion of nature toward order. In
+all of them is the sense of symmetry, of balance, and because they are
+excursions into the unknown, the method of allegory. The true symmetry
+of the universe--the great annual journey of the earth around a sun
+itself in motion in a firmament so vast that through the ages the stars
+seem not to have changed their places--was not grasped. The result was
+errors, picturesque sometimes, sometimes more useful than truth.
+
+Wherever one stands, the meeting line of the sky and earth forms a
+circle of which one is the center. This picture shaped the primitive
+geography. The earth was a disk and each people seemed to itself to
+be at the central point. In Homer it was a disk surrounded by a river
+called the Ocean Stream. The farther shore of this river supported
+the brazen dome of heaven, and earth and heaven were kept apart by
+the pillars which Atlas bore on his shoulders. Thales taught that the
+earth was a sort of drum floating upright in the wilderness of waters.
+The ancient Hebrews thought that the earth was a rising plain which
+floated like a lotus flower in the waters. The Tibetans believed the
+earth to be cone-shaped. The Chinese thought that all other lands were
+grouped as islands about their own. The Celts thought the earth rested
+on columns and in the Irish sea-tales various islands are pictured
+as standing on pillars. In North America the plains tribes thought
+that the Rocky Mountains supported the sky, the Pacific coast tribes
+conceived of the earth as an island swimming in the cosmic waters, and
+the Southwestern tribes gave it as many stories as the tallest of their
+public dwellings. The Shoshones said the vault of the sky was a dome of
+ice against which the rainbow-snake rubbed its back, and the Haida said
+that the firmament regularly rose and fell, the clouds striking the
+mountains with an audible noise. According to many Western tribes the
+canopy of heaven was pierced with holes at the four cardinal points,
+and these were constantly opening and closing; a sky-world like the
+earth was beyond, into which swans and shamans could pass. All peoples
+believed that the earth was immovable, with the sun revolving around
+it. Many thought it rested on the back of some animal--a buffalo, a
+tortoise, a catfish.
+
+Sometimes more sophisticated and still more fanciful ideas were
+entertained. To one school of Greek thought the world was a living
+being and man himself a microcosm, a little world, as Paracelsus called
+him. The sun and moon were the two eyes of the world, the earth its
+body, the ether its intellect, and the sky its wings. It was held that
+the movements of man and of the world were in exact correspondence;
+hence astrology, which interprets the one by the other. To the
+Venerable Bede the universe was an egg, the earth its yolk, the water
+the white of the egg, the air its membrane, and the encircling fire the
+shell or cover of all.
+
+Cosmas took literally the utterance of St. Paul that the tabernacle was
+a figure of the world. In an amazing exercise of ingenuity he found
+the oblong design, the walls, roof, and floor, the candlesticks, the
+Ark of the Covenant, and the table of shewbread of this Jewish desert
+booth all repeated in the shape and furnishings of the universe. His
+scheme of things has been compared to a traveler’s trunk, with its body
+standing for the earth, the flat tray for the firmament, and the curved
+lid for the arch of upper heaven. The effects of day and night were
+produced, Cosmas thought, about as they are on the stage. There was a
+tall mountain in the north. When the sun went behind it darkness fell;
+when the sun came out from behind it, there was light. This conception
+lacks both the intelligence and the poetry of the American Indian myth
+where the Sun-Carrier is pictured as hanging the sun on a peg on the
+west wall of his lodge and then unrolling in succession the robe of
+dawn, the robe of blue sky, the robe of golden evening light and the
+robe of darkness.
+
+The sense of symmetry demanded that the earth should have a central
+point, and each country sought it somewhere in its own borders. Homer
+thought that this was on Mount Olympus, where the Greek gods dwelt. The
+Hindus thought that it was on Mount Meru, where their own gods dwelt.
+The Chinese fixed it on Mount Sumeru on a circle of gold and with the
+sun and moon revolving around it; this was surrounded by the seven
+sacred mountains, the seven seas, and the four inhabited continents.
+
+Christian pilgrims said that Jerusalem was in the center of the earth,
+quoting the Psalm, “For God is my King of old, working salvation in the
+midst of the earth.” There was a spot not far from the place of Calvary
+which the Lord had signified and measured, and this was called Compas.
+It was something pilgrims could see and touch. For eight centuries
+the legend was current, and for three centuries, until nearly the
+time of Columbus, it dominated European maps of the world, which were
+wheel-shaped, with Jerusalem at the hub.
+
+Among the Eastern nations the sources and courses of rivers had
+sometimes a cosmic significance. They flowed from the center of the
+earth or from the Terrestrial Paradise. From the Cool Lake which was
+in the midst of Asia, to the south of the Fragrant Mountains and to
+the north of the Snowy Mountains, flowed four great rivers, according
+to the Chinese. The Ganges issued from the eastern side of the lake
+through the mouth of a silver ox, and found the southeastern sea. The
+Indus issued from the southern side through the mouth of a golden
+elephant, and found the southwestern sea. The Oxus issued from the
+western side through the mouth of a horse of lapis lazuli, and found
+the northwestern sea. The River of China issued from the northern side
+through the mouth of a crystal lion, and found the northeastern sea.
+
+In the Genesis story a river goes out of Eden to water the garden and
+divides into four--Pison, which compasses the golden land of Havilah;
+Gihon, which compasses Ethiopia; Hiddekel, which goes toward the east
+of Assyria; and Euphrates. Josephus, the Romanized Jew, assimilated
+the Hebrew geography with the Greek account of an Ocean Stream that
+flowed around the earth. This encircling river, he said, was the source
+of the four biblical streams. The Arabs also accepted the rivers of
+Eden and showed ingenuity in tracing their courses to the distant lands
+where flowed the streams they had identified with them. So did John
+Marignolli, the fourteenth-century Franciscan traveler.
+
+Paradise, he said, was in Ceylon, about forty miles distant from Adam’s
+Peak, which he visited. On this latter peak was Adam’s footprint and
+the garden he tilled when expelled from the abode of innocence. The
+Mount of Eden overtopped it, and almost always the mists brooded there,
+but one could hear the waters falling from the sacred fount out of
+which the four rivers came. These flowed away from the island of Ceylon
+by channels under the ocean, the Gihon becoming the Nile, the Pison
+passing through India and China, and doubling back through the deserts
+to die in the sands and be born again as the Caspian Sea.
+
+With the greater portion of the earth unknown, a curious custom
+obtained of using definite figures in default of definite facts.
+Dicuil, the Irish scholar, said that there were 2 seas, 72 islands, 40
+mountains, 65 provinces, 281 towns, 55 rivers, and 116 peoples; he had
+read this in what he called the cosmography of Julius Cæsar and Mark
+Antony. Idrisi declared that there were 27,000 islands in the Atlantic.
+Mariners on the Sea of China told Marco Polo that it contained
+precisely 7,440 islands, mostly inhabited. In the Indian Ocean, he
+said, there were 12,700 islands. The Koreans had an old tradition that
+there were fourscore and four thousand several countries upon the
+earth, but themselves doubted it. The sun could not warm so many lands,
+they thought. Their real belief was that there were but twelve kingdoms
+or countries. When the Dutch explorers named other countries to them
+they laughed; the visitors must be talking of towns and villages.
+
+Sometimes the sense of symmetry, sometimes poetic instinct and the
+desire for graphic imagery, led men to give the habitable world the
+outlines of animate or inanimate objects. Strabo likened it to a
+chlamys, or soldier’s cloak. Dionysius Afer said it was like a sling.
+The California Indians said it was like a mat with the long way north
+and south. Massoudy likened it to a bird. The head of the bird was at
+Mecca and Medina, Africa was its tail, Irak and India its right wing,
+and the land of Gog and Magog its left wing. Other writers pictured
+the earth in the semblance of a man, with the head in the southern
+hemisphere, and the feet or under part in the northern; the right hand
+was the east, whence began the movement of the _primum mobile_, and
+the left the west, whither it trended. As the head was the noblest
+part, governing the rest of the body, so Ptolemy thought, the southern
+hemisphere was nobler than the other parts of the earth, and the stars
+above it were more resplendent and of greater virtue than those of the
+northern.
+
+The tides were the breath of the living earth, Solinus thought. A
+large man on the beach of the ocean gets up and sits down twice a
+day, said the Tahltan Indians of Canada; twice a day a colossal crab
+comes out of and goes back to its cave at the foot of the world-tree,
+said the Malays; for six hours a serpent at the rim of the world
+draws in its breath and for six hours lets it out, said the Scotch
+islanders--wherefore the tides ebb and flow. The Gauls endowed them
+with life and attacked them with weapons.
+
+Ptolemy pictured Great Britain as a Z written backward. Strabo compared
+Spain to an ox hide. Numantianus likened Italy to an oak leaf. India
+was thought to be an exact equilateral triangle.
+
+There were conflicting views as to the south. Although by the beginning
+of the historical period the Sabæans and Phœnicians had gone down the
+eastern coast of Africa through the Indian Ocean some twenty degrees
+beyond the equator to seek the gold of Havilah, these ventures into
+the zone of torrid heat were not for the Atlantic and the peoples of
+the west. The insidious fictions of the Semitic mariners had awakened
+their fears. No man, they thought, could live in the lands of vertical
+sunlight. In what lay beyond these, they had as little interest as men
+have now in the possible populations of other planets. Europeans of
+the early Christian era put aside the notion which enlightened Greeks
+had entertained that there might be “opposite peoples of the south.”
+Assuming the inhuman heat of the torrid zone, it was evident that a
+tropical people could not be of the race of Adam, and heresy was in the
+thought of any other lineage.
+
+Lactantius, the Christian Cicero of the third century, is remembered
+because he gave popular error rhetorical expression and because his
+words were flung at Columbus twelve centuries afterward, when he
+appeared before the Council of Salamanca to justify his theory that
+one might reach the east by sailing west. “Can any one be so foolish,”
+asked Lactantius, “as to believe that there are men whose feet are
+higher than their heads, or places where trees may be growing backward
+or rain falling upward? Where is the marvel of the hanging gardens of
+Babylon, if we are to allow of a hanging world at the Antipodes?” Pliny
+had answered him with another question two centuries before. “If any
+one,” he said, “should ask why those situated opposite to us do not
+fall, we directly ask in return, whether those on the opposite side do
+not wonder that we do not fall.”
+
+Even when the ancient world had accepted the theory that the earth was
+a sphere, this seemed to it somehow half as long again from east to
+west as from north to south, and the belief is preserved in the two
+terms, Longitude and Latitude. The limits of the habitable earth were
+Thule, or Iceland, to the north; Taprobane, or Ceylon, to the east;
+the Aromatic Cape, to the south, and the Sacred Promontory in Portugal
+to the west. North of Thule it was too cold, and south of the Cape of
+Spices it was too hot, to support life.
+
+All that the ancient world knew of geography was gathered up by Ptolemy
+and systematized in a scheme which among learned men was the standard
+of belief for fourteen centuries afterward. This great Egyptian of the
+second century eliminated errors, corrected reckonings, and brought
+his science abreast of facts which traders had gathered. He made,
+however, three great errors, each, as it proved, more useful than the
+truth would have been. Ptolemy estimated the circumference of the earth
+as one-sixth less than the fact, although Eratosthenes had already
+reached the correct figure. Thus the true sailing distance from Spain
+west to Asia was reduced by about 4,000 miles and the later venture of
+Columbus made to seem a task less formidable. Ptolemy also gave Asia a
+vast extension eastward, further reducing the apparent distance of a
+westward route from Europe to the Orient.
+
+[Illustration: CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AT THE COURT OF FERDINAND THE
+CATHOLIC AND ISABELLA OF CASTILE
+
+_By_ V. von Brozik]
+
+His third error was to assume that another continental mass joined the
+southern extension of Africa with a southeastern extension of Asia,
+completely landlocking the Indian Ocean. This was the Terra Australis
+Incognita of the older charts. It seemed to be needed to balance the
+land masses of the northern hemisphere and satisfy the persistent
+demand of the mind for symmetry in the arrangement of the earth. This
+vast domain has disappeared from the maps, but its name and part of its
+area are preserved in the island continent of Australia. Thus Ptolemy
+anticipated the discoveries of the Portuguese, Dutch, and English.
+
+Much of what Ptolemy knew succeeding ages forgot. The mediæval
+conception of the world was that of a T within an O with the east at
+the top of the circle because Paradise was there and deserved the
+highest place, and Jerusalem as its center. The lower half of the
+circle was divided by the Mediterranean equally between Europe and
+Africa, while the upper half was all assigned to Asia. The Ægean and
+Red seas, branching to the left and the right from the head of the
+Mediterranean, divided the upper and lower halves of the circle, and
+these three seas formed the T within the O. Around all flowed the Ocean
+Stream.
+
+Intellectually, this presentation of the habitable earth belongs in
+about the ninth century B. C. rather than the fifteenth century A. D.,
+but the map, like the Ptolemaic geography, was a brief for discovery.
+It cut off the south of Africa, and made it seem a short voyage around
+it to India, and thereby it encouraged efforts to open a sea route to
+the Orient. It immensely extended Asia to the east, and thereby led
+Columbus to believe it might more easily be reached by sailing west.
+Also, it revived the reign of fable and made a new world of wonder.
+There were blank spaces on the map of Asia. The monkish map-makers
+filled them in with pictures of monstrous races and animals drawn from
+the classics, from Old Testament imagery, and from the Arab repertory.
+
+It seemed at last that all the mistakes of geography were in conspiracy
+to unlock the unknown half of the world. The apocryphal book of Esdras
+had said that the earth was one part water and six parts dry land. That
+three-fourths of its surface was sea, nobody surmised. Marco Polo had
+moved Zipangu (Japan) a thousand miles east from its real position by
+giving its distance from the mainland of Asia as 1,500 miles instead
+of 1,500 li--a Chinese measure of about one-third of a mile. In the
+map of Toscanelli, on which Columbus counted much, the Asiatic coast
+was placed where California is. The Azores were supposed to lie far
+west of their true position. Columbus did not dream that 210 degrees
+of longitude lay between Lisbon and Japan by the westward route. He
+believed that by sailing from the Azores for about 3,100 miles he would
+find Zipangu, and not unknown Florida. “_El mundo es poco_” (“the world
+is small”), he exclaimed, and steered confidently toward the setting
+sun.
+
+These great errors made the adventures of the Genoese in the New World
+a gorgeous illusion--the vestibule into a past where, as he thought,
+other feet had trodden, instead of the threshold of continents his
+feet were first to press. To him it seemed only that he was reading
+the book of Marco Polo backward. The gold and aromatics of which he
+found traces were those of the Golden Chersonese and the Spice Islands
+of the East. An Indian tale of a white-robed cacique aroused his hope
+of an interview with Prester John. He dispatched a mission, including
+a converted Jew who knew Hebrew, Chaldaic, and a little Arabic, to a
+chieftain of Cuba, in the hope that thus he might establish relations
+with the princely house of Kublai Khan. Presently he would sail farther
+and, leaving the tropical islands behind him, would round the Malay
+Peninsula, cross the Bay of Bengal and the Sea of the Arabs, and make
+his way by land from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, and by ship from Joppa back
+to Spain. It was a soaring dream, yet its wings beat feebly beneath the
+pinions of the tremendous reality the man died without comprehending.
+
+Columbus added another chapter to one of the oldest beliefs--the theory
+of a world summit. Aristotle had thought that the highest part of
+the earth was under the antarctic pole, others that it was under the
+arctic pole. Columbus held that it was under the equator. The earth,
+he thought, had the shape of a pear instead of an orange. It seemed
+to him he knew just when the globe began to swell toward heaven. This
+was about a hundred leagues west of the Azores. There the magnetic
+needle swung from northeast to northwest. The airs became more pure
+and genial, the sea grew tranquil. From the climate of oppressive heat
+and unwholesome air, the explorer ascended the back of the sea, as one
+ascends a mountain toward heaven. The culminating point was on the
+Tierra Firma of South America, which might be approached by way of the
+Gulf of Paria. Thence flowed the mighty stream of the Orinoco.
+
+A Spanish historian, excusing this fancy of Columbus, remarks that
+mathematicians have since demonstrated that he was not entirely wrong.
+The diameter of the earth is twenty-seven miles greater at the equator
+than at the poles, and the mountain country of Ecuador, beyond the
+headwaters of Orinoco, is the true world summit, for, of all lands, it
+lies nearest heaven.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III. Inanimate Nature
+
+
+The progress of knowledge has been an advance from poetry to prose.
+In part it has consisted in forgetting the things that were not so.
+Through most of the story of mankind everything was fabulous. There
+were no inanimate objects at the beginning. Sticks and stones had a
+soul. This belief passed, but some quality of marvel remained--the
+rhythm of the moon repeated in things terrestrial; the loves and
+antipathies of the plants; the properties of gems to bring good fortune
+or ill, to promote fecundity, to test the continence of men and women.
+There was an unwieldy mass of topographical legends. Every township had
+its shrine, or wonder-working well, or hill or tree that broke a law
+of nature. There were strange cures for aches and pains. Illusion was
+everywhere. The lumber rooms of history are stored with traditions in
+which is the faint fragrance of faded wonder.
+
+Sea and sky had each their part in the drama of life. To the Celt the
+voices of the waves carried warning, or sympathy, or prophecy. The
+ninth wave was larger than those before it, and mystery was in it.
+It was thought that no man or animal beside the Gallic sea died with
+a rising tide. The sun sank into the ocean with a hissing sound, and
+there were races on both sides of the world that heard it. The moon,
+Pliny said, “is not unjustly regarded as the star of our life.” All
+seas were purified when it was full, the Nile waxed and waned with it,
+and sap in trees, and even men’s blood, increased or diminished with
+its phases. The time of the rising of the Dog Star was a sort of zero
+hour for many things in nature and husbandry.
+
+
+_The Table of the Sun_
+
+There was a Table of the Sun, where the earth itself presided as host.
+Herodotus was the first to describe it. He says that when Cambyses,
+the Persian king, was in Egypt, he sent spies into Ethiopia under
+the pretense of bearing gifts to court, but in reality to see if the
+table were a fact. The spies came back with various stories--that the
+Ethiopians drank only milk and water, that they lived to be one hundred
+and twenty years old, that the Fountain of Youth bubbled up in that
+country, and that they had seen the Table of the Sun. This was set
+by direction of the magistrates in a meadow in the outskirts of the
+capital city, and the people of the land said that the earth itself
+brought forth the food spread upon the table for all comers. For a full
+description one may use with advantage the idiomatic paraphrase of
+Purchas:
+
+“Of the Table of the Sunne thus writeth Friar Luys de Urreta: that the
+king in a curious braverie, and sumptuous vanitie, caused there to bee
+set by night in a certain field store of white bread, and the choysest
+wines; hanged also on the Trees great varietie of Fowles, rost and
+boyled, and set on the ground, Mutton, Lambe, Veale, Beefe, with many
+other dainties ready dressed. Travellers and hungry persons which came
+hither and found this abundance, seeing no bodie which prepared, or
+which kept the same, ascribed it to _Jupiter Hospitalis_ his bounty
+and hospitality, shewing himselfe a Protector of poore Travellers, and
+called this field the _Table of the Sunne_. The report hereof passed
+through the world, and brought many Pilgrims from farre Countries,
+to visit the same. _Plato_ the Prince of Philosophers entred into
+Aethiopia, led with desire to see this renowned _Table_ and to eate of
+those delicacies. The Aethiopians, since their Christianity, in zealous
+detestation of Idolatry, will not so much as name this field, and these
+ancient Rites.”
+
+It has been suggested that the legend derives from the system of dumb
+trading between civilized and savage peoples which in Africa antedates
+history. If this be so, the wheat was supplied by merchants rather than
+by the king, the magistrates laid down the rules for the voiceless
+market, and the natives, coming after the merchants had withdrawn, left
+gold in exchange for what they took away.
+
+
+_The Mountain of Lodestone_
+
+Agib, son of a sultan and by his vicissitudes become the Third Calendar
+of the _Arabian Nights_, had embarked with all the royal fleet on a
+tour of his provinces. A storm blew them out of their course, and then
+by virtue of the iron in the ships they were drawn irresistibly toward
+a black mountain or mine of adamant that loomed before them. They saw
+upon it a dome of fine brass and on the dome a brazen horse, carrying
+a rider who had a plate of lead on his breast, on which talismanic
+characters were graven. Suddenly “all the nails and iron in the ships
+flew toward the mountain, where they were fixed, by the violence of
+the attraction, with a horrible noise; the ships split asunder, and
+their cargoes sunk into the sea,” with all the men save Agib himself.
+He gained the shore, climbed to the dome, and slept there, in his sleep
+receiving good counsel. The next day he shot three arrows of lead from
+a bow of brass at the brazen horse and its rider. They were toppled
+over, the sea rose and engulfed the mountain, and Agib was ferried off
+to fresh adventures.
+
+Some Bedouin or Persian story-teller of the bazaars may have added the
+detail of the heaven-kissing statue and its overthrow, but the body of
+the narrative is one of the oldest of legends. Men have always been
+curious about the lodestone. The tale of the magnetic mountain to which
+ships built with iron bolts are drawn is found in Aristotle, Pliny,
+and Ptolemy, in the Arab geographies, in Chinese writings, and in the
+reports of explorers clear to the close of the mediæval period. Ogier
+the Dane in the Charlemagne cycle was wrecked on such a mountain and
+like Agib was spared for sensuous delights. In a twelfth-century poem,
+when the ship of Duke Ernst entered the Klebermeer, it was drawn to the
+rock called Magnes and found itself among “many a work of keels,” over
+which the masts rose like a tangled forest.
+
+Ptolemy is the most definite of the early writers. “There are said to
+be ten islands,” he says, “forming a continuous group called Maniolai,
+from which ships with iron nails are said to be unable to move away,
+and hence they are built with wooden bolts. The inhabitants are reputed
+to be cannibals.” Dampier, Gemelli-Careri, and many others identify
+Maniolai with Manila, and assume that the magnetic islands were the
+Philippines; but Gerini, a sagacious editor of Ptolemy’s eastern
+geography, believes they were the Nicobars.
+
+
+_The River Sambation_
+
+Rising in a pious Jewish fable, first recited in Josephus, the River
+Sambation has flowed for eighteen centuries through the geography of
+legend. It separated the lost Ten Tribes from other Jews, or from the
+subjects of Prester John. Some said it was in Caucasia, others in
+Arabia; and from as far east as China and as far west as Ethiopia it
+was reported. Josephus placed it between Raphanea and a district of
+Agrippa’s kingdom; it was called the Sabbatic river because it ran only
+on Saturdays, its bed being dry the other six days of the week. Pliny
+had it, however, that on Saturdays the stream rested. Much was heard
+of it in the Middle Ages. Eldad Hadani, a ninth-century traveler, said
+it was in the land of Cush. It had little water, but sand and stones
+rolled restlessly down its bed with a noise “like the waves of the sea
+and a stormy wind”; on the Sabbath their tumult was stilled and flames
+surrounded the river so that none could pass.
+
+The stream was in India, spice groves bordered it, and quantities of
+precious stones went down in its billowing sand to the sea; so said
+the letter of Prester John. It was fifty days’ journey inland from
+Aden, said the Jewish traveler Obadiah di Bertinoro, for thus Arab
+traders had told him. A Jewish geographer, Abraham Farissol, also of
+the fifteenth century, identified it with the Ganges. Abraham Yazel, a
+Jewish scholar of the next century, told of a bottle filled with its
+sand, and save on the Sabbath the sand was in motion. A Christian whom
+he quoted had seen the river in the dominions of the Grand Turk. It
+was from one to four miles broad, with plenty of water, but dangerous
+to navigate because of the rocks and sand that rolled along with the
+current: “ships which venture on it lose their way, and indeed no ship
+is yet known to have returned safely from this river.” An Arabian in
+Lisbon carried an hour-glass filled with this uneasy sand on Friday
+afternoons through a street of shops run by Jews who had professed
+Christianity. “Ye Jews,” he exclaimed, “shut up your shops, for now the
+Sabbath comes.” The last word from the Sambation was in 1847, when the
+governor of Aden told a messenger seeking aid for Jews of the Holy Land
+that there was a great Jewish kingdom forty stages inland, but that the
+river was not there; it was in China.
+
+
+_Magical Springs_
+
+Classic mythology peopled lakes, rivers, brooks, and springs with
+female divinities of a minor rank known as naiads, who were endowed
+with prophetic power and were able to inspire those who drank of
+these waters. The belief in the nymphs waned, but a belief in the
+singular properties of the waters long persisted. Many stories relate
+to the mental effects thereof. If you drink of a pool in the cave of
+the Clarian Apollo at Colophon, says Pliny, you will acquire powers
+of oracle; but you will not live long. Ctesias tells of an Indian
+fountain the waters of which, when drawn, coagulated like a cheese;
+if a little of this were triturated and the powder administered in a
+potion, anybody who drank of it would become delirious, rave all that
+day, and blab out whatever he had done. Therefore did the king use this
+water as the modern drug, scopolamin, has been used, to detect the
+guilt of persons accused. In Ethiopia, according to Diodorus, Semiramis
+discovered a small lake the sweet red waters of which impelled people
+who drank of them to confess their faults. Pliny recites that at the
+temple of the god Trophonius in Bœotia near the river Hercynnus are two
+fountains, one promoting remembrance and the other forgetfulness; one
+is called Mnemosyne, the other Lethe.
+
+
+_The Fountain of the Sun_
+
+The Fountain of the Sun was rediscovered by a modern traveler, Belzoni,
+in the oasis of Jupiter Ammon. He found that the ruins of the temple of
+Jupiter Ammon served as a basement for nearly a whole village, in the
+vicinity of which was this famous fountain in a deep well. According
+to old report it was warm at midnight and cold at noon. The fact is
+its temperature does not vary between night and day, and its apparent
+changes are due to the greater or less heat of the surrounding air, as
+the day advances or declines.
+
+
+_The Tree of the Sun_
+
+Best known of all trees was the Tree of the Sun. This grew in Persia,
+and Maundeville says of it: “Within those Deserts were the Trees of the
+Sun and of the Moon, that spoke to King Alexander and warned him of his
+Death. And Men say that the Folk that keep those Trees, and eat of the
+Fruit and of the Balm that groweth there live well four hundred Year or
+five hundred Year, by virtue of the Fruit and of the Balm.” Sir John
+said he would have gone toward the trees “full gladly,” but because
+of the wild beasts, serpents, and dragons “I trow that one hundred
+thousand Men of Arms might not pass the Deserts safely.” However, Marco
+Polo passed them safely, and gives one of his terse descriptions of
+the tree “called the tree of the sun and by Christians _arbo secco_,
+the dry or fruitless tree.” It looked like the chestnut, but its husks
+contained no fruit, and probably it was the Oriental plane tree. Here
+Alexander fought Darius.
+
+
+_Wonder-working Trees_
+
+Ctesias has a characteristic traveler’s account of the parebon, an
+Indian tree about the size of the olive, but with neither flowers nor
+fruit. It has, however, fifteen thick roots, which, like the diviner’s
+rod, will attract the precious metals. If a cubit’s length of root be
+taken, says the Cnidian, “it attracts lambs and birds, and with this
+root most kinds of birds are caught.” If you cast it into wine, it
+solidifies the liquor so that it can be held in your hand like a piece
+of wax.
+
+The ancients had much to say of the properties of other trees and
+plants. It was thought that the laurel or bay tree was never struck
+by lightning, and so the peasants of the Pyrenees hold to this day;
+the Emperor Tiberius wore a laurel wreath during thunderstorms. The
+oak, planted near the walnut, would perish. The shadow of the walnut
+was injurious to men and productive of headache. The shadow of the elm
+was refreshing. The olive, if so much as licked by a she-goat, became
+barren. There was a moral feud between the vine and the cabbage, and
+between the vine and the radish, so that the latter was prescribed for
+drunkenness. The virtue of the mistletoe, says Pliny, was to resist
+all poisons and make fruitful any that used it. The cocoanut and the
+betel nut were powerful aphrodisiacs. The gum of the camphor tree bred
+impotency. The smell of the basil begat scorpions in the brains of men.
+Moly would neutralize sorcery. There was a plant called the eriphia
+with a hollow stem, inside of which was a beetle which kept ascending
+and descending its narrow home the while it bleated like a kid; this
+plant was beneficial to the voice.
+
+The fable of the deadly upas, or poison tree of Macassar, Erasmus
+Darwin’s “hydra tree of death,” is modern. According to tradition, a
+putrid stream flows from the roots of the tree, which grows in Java,
+and the vapors thereof kill. Foersch, a Dutch physician who published
+a book in 1783, is mainly responsible for the ill repute of this tree.
+He declares that “not a tree nor blade of grass is to be found in the
+valley or surrounding mountains. Not a bird or beast, reptile or living
+thing lives in the vicinity.” He even asserts that “on one occasion
+sixteen hundred refugees encamped within fourteen miles of it, and all
+but three hundred died within two months.” Investigation has disproved
+all of this. The tree grows in a region where vegetation is luxuriant,
+men make a garment of its fiber and walk under its branches, and there
+birds roost. The venom known as Macassar poison with which Malays tip
+their arrows is, however, made from its gum.
+
+There grows on the island of Hierro in the Canaries a remarkable tree,
+if one may credit Richard Hakluyt and others of his time. Hierro is six
+leagues in circuit and produces ample foodstuffs for its inhabitants
+and their flocks of goats, although no rain falls and no springs gush.
+There is, however, a great stone cistern standing at the foot of a tree
+with leaves like the olive’s. Clouds hover over the tree “and by means
+thereof,” says Hakluyt, “the leaves of the sayd tree continually drop
+water, very sweet, into the sayd cisterne, which cometh to the sayd
+tree from the clouds by attraction.”
+
+The rain tree of Peru is described as tall, rich in leaves, and
+possessed of “the power of collecting the dampness of the atmosphere
+and condensing it into a continuous and copious supply of rain.” “In
+the dry season,” says a Spanish newspaper quoted in Walsh’s _Handy Book
+of Curious Information_, “when the rivers are low and heat great,
+the trees’ power of condensing seems at the highest and water falls
+in abundance from the leaves and oozes from the trunks. The water
+spreads around in veritable rivers. These rivers are canalized so as to
+regulate the course of the water.” This singular statement closes with
+an estimate that a Peruvian rain tree will yield nine gallons of water
+a day, and that 10,000 trees producing daily 385,000 liters of water
+can be grown on a square kilometer.
+
+The Weather Bureau at Washington examined (1905) the facts as to the
+rain tree, and declared that such a tree never existed. The American
+consul-general at Callao reported (1911) that he could find no rain
+trees in Peru. Then the Department of Agriculture made a statement that
+the rain-tree legend was centuries old, but had no basis. In partial
+explanation thereof an English botanist said that cicada-swarms,
+settling upon trees, tap their juices, which fall on the ground.
+
+Australia has planted many so-called rain trees.
+
+Ulloa, the Spanish astronomer, brought back to Europe a related story
+in 1736. He found at Quito, he said, a species of cane from thirty-five
+to fifty feet high and half a foot thick. Until the canes reach full
+size most of the tubes contain a quantity of water, and this rises and
+falls and is clear or turbid, according to the phases of the moon.
+
+
+_The Mandrake Myth_
+
+Legends of the mandrake are perhaps a legacy of the ancient dark white
+race whose gloomy imaginings and orgiastic practices survived to
+color the brighter religions of Greece and Rome, and emerged again in
+the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages. These legends are widespread,
+uniformly sinister, often obscene. Their basis may be in homeopathic
+magic--the belief that like cures like, and also may kill like; or
+it may be in the sea, where affinities with the pearl myth have been
+noted. It is possible that the mandrake of forbidding fable is just a
+stranded cowry, the shell which has been called the first deity.
+
+The mandrake is a member of the potato family growing in Mediterranean
+countries. It is an emetic, a purgative, a narcotic poison. Usually its
+flesh-colored roots are forked, so that, like a transplanted carrot or
+parsnip, it resembles a miniature human figure. On this resemblance,
+and on its sleep-producing properties, men have thought that the
+legends were based, and in China, ginseng, which also has man-like
+roots, has inherited them. The possessor of the mandrake could win good
+luck for himself, bring bad luck to others, sway the passions, and even
+in some measure command the elements.
+
+Hence the popular notions that the mandrake was an aphrodisiac, that
+it relieved barrenness and promoted pregnancy, as in the triangular
+episode in Genesis in which Jacob, Rachel, and Leah figured; it was
+known as the love-apple, and Venus was called Mandragorotis, while
+the Emperor Julian wrote Calixenes that he drank its juices as a love
+potion. Hence, also, the belief that it dripped blood when pulled
+from the earth and, as Homer says, emitted a deathly shriek fatal
+to the man who heard it; according to Josephus it was the custom
+in a certain Jewish village to use a dog to pull up the roots, the
+dog being killed by the shrieks that followed. Grimm describes this
+process, which consisted in Germany of loosening the soil about the
+root, tying the root to the dog’s tail, retreating to a safe distance
+down the wind, and then decoying the dog with a piece of bread. The
+dead canine was buried on the spot with religious honors, and the root
+“washed with wine, wrapped in silk, laid in a casket, bathed every
+Friday, and clothed in a little new white smock every new moon. If thus
+considerately treated, it acts as a familiar spirit, and every piece of
+coin laid by it at night doubles in the morning.”
+
+Thus the mandrake legend entered its mediæval phase of devil worship.
+The root was used as a charm against nightmare, and against robbers,
+and to locate buried treasure. It was supposed to be a living creature
+“engendered,” as Thomas Newton says, “under the earth of the seed of
+some dead person put to death for murder,” or, as Grimm says, “growing
+up beneath the gallows from which a thief is suspended.” Heads were
+carved on the mandrakes and these elaborated images went by the names
+of manikin and erdman, or earth-man. As much as twenty-five ducats
+in gold was paid for them. They were often carried on the person
+in bottles, and bottle imps were credited with the magic powers of
+homunculi. But if a man died with one of these upon his person, the
+devil owned him forthwith. Joan of Arc was charged with carrying such
+an image about with her, but replied that she did not know what a
+mandrake was. Margaret Bouchey was hanged near Orléans in 1603 on the
+ground that she kept a living mandrake fiend, in form of a female ape.
+
+Mandrake manikins were counterfeited from the root of a yam-like plant,
+which had been manipulated into a complete likeness of the human body.
+Sir Thomas Browne describes the process: “The roots which are carried
+about by imposters to deceive unfruitful women are made of the roots of
+canes, briony, and other plants; for in these, yet fresh and virent,
+they carve out the figures of men and women, first sticking therein
+the grains of barley or millet where they intend the hair should grow;
+then bury them in sand until the grains shoot forth their roots, which,
+at the longest, will happen in twenty days; they afterward clip and
+trim those tender strings in the fashion of beards and other hairy
+teguments. All which, like other impostures, once discovered, is easily
+effected, and in the root of white briony may be practiced every
+spring.”
+
+A century ago mandrake images were still seen in French seaport towns,
+but now mandragora has lost its vogue even as a medicine. In Africa and
+the East, however, it is still used as a narcotic and anti-spasmodic,
+while ginseng, which is a surrogate, maintains its spell in China,
+where as much as four hundred dollars has been paid for an ounce of it.
+
+
+_Precious Stones_
+
+Among minerals jade held a place as distinct as that of the mandrake
+among plants, but its associations were all auspicious. Its place is
+the highest among the precious stones, although it is not a precious
+stone at all. It is a substance to which heliolithic culture attached
+magical power and which it carried quite around the world before
+history began, Aryans, Kanakas, and red Indians holding it in equal
+regard. Axes and hatchets of jade or jadeite have been uncovered in
+the burial grounds of neolithic Europe, and there are jade celts,
+cylinders, and amulets bearing Greek, Babylonian, and Egyptian
+inscriptions. In a sense the civilization of China has been built up
+around this stone. Eighteen centuries before the Christian era the
+emperors of the Shang dynasty used it in the state ritual, paying
+homage to the east with a green jade tablet, to the south with a red
+tablet, to the west with a white tablet, and to the north with a black
+tablet. According to Confucius, “its sound, pure and sonorous, with its
+peculiarity of ceasing abruptly, is the emblem of music; its splendor
+resembles the sky, and its substance, drawn from mountain and stream,
+represents the earth.” An ancient caravan trade in this stone is
+commemorated by a portal in the Great Wall called the Jade Gate.
+
+The Amazon stone which the Spaniards obtained from the South American
+Indians was jadeite. By them as well as by their conquerors it was
+thought to be a cure for diseases of the kidneys, hence its name of
+nephrite. A revived interest in jade followed American exploration.
+Historically it has been treasured as a cure for colic and for diseases
+of the spleen and loins; hung against the stomach, Galen believed it
+a remedy for cramps. It was a good-luck charm, and, fashioned into
+drinking cups, a detector of poisons, which foamed against the brim.
+It survives in art and symbolism after having passed out of magic and
+medicine.
+
+Many of the old traditions about stones persist in popular belief,
+which holds certain kinds of gems and individual jewels as lucky or
+unlucky; and in fashion, which assigns to each month its appropriate
+birthstone. It was supposed that the garnet preserved health, that
+the ruby was a remedy for plague, that the turquoise protected from
+accident, that the eagle-stone would promote childbirth, that the
+emerald would prevent epilepsy, that the topaz would cure insanity,
+that lapis lazuli was a purgative, and bezoar antidotal. Jasper was
+a febrifuge and rock crystal quenched thirst. An amethyst would
+prevent intoxication, a bloodstone would confer the gift of prophecy,
+a chrysoprase would cure cupidity, a sapphire would defend against
+enchantments, an agate would avert a tempest, a carbuncle would give
+light in the dark, an opal would dispel despondency, an emerald would
+break if worn in the commerce of the sexes, and a diamond under a
+woman’s pillow would discover her incontinency.
+
+[Illustration: _According to Tradition, a Putrid Stream Flows from the
+Roots of the Tree and the Vapors Thereof Kill_]
+
+In Christian symbolism, jasper signified the foundation of the
+church, emerald the freshness of piety, beryl the illumination of the
+divine spirit. Sapphires typified the heavenly-minded, chrysolite those
+who let their light shine in word and deed, chalcedony those who fast
+and pray in secret.
+
+However vain the pagan jewel-lore from which Christian borrowings were
+made, the ideas it arrays are older than the conception of precious
+stones as mere adornment. These things were sought and worn at first
+as life-givers and luck-bringers, and not because they were beautiful.
+Justinus Kerner is of those writers who contend that primitive man was
+so attuned to nature that “even the spirit of the stone, now grown
+dull and sluggish, was capable of affecting him.” Only when persons
+are under the influence of magnetism, says this writer, are they
+susceptible to the inherent powers of precious stones; because that
+state was in a measure the normal state of early men they found greater
+medicinal virtue in gems than in roots and herbs.
+
+
+_The Wonders of Countries_
+
+The travelers of yesterday found marvel awaiting them in every land.
+The sun of India, Ctesias says, appears to be ten times larger than in
+other countries, and for four finger-breadths downward the surrounding
+seas are so hot that fish cannot come near the surface. It is so hot
+in Ormuz, says Maundeville, that “the Folk lie all naked in Rivers and
+Waters, Men and Women together, from nine o’clock of the Day till it
+be past the Noon.” In the Persian city of Susis, says Strabo, “lizards
+and serpents at midday in summer cannot cross the streets quick enough
+to prevent their being burnt to death midway by the heat.” Setting one
+thing against another, Diodorus says that in Scythia by the force of
+cold even brazen statues are burst asunder, while “in the utmost coasts
+of Egypt and the Troglodytes the sun is so scorching hot at midday that
+two standing together cannot see each other by reason of the thickness
+of the air.”
+
+Ctesias speaks of a fountain in India which swims every year with
+liquid gold, and out of which are drawn a hundred earthen pitchers
+filled with the metal--melted ore, suggests Lassen. There is growing
+upon Mount Ida in Scandia, says Father Jerom Dandini, “a herb whose
+virtue is to gild the teeth of those animals that eat of it; one may
+believe, and with good reason, that this proceeds from the golden
+mines which are in that ground.” Herodotus reports the Thracians as
+saying that the country beyond the Ister (Danube) is possessed by
+bees, wherefore travelers cannot penetrate it; these may have been
+mosquitoes. At the altars of Mucius in the country of the Veii, and
+about Tusculum and in the Cimmerian Forest, says Pliny, there are
+places in which things that are pushed into the ground cannot be pulled
+out again.
+
+Geographical marvel may be brought down almost to date with Humboldt’s
+report on the moving “stone of the eyes” in South America, which the
+natives believed to be both stone and animal; and with Irving’s account
+of the extinct thunderbolts which the plains Indians told him they
+sometimes used for arrow heads. So armed, a warrior was invincible, but
+he vanished if a thunderstorm arose during battle.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV. The Animal Kingdom
+
+
+Much of the literature of marvel relates to real animals. The savage
+could see no great difference between them and himself; that their
+bodies were unlike his did not seem important. They could reason like
+him, they could understand what he said to them, they had souls which,
+like his own, lived after death. A beast could assume human shape, a
+man could become a beast, and it was totemic theory that some beasts
+were ancestors of some men.
+
+There were tribes that acted as if they were beasts, or birds. The
+Bororo Indians identified themselves with gorgeous red birds that lived
+in the heart of the Brazilian forest, and treated them as if they were
+fellow mortals. Travelers have told of savages who ate maggots bred
+in the carcasses of animals, and on ceremonial occasions thereafter
+writhed, roared, barked, or grunted, in keeping with the nature of the
+snake, lion, jackal, or hippopotamus whose body had been the table of
+their feast. The people of an Alaskan island mistook the first Russian
+party that landed there for cuttlefish, because the men had buttons on
+their clothes.
+
+Abundant traces of a belief that animals were beings of a higher order
+than men are found in early religion, magic, and medicine. Many of them
+were worshiped. Out of a fear that their spirits might work harm, all
+of them were propitiated even when pursued or killed. Portions of their
+dead bodies were used as amulets and to work spells. Their brains,
+blood, entrails, and excrements were a principal part of the Roman
+pharmacopœia in the most brilliant age of the Empire; the witches’
+broth in Macbeth is an Augustan brew. Along with hundreds of like
+prescriptions, Pliny recites that a mole’s right foot and the earth
+thrown up by ants are remedies for scrofula, that a bat’s heart is an
+antidote for ant venom, that a hen’s brains will cure snake poison and
+the owlet’s a bee sting, that profuse perspiration may be checked by
+rubbing the body with ashes of burnt goats’ horns mixed with oil of
+myrtle, and that catarrh may be relieved by kissing a mule’s nostrils.
+
+Curious as these things may seem, they come naturally from the fact
+that primitive man had mainly to do with animals. Outside of his tribal
+group he knew other men only as enemies. But all about were furred and
+feathered and not unfriendly creatures whose acts had a certainty and
+finality lifting them above the doubts and fears that harassed him. He
+seemed a late comer and guest in an animal world. So he did what timid
+peoples are wont to do. He put himself under the protection of beings
+more gifted than himself. He became a vassal of the beasts. This was
+the first feudalism.
+
+The savage was glad to assert his kinship with the brute. In the Indian
+west it was through the First People, who had the human shape but an
+animal nature, and were transformed into beasts and birds; a beast or
+a bird then created the second race of men. The natives of Vancouver
+Island thought that when nobody was about animals laid aside their
+skins and were people. In places the tradition lingers that migratory
+birds become men when in other lands. A traveler far from home was
+amazed when a stranger called him by name and asked about each member
+of the family. The mystery was solved when he learned how this intimate
+knowledge was gained; the stranger was the stork that each year built
+its nest upon his roof.
+
+Both in skin-shifting and shape-shifting the blood relationship between
+man and brute was avowed. In the one, the hero of savage epic, by
+donning or doffing an animal skin, put on or put off the beast nature.
+In the other, the human or animal actor strutted for a space on his
+cousin’s stage. Wizards could transform themselves, as men thought,
+into wolves and hyenas; the world-wide legend of the werewolf traces
+from the time when metamorphosis was the alpha and omega of myth.
+Its survivals strew the classics. Io became a heifer, Actæon a stag,
+Antigone a stork, Arachne a spider, Itys a pheasant, Philomela a
+nightingale, and Progne a swallow.
+
+Animals took on human form to get better acquainted with men. Indian
+story tells of a man who unwittingly married a female buffalo. An
+Indian woman wedded a stranger who bade her always throw the bones
+in a certain place, and whenever he went out to eat she heard the
+barking of a dog near the bone-heap; that was what he was. There are
+stories from every continent of the union of women with reptiles that
+masqueraded as men. Perhaps because they can assume the erect posture,
+bears were often parties to alliances of this kind. It was thought in
+Iceland that they were men bewitched and that their progeny were born
+human but turned into cubs at a touch of the dam’s paw. The Votiaks
+of the American northwest say the bear traces back to man and knows
+his speech. When the hide is off, the California Indians aver that
+bears are just like people. In a Coos Indian story a girl married
+a fine-looking man whom she met while picking berries; but when he
+took her to the ancestral lodge, she found herself in a bear camp.
+There is a Tlingit tale of a hunter who was captured by a female
+grizzly--object, matrimony.
+
+The mitigation of these world stories is that they are literalistic
+misreadings of old totemistic custom. Yet it is pleasant enough to
+learn from a Tahltan tale that caribou “like to be called people.”
+
+Under totemism, men chose their elder brothers, the brutes, for
+guardians, took their names, deposited their own souls with them for
+safekeeping, and, after death, entered their bodies. Where totemism
+was unknown it was thought that the larger prowling animals might be
+tenanted by demons and that their weird howls at night were incidents
+of beast debates which had the destinies of men as their topic. It
+was well not to affront them even by naming them; better to use
+ingratiating epithets, such as “blue-foot,” “gold-foot,” “gray-beard,”
+“broad-brow,” “flash-eye,” “forest-brother.” The lesser sort were rogue
+heroes in the beast epics--among the Hottentots the jackal; among the
+Bantus, the rabbit; among the Orientals, the fox; among the American
+Indians, the turtle, coyote, and raven.
+
+As a memorial of the antique relation between man and beast, three out
+of every hundred persons in England and America bear animal names.
+There is a wealth of detail as to how that relation was carried
+down through legend into history. The woodpecker directed the Aryan
+migrations, the wolf suckled the founders of Rome, the nest of the
+eagle determined the winter camps of the legions, the flights of birds
+fixed the sites of cities, and their entrails decided for nations
+the issues of war and peace. Animal forms range the entire field of
+early man’s interests. Deified bulls, rams, crocodiles, hawks, and
+ibises thronged the hospitable pantheon of Egypt. In the speculation
+of various peoples the snake, the elephant, the whale, the boar, the
+turtle, or the catfish supported the world, and when the creature moved
+itself earthquake followed. The dove of Hebrew deluge story found the
+earth. The larger animals were in the sky as constellations before
+history began. When the moon is in eclipse there are men to believe
+that it has been swallowed by a snake, a wolf, a frog, a crab.
+
+In their primitive judicial processes men took oath in the name of
+the sacred animal. In their agriculture they conceived of the life
+of the grain as residing in an animal corn spirit--a horse, a pig, a
+goat, or a dog, which hid itself in the last clump of grain to be cut.
+In their marriage ceremonies, the cock, duck, goat, or goose was a
+fertility emblem. Totem beasts are tattooed on the bodies of savages.
+Animal outlines, at first as a strong magic, were used upon pottery,
+clothes, and weapons, and as decoration are still used. In animal masks
+and with magical intent, dances are performed which mimic the ways of
+beasts. Their feet, horns, claws, and teeth enter the medicine bag of
+the shaman. When at last death comes to the savage, perhaps a turkey
+buzzard or a humming bird convoys his soul to the other world, or a dog
+guards the bridge over which it is to pass to a happier realm, where
+the hunting of animals begins anew.
+
+The reverence paid to the least considered of animals may serve to
+show in what regard all of them were held and to explain the marvels
+told about them. Scattered through the literature and folklore of
+various peoples is a copious mass of traditions as to vermin worship
+and to practices just suggested by the fact that Beelzebub, the
+devil of Jewish Scripture, is the Semitic god of flies. There was a
+classic deity known as the mouse-Apollo and tame mice were kept in
+his sanctuary. The Philistines sent to Israel, with the captured Ark,
+golden images of mice. Isaiah bears witness that certain of the Jews
+met secretly in gardens and ate swine’s flesh and mice for sacramental
+purposes. In old stories the soul is pictured as issuing from the
+mouths of dying or sleeping persons in the form of a mouse. The
+Chams of Indo-China erected a pillar to the god rat. Herodotus tells
+of the destruction of an Assyrian army in Egypt by the aid of mice
+auxiliaries. It is still the custom in some districts of Europe for
+peasants to exorcise mice from the crops by running wildly with lighted
+torches around the fields on the eve of Twelfth Day; to put the milk
+teeth of children in a rat runway, so that the second teeth shall be
+as white and strong as the rodent’s; to treat white mice with kindness
+so as to bring luck to the house, and even to post a writing with a
+message of good will where rats and mice can see it.
+
+While domestic animals which had killed or maimed persons were
+regularly tried in the criminal courts of ancient Greece and mediæval
+Europe, ecclesiastical courts long exercised jurisdiction over smaller
+animal offenders. The curse of the Church was relied upon to reach
+vermin against which the secular law knew itself to be powerless; yet
+anathema was not pronounced without judicial process. On complaint of
+ravaged parishes, field mice, locusts, and beetles were summoned to
+appear in court on a certain day and counsel was appointed to defend
+them. In defense of accused rats in the diocese of Autun, Chassenée,
+the brilliant French advocate of the sixteenth century, laid the
+foundations of his fame. He cited biblical and classical writers,
+interposed various technical objections, attributed the failure of his
+clients to appear to the absence of safe conducts, and demanded that
+the plaintiffs give bond that their cats would not molest the defendant
+rodents in their journey to court. On their refusal to give bond the
+case was adjourned without day.
+
+Many such cases were compromised by setting aside a plot of land
+to which the accused creatures might repair for sanctuary. In the
+suit of Franciscan friars in Brazil in 1713 against white ants which
+had invaded their monastery, the compromise was influenced by the
+plea of counsel that the defendants not only had prior possession
+of the ground, but were more industrious than the complaining
+monks. Ecclesiastical suits were brought at various times against
+caterpillars, cockchafers, flies, leeches, moles, snails, slugs,
+weevils, and worms. From the ninth to the nineteenth century there is
+a record of 144 successful prosecutions of animals, vermin included,
+and these are thought to be only a fraction of the total number of such
+litigations. The age which brought them was no less sure that insects
+had rights, including the right of subsistence, than that the Church
+had effectual power over them.
+
+
+_The Elephant_
+
+About the larger creatures fable has been busy and the foremost figure
+is naturally the hugest of the land animals; only with mediæval and
+heraldic times did the lion win pre-eminence. Classic tradition
+revolves around the elephant’s intelligence, morality, and social
+traits. There are stories of its understanding Greek, and even writing
+it. As Pliny repeats, “it is sensible alike of the pleasures of love
+and glory, and, to a degree that is rare among men even, possesses
+notions of honesty, prudence, and equity; it has a religious respect
+also for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon.”
+
+When surrounded by hunters, report had it that elephants placed
+themselves in battle line, with the smaller-tusked animals in front, so
+that the enemy might see that the spoil was unworthy the seeking. When
+they perceived themselves about to be overcome, they broke off their
+teeth against a tree in order to pay their ransom. While other animals
+avoided fire, they resisted and fought it because they saw it destroyed
+the forests. When worn out by disease, they have been seen lying on
+their backs and casting grass up into the air, “as if deputing the
+earth to intercede for them with its prayers.”
+
+John Lok, in his _Voyage to Guinea_, paraphrases an ancient belief as
+to the feud between the elephant and what he calls the dragon: “They
+have continual warre against Dragons, which desire their blood, because
+it is very colde; and therefore the Dragon lying awaite as the Elephant
+passeth by, windeth his taile, being of exceeding length, about the
+hinder legs of the Elephant, & so staying him, thrusteth his head into
+his tronke and exhausteth his breath, or else biteth him in the Eare,
+whereunto he cannot reach with his tronke, and when the Elephant waxeth
+faint, he falleth downe on the serpent, being now full of blood, and
+with the poise of his body breaketh him: so that his owne blood with
+the blood of the Elephant runneth out of him mingled together, which
+being colde, is congealed into that substance which the Apothecaries
+call Sanguis Draconis, (that is) Dragons blood, otherwise called
+Cinnabaris, commonly called Cinoper or Vermilion, which the Painters
+use in certaine colours.”
+
+The elephant is polygamous, although, as Lok says, “Plinie and Soline
+write that elephants use none adulterie.” It was thought that the
+intercourse of the sexes took place every second year, in a honeymoon
+of five days’ length, and that the couples purified themselves in a
+river before rejoining the herd. Of these nuptial journeys Buffon says,
+“In their march love seems to precede and modesty to follow them, for
+they observe the greatest mystery in their amours.” To this day the
+East Africans think that if their wives are unfaithful while they are
+on an elephant hunt, themselves will be killed or maimed by their
+quarry.
+
+It was a Roman belief that when elephants met a man who had lost his
+way in the woods they would go gently before him and bring him to a
+plain path. Sindbad had a kindred experience on his seventh voyage when
+a herd conducted him to their cemetery so that henceforth “I should
+forbear to kill them, as now I knew where to get their teeth without
+inflicting injury on them.” It is still widely believed that somewhere
+in Central Africa, perhaps in a remote valley of the western Sudan, is
+an elephant graveyard whither all the aged and ailing pachyderms of
+the continent repair, sometimes traveling thousands of miles in order
+to die in peace amid the relics of their kind. No elephants dead of
+natural causes are ever found, tradition avers, and from time to time
+expeditions have sought the vast riches of this storehouse of mortuary
+ivory.
+
+To the elephant various peoples have accorded royal honors. Akbar,
+the great Mogul, erected a monument to a favorite elephant, which
+still stands near the deserted city of Fatephur Sikri; it is a tower
+seventy-two feet high, studded with hundreds of artificial tusks. At
+the court of Siam the traditional rank of the chief white elephant
+has been next to the queen and before the heir-apparent. The chief of
+the Burmese court herd has the residence and honors of a minister of
+state. “The king of Pegu,” says one of the Hakluyt travelers, “is
+called the King of the White Elephants. If any other king have one, and
+will not send it him, he will make warre with him for it; for he had
+rather lose a great part of his kingdome than not to conquere him.”
+This was history when penned. In the sixteenth century a long war was
+waged between Pegu, Siam, and Aracan, wherein five kings were killed,
+in order to obtain possession of one white elephant. These albinos are
+regarded as an appurtenance of royalty and lack of them is an ill omen.
+Siam is the Land of the White Elephant.
+
+
+_The Rhinoceros_
+
+The ancients had less to say of the rhinoceros than of the monoceros or
+unicorn, for which fabulous beast it may have provided the pattern; but
+they wove legends about the virtues of its horn and its feud with the
+elephant. Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote that when the rhinoceros walked
+its horn shook, but that rage tightened it so that the beast was able
+to uproot trees. Its skin was four fingers thick, and so hard that from
+it, instead of iron, men made plowshares. In later ages the horn was
+kept for the cure of diseases and detection of poison. Drinking cups
+were made of it on a turner’s lathe, and the mediæval west accepted the
+tradition of the east that these would sweat at the approach of poison.
+Horns taken from young bull rhinoceroses which had never coupled with
+females were preferred. Set in gold and silver, the goblets were an
+acceptable present for kings. Thunberg was one of the first inquirers
+to put the superstition to the test by bringing the horn and various
+poisons together; there was no chemical reaction.
+
+The tongue, not the horn, of the rhinoceros was its weapon of offense,
+according to old belief. Marco Polo says that this member, in the
+Sumatran species, is armed with long sharp spines, wherewith, after
+trampling its enemies, it licks them to death. Pliny has a like story.
+
+
+_The Hippopotamus_
+
+Of the hippopotamus two travelers’ tales may be noted. Pliny gives it
+on hearsay that the river horse enters a cornfield backward, so that
+there will be no one waiting to waylay it when it comes out. The
+statement of Father Joano dos Santos in his history of eastern Ethiopia
+(1506) may best be set down verbatim: “The hippopotamus is naturally
+of a sickly constitution, and subject to gouty paines, which it cures
+by scratching the stomach with the left foot; and it has further been
+noticed, when it wishes to effect a perfect cure that it falls on the
+horn of the hoof of the left foot; this, entering the stomach, appeases
+and terminates the pain. Hence the Caffres and Moors make use of this
+horn as a remedy for the gout.”
+
+
+_The Hyena_
+
+The foul countenance and abject gaze of the hyena, its misshapen body,
+its slinking tread, its affinities with both the wolf and the cat
+tribes, have been provocative of legend. It lurks in caves and ruins
+by day, it prowls for carrion food at night, it despoils graveyards
+of their dead, it roams through unlighted villages, and its howl when
+excited has a weird note, as of a demon’s laughter; so antique fable
+had much to work upon. “Of prodigious strength,” Ctesias called the
+beast under its Indian name of Krokottas; and, indeed, no animal of
+its size has jaws so powerful. He credited it with the courage of the
+lion, the speed of the horse, and the strength of the bull. It imitated
+the human voice, he said, and, pronouncing their names, called men out
+at night, when it fell upon and devoured them. “We cannot in the least
+credit this,” is however, the comment of Diodorus Siculus.
+
+Pliny, and Solinus after him, thought that the hyena was male one
+year and female the next--an opinion challenged by Aristotle. It was
+supposed to carry a stone in its eye which, placed under a man’s
+tongue, would enable him to prophesy. Purchas says the beast “hath
+no necke joynt, and therefore stirres not his necke but with bending
+about his whole body.” Improving upon Ctesias, he says the animal draws
+near to sheepcotes at night in order to learn the names of herdsmen,
+whom afterward it decoys to destruction. Its eyes are “diversified
+with a thousand colours” and the touch of its shadow “makes a dogge
+not able to barke.” Buffon mentions, only to scout, the notion that
+the hyena fascinates shepherds so that they cannot move, and renders
+shepherdesses distracted in love. As a supposed hybrid, Raleigh
+excludes it from the Ark. A kind of worship is still paid it in East
+Africa, where the oath of the hyena is administered; it is a crime to
+kill one and a misdemeanor to mimic its voice. Stories are told of
+gold rings found in the ears of dead hyenas similar to those worn by
+sorcerers and workers in iron.
+
+
+_The Gnu_
+
+Near the headwaters of the Nile, according to Pliny, roams the
+catoblepas, an animal of moderate size and of movements made cumbersome
+by a head immoderately heavy, which is always bent down toward the
+earth. This is a fortunate thing, for otherwise “it would prove the
+destruction of the human race,” since “all who behold its eyes fall
+dead upon the spot.” In this demon-beast of dejected aspect Cuvier
+recognizes the antelope-gnu, a horned creature apparently compounded of
+a bison’s head, a horse’s body, and an antelope’s legs; a fantastic and
+mournful silhouette of the African prairies.
+
+
+_The Crocodile_
+
+The standing of the crocodile in ancient Egypt, and among the savages
+of the East Indies to this day, has been that of a sacred, or at least
+a tabooed, animal. It had its own temple at Memphis, where it was
+worshiped as a divinity, and tame crocodiles took part in the religious
+processions. The Dyaks of Borneo and the Minangkabauers of Sumatra
+never kill a crocodile unless it has killed a man. Its privileged
+position among animals is due to a variety of reasons, of which only
+three need be noted: it is a dangerous reptile, it flourishes mainly
+where other food is plenty, and its meat is not agreeable to most
+palates, having, as Sir Samuel Baker puts it, “the combined flavor of
+bad fish, rotten flesh, and musk.” Such a creature it is both savage
+superstition and policy to let alone, and even to flatter.
+
+The older explanations of crocodile worship are more fantastic.
+According to Plutarch, this reptile is a symbol of deity because it
+is the only aquatic animal which has its eyes covered with a thin
+membrane, so that, like divinity, it sees without being seen. He adds
+that the Egyptians worship God symbolically in the crocodile, that
+being the only animal without a tongue, like the Divine Logos, which
+is in no need of speech. One species has something more than a hundred
+teeth, wherefore Achilles Tatius declares, “the number of its teeth
+equals the number of days in a year.”
+
+In his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Ludolf saw a crocodile which the
+Knights Templars, by extracting certain of its teeth, had converted
+into a serviceable beast of burden. “In winter,” says Maundeville, “the
+Cockodrills lie as in a dream.” Purchas provides a detail on a matter
+of peculiar interest to the mediævals: one lobe of the crocodile’s
+liver is poison, the other counter-poison.
+
+“Crocodile tears” are defined as simulated weeping, and back of this
+useful metaphor is the venerable tradition set down in Hakluyt’s
+collection: “His nature is ever when hee would have his prey, to cry
+and sobbe like a Christian body, to provoke them to come to him, and
+then hee snatcheth at them, and thereupon came this proverbe that is
+applied unto women when they weepe, _Lachrmyæ Crocodili_, the meaning
+whereof is, that as the Crocodile when hee crieth, goeth then about
+most to deceive, so doeth a woman most commonly when shee weepeth.”
+
+
+_Snakes_
+
+Most of the numerous snake traditions have a religious significance.
+The older writers, however, have left observations which belong to
+natural history. Pliny recites it as “a well-known fact” that a serpent
+120 feet in length was taken at the river Bagrada in the Punic Wars
+by the Roman army under Regulus. The monster was besieged as if it
+were a fortress, balistæ and other engines being used. Of India, known
+from earliest time for its immense serpents, the most striking reptile
+story Ctesias has to tell is of a snake only a fathom long, and without
+fangs. It is purple with a white head and does execution by vomiting.
+Flesh putrefies wherever the vomit falls. Suspended by the tail, it
+yields two kinds of poison, amber-hued when the snake is living, black
+when obtained from a carcass. A sesame seed’s bulk of the former brings
+instant death to him who swallows it, his brains oozing from his
+nostrils, while the latter brings death from consumption after about a
+year.
+
+Out of many traditions that snakes have power to fascinate or injure
+without striking, two opinions from respectable sources may be given.
+Ulloa, the Spanish explorer, thinks the breath of the cobra produces “a
+kind of inebriation,” in persons, as does “the urine of the fox” and
+“the breath of the whale.” Lobo, the Portuguese friar, reports that
+while lying on the ground in Abyssinia, he was seized with a pain which
+forced him to rise, when he discovered a serpent something more than
+four yards from him. He revived himself with “that sovereign remedy” a
+bezoar stone. These serpents, he explains, have wide mouths and swallow
+air in great quantities, which they presently eject with such force
+that it kills at four yards.
+
+
+_Grasshoppers_
+
+Classic writers knew the grasshopper less as a pest than as a food,
+and it has a pleasant place in myth. Tithonus, beloved of Aurora and
+dowered by the gods with immortality but not with eternal youth, was
+changed by her into a grasshopper after he shrank up with old age.
+There is a grasshopper fable to which Strabo gives a naturalistic and
+Solinus a supernatural tinge. In southern Italy, Rhegium and Locris are
+divided by a river flowing through a deep ravine. The insects on the
+Locrian side sing, while those on the other side are silent.
+
+Strabo suggests that this is because it is sunny on the Locrian side,
+and densely wooded across the river. In the one case the membranes used
+in stridulation are dry and horny and therefore resonant when rasped
+together; in the other, they are so softened by shade and dew that they
+produce no sound. Solinus has a simpler explanation. Hercules passed
+by Rhegium and its grasshopper orchestra irritated him. So he bade the
+insects be silent, and, resentful or forgetful, failed to lift the
+embargo.
+
+
+_The Salamander_
+
+The best account of the salamander appears in the _Memoirs_ of
+Benvenuto Cellini. “One day,” he said, “when I was about fifteen
+years of age, my father was in a cellar where they had been scalding
+some clothes for washing. He was alone, and was playing upon the viol
+and singing in front of a good fire of oakwood, for the weather was
+very cold. On looking at the fire accidentally, he saw a small animal
+resembling a lizard, gambolling joyously in the midst of the fiercest
+flames. My father instantly perceiving what it was, he called my
+sister and me, pointed out the animal to us, and gave me a severe box
+on the ear, which caused me to shed a perfect deluge of tears. He
+gently wiped my eyes and said to me, ‘My dear boy, I did not strike you
+as a punishment, but only that you should remember that that lizard
+which you behold in the fire is a salamander, an animal which has never
+been seen by any known person.’ He afterwards kissed me and gave me a
+few quattrini.”
+
+That the salamander is able to live in flames, Aristotle thought, and
+Ælian, and Nicander, and Pliny. The last named tells why: This lizard
+is so cold that it extinguishes fire like ice. There is great danger in
+its venom. Unless precautions are taken it might destroy whole nations,
+for if it crawls up a tree it infects all the fruit and those who eat
+thereof are killed. It will also poison water or wine in which it is
+drowned. Sir Thomas Browne concedes that it may resist a flame or put
+out a coal, but “thus much will many humid bodies perform.”
+
+
+_The Spider Dance_
+
+The tarantula is a large, brown mining spider which is found on both
+shores of the Mediterranean, and is said to be numerous near Taranto
+in southern Italy, whence its name. Its bite is painful, although not
+dangerous, but in the fifteenth century the superstition arose that it
+caused what is called tarantism, a nervous affection with some of the
+symptoms of hydrophobia, and now classed with St. Vitus dance. Those
+who were bitten, or believed themselves to be, assumed a livid color,
+lost the senses of sight and hearing, and sank into a deep depression;
+nausea and sexual excitement were also remarked. Only music could
+arouse the sufferer; under the influence of lively strains he would
+dance himself into a perspiration and the poison of the spider bite
+would escape through the skin. If the dance was continued to exhaustion
+the patient was cured, at any rate for a time.
+
+The disease soon assumed the form of a contagion communicated from one
+person to another. Dancers were violently affected by bright colors.
+Red was the favorite, and then green and yellow, and one man’s hue
+might be another’s madness. Sufferers sought water, some plunging into
+the sea, others immersing their heads in a tub or carrying globes
+of water while dancing. Old and young, skeptical visitors as well as
+natives, and women more than men, were the victims. Attacks lasted from
+two to six days, and recovery was effectual until warm weather came the
+following year, when the symptoms had again to be exorcised to music.
+One woman was a tarantant for thirty summers.
+
+The earliest mention of the mania is in the writings of Nicolas
+Perotti, a contemporary of Columbus. It broke out at the same time that
+the St. Vitus dance appeared in Germany. A like superstition and a like
+cure are known in a Persian province. The northern nations were first
+to recover and since the seventeenth century the epidemic has slowly
+waned. The lively Neapolitan folk dance, called the tarantella, is a
+memorial of the madness that set the Middle Ages dancing with a spider
+calling the tune.
+
+
+_The Swallow_
+
+Swallows show themselves suddenly in the northern climes in April, and
+as suddenly vanish at the threshold of autumn. They are often seen
+skimming the surface of water. Doctor Kalm, the Swedish traveler,
+reports that in April, 1750, he saw great numbers perched upon posts,
+“and they were as wet as if they had just come out of the sea.” That
+the swallow comes out of the sea in the spring and returns to it in
+the fall is a belief of unknown antiquity. Thus, thought Luther, it
+repeated each year the process of creation recorded in Genesis, when
+the water obeyed the command to bring forth “fowl that may fly above
+the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
+
+There is a considerable literature on the reputed hibernation of the
+swallow. It has been credited with electing at will the winter economy
+of the wild goose, the bear, or the batrachian. In Mediterranean
+countries it is conceded that swallows migrate. In England and Germany,
+according to one eighteenth-century observer, they “retire into clefts
+and holes in rocks, and remain there in torpid state.” In the colder
+northern countries popular opinion has been that they submerge in the
+sea. Regnard, the French comic poet, who made a journey to Lapland in
+1681, accepted this on the word of trustworthy Danes and Swedes.
+
+In the eighteenth century the secretary to the city of Dantzig obtained
+sworn testimony in support of this opinion from collectors of the
+revenues of the king of Prussia. The mother of the Countess Lehndorf
+reported that she saw “a bundle of swallows” brought from under water
+to a warm room, where they revived and fluttered about. Count Schlieben
+said that while fishing on his estate he saw several swallows netted,
+one of which he carried into a warm room; it lay there for an hour and
+then began to stir and fly around. Collector-General Witkowski said
+that in 1741 he got two swallows from the great pond at Didlacken, and
+that these birds revived in a warm room, “fluttered about, and died
+three hours later.” Six other witnesses made their several oaths to
+similar incidents.
+
+A final touch of poetry is given by the statement of Doctor Wallerius,
+the celebrated Swedish chemist, who deposed “that he had seen more than
+once swallows assembling on a reed till they were all immersed and
+went to the bottom; this being preceded by a dirge of a quarter of an
+hour’s length.” Holy, luck-bringing, and inviolate, men everywhere have
+thought the swallow, and the solemn descents into the sea with which
+legend credited it deepened this character.
+
+
+_Wild Geese_
+
+About wild geese a still more fantastic belief obtained up to four
+centuries ago, when the Dutch discovered Spitzbergen. It was thought
+that goslings grew upon trees in the form of nuts. The nuts fell into
+the sea and the chicks came forth. Therefore a decree at the Sorbonne
+in Paris adjudged that wild geese were not birds and could be eaten
+in Lent. In Spitzbergen, Barentz came upon the breeding grounds of
+these migratory fowl, and, breaking open the eggs, discovered the
+unhatched young in them. So the myth passed. “It is not our fault,” he
+remarked, “that we have not known this before, when these birds insist
+upon breeding so far northward.” Two variants of the story are found
+among Norwegian writers. Jonas Ramus says that “a particular sort of
+Geese found in Nordland leave their seed on old trees and stumps and
+blocks lying in the sea”; a shell forms around the seed, and from the
+shell, as from an egg, young geese are hatched by the sun. Pontoppidan
+describes what seems to be the goose barnacle which contains “the
+little creature reported to be a young wild goose.” It looks like
+“little crooked feathers squeezed together” and is merely a “living
+sea insect.” While the legend was credited it was used to confirm the
+doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
+
+
+_Animal Politics_
+
+Fable dowered various creatures with the political institutions and
+social sense of the ant and bee. Pearl oysters were said to live in
+settlements under the rule of the oldest. Cranes placed sentinels on
+guard at night, each with a stone in its claw; if the bird nodded
+the stone fell to the ground, betraying its neglect of duty. Cranes,
+rooks and storks, even modern observers assert, hold criminal courts.
+Twice a year a pair of ravens was assigned to each farm in Iceland
+by a parliament of their fellows. The storks of Egypt were supposed
+every winter to make the Mecca pilgrimage and were regarded as hajjis.
+Because the panther’s diet was aromatic roots and herbs, its breath
+was balmy and medicinal, and when it walked abroad all the other
+beasts attended it. Wild beasts and apes tended a mountain shrine near
+Srinagar in India, bringing daily offerings of flowers. In Ceylon “very
+pious and credible persons” told Ibn Batuta that the bearded black
+monkeys had their own sultan, who wore a green turban woven of leaves,
+as if he wished to seem an Islamite, and maintained a council of state
+and a harem.
+
+
+_Other Animal Marvels_
+
+Marvel tales about animals might be recited almost indefinitely,
+and a respectable authority ancient or modern, named for each. A
+few representative ones may be noted. It is a well-known fact, says
+Solinus, that magpies have died because they could not master the
+pronunciation of a difficult word. In South America, according to
+Purchas, men make clean their teeth with the beards of seals, “because
+they bee wholesome for the toothache.” The she-camel, so says Launcelot
+Addison, father of the essayist, “brings forth her young in a negligent
+slumber.” The toucan, says Humboldt, makes an extraordinary gesture
+when preparing to drink, which the monks assert is the sign of the
+cross upon the water, and so the creoles call it _diostede_ (God gives
+it to thee). Bordering the country of the grasshopper-eaters in Africa,
+says Diodorus, is a fair land which has been untenanted since rain bred
+a multitude of venomous spiders that stung many persons to death and
+drove away the remainder. Plutarch thought that the ibis became more
+sacred by standing with straddled legs so as to form a triangle. Buffon
+confutes the notion, based on the noisome odor of the shrewmouse, that
+its bite is dangerous to cattle. Isaac Walton cites a polygamous fish
+which “goes courting she-goats on the grassy shore.” Even Linnæus
+thought that birds of paradise had neither wings nor feet.
+
+
+_Pliny’s Mirabilia_
+
+Pliny is authority for the fables which follow: The ant rests from
+her labors at the changes of the moon. The sea remains calm while the
+halcyon is hatching her young upon it. When the sun is in Cancer the
+bodies of dead crabs on the seashore are transformed into serpents.
+When the porcupine stretches its skin it discharges its quills like
+missiles. Lions resent it if a man looks at them asquint. The breath
+of the elephant will draw serpents from their retreats. Only by using
+the left hand can one pull snakes from their holes. They will flee from
+a naked man, but pursue one clothed. The best way to catch eels is to
+put the bait in the end of a hollow fishing rod and suffocate them by
+blowing through it.
+
+Bears crawl into their dens on their backs in order to leave no
+betraying trail. Ostriches throw stones at their pursuers. Vultures
+will entice a bull over a precipice by holding their wings before its
+eyes. The boding raven is most so when it swallows its voice as if
+choked. If a horse follows in the track of a wolf it will burst asunder
+beneath its rider. If a shrewmouse crosses the rut of a wheel it will
+die at once. The pastern bones of swine promote discord. Madness in
+he-goats may be calmed by stroking their beards. She-goats in pasture
+never look at one another at sunset. Goats breathe through their ears,
+are never quite free from fever, and are therefore more lascivious than
+sheep. Roebucks grow fat on poisons.
+
+As to birds and insects, it is doubtful if they dream; yet pigeons
+“have a certain appreciation of glory.” At a certain season cuckoos
+become hawks. The crow is at enmity with the weasel, the duck with
+the sea-mew, but there is friendship between the peacock and the
+pigeon, the turtle-dove and the parrot, the heron and the crow. Quails
+sometimes settle so thickly on ships at night as to sink them. Locusts
+make their whirring noise by grinding their teeth. Hornets, wasps, and
+bees will not attack a person stung by a scorpion. In high winds bees
+carry small stones for ballast. It is not certain whether their honey
+is “the sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from the
+stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself.”
+
+Stranger than these classic beliefs is the early Christian tradition of
+the small hole found in the forefeet of pigs when the hair is removed.
+Therein of old time passed the legion of devils in the country of the
+Gadarenes. The rings about the hole which seem branded in the skin are
+the marks of demons’ claws as they entered their unclean habitation.
+Javanese Moslems have it that the peacock was gatekeeper of Paradise
+and admitted the devil by swallowing him. A third domestic creature,
+the cock, could scatter ghosts and demons by his dawn cry.
+
+
+_Browne Catalogues Vulgar Errors_
+
+The treatise upon _Vulgar Errors_ which Sir Thomas Browne made in the
+seventeenth century attacks many notions that had come down to his time
+from a past without date. Among them are the following: Swans sing
+their own death songs. The badger has the legs of one side shorter
+than the other. Spermaceti is the spawn of the whale. Lampries have
+nine eyes. There is antipathy between the toad and the spider. There
+is a lucky-stone in the toad’s head. The pelican pierces her breast
+and feeds her young with her own blood. The clicking sound made in a
+wainscoting by the beetle called the death-watch presages bereavement.
+Peacocks are ashamed of their legs. Storks will live only in republics
+or free states. Lions are afraid of cocks.
+
+Each of these beliefs the great physician confutes in turn, remarking,
+for example, that storks nest in kingly France and in the dominions of
+the Great Turk, and that a lion, escaped from a menagerie, had robbed a
+hen roost in Bavaria.
+
+
+_Beasts of the Hermits_
+
+A chapter of charming legends has for its theme not the remarkable
+traits of different species of animals, but the conduct of single
+creatures that came under the influence of holy men who went out into
+the deserts in the early days of the Christian era. In the absence of
+human society the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field formed
+for the hermit the society of the waste. The crocodile, protected and
+worshiped by pagan Egypt, the gross-looking hippopotamus, the venomous
+serpents, and above all the hyena, with its fearful laughter, rimmed
+the anchorite’s life with a horizon of supernatural terror; these were
+embodied dæmons with designs upon his very soul. But sometimes he could
+cast out the evil spirit that tenanted them, and there were other and
+gentler beasts that became his servants and companions. In them the
+unfriendly deserts were made to repeat the polity of Eden, where all
+created things obeyed man.
+
+Wild asses, lions, stags, wolves, and fowls were the hermit’s domestic
+animals. Stags, harnessed to plow, cultivated the field of St. Leonor,
+and took the place of St. Colodoc’s cattle when these were driven away
+because he had sheltered a hunted deer. St. Helenus rode on the back
+of a crocodile. Dragons guarded the cell of Abbot Ammon. The lion from
+whose foot St. Gerasimus extracted a thorn protected his ass. St.
+Costinian saddled and rode a bear. St. Sulpicius tells of a she-wolf as
+tame as a dog and of a lioness under a palm tree that moved modestly
+aside at a hermit’s command until he had eaten his fill of dates.
+Swallows sang upon the knees of St. Guthlac.
+
+Not all of this, it may be, is the mere poetry of pious imaginations.
+After the breakdown of Roman civilization in the west, many of the
+oxen, horses, and dogs returned to the wild state, and what the
+hermits did in some cases was merely to recall them to their ancient
+allegiance. Here and there among so many thousands of solitaries, so
+Kingsley urges, were men such as become horse-tamers and bee-takers
+in settled communities, whose natures won them friends in the world
+of brutes. The very quietude of the hermits, their habit of silent
+meditation in field and forest, would disarm the fears of wild things
+and draw them toward companionship.
+
+
+_The Invasion of the Cathedrals_
+
+The church had yet another chapter to write in the story of the
+beasts, and this time they became hieroglyphs on the vast scroll of
+the cathedrals. The early significance of animals in the life of man
+was completely revived in the mediæval fanes, but as allegory rather
+than reality. Brute and fowl were created, it was thought, only to
+illustrate the truth of God’s word and to convey some spiritual
+message. Did not Job say, “Ask the beast and it will teach thee, and
+the birds of heaven and they will tell thee”? What they taught and
+told was set forth at large in the cathedral, which became in very
+fact a rebus carved in stone. With effects that were indescribably
+quaint, and beautiful at times, Christian symbolism wrought itself in
+ecclesiastical architecture in an age when few could read other writing.
+
+From Egypt, where cenobites were already in communion with desert
+creatures, the impulse came; and from India, where Buddhist ascetics
+were taught to pattern their humility from the ass that sleeps by the
+roadside, their aloofness from the rhinoceros that wanders alone. Its
+immediate source was the _Physiologus_, or Naturalist, the compilation
+by an Alexandrian Greek of what the ancient world reported of animals
+and plants, with moral reflections added. The compendium was translated
+into all of the languages of Europe and several African and Asiatic
+tongues, and, being in the vernacular, may have been for a time more
+widely read than the Bible itself. For the unlearned a source of
+pleasant stories and forerunner of the bestiaries, for the learned
+it was a theological treatise. Its subject-matter entered patristic
+writings and popular sermons and was at length transferred to stone.
+
+The vogue of animal symbolism in Christian churches covered half a
+millennium, was at its height in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
+was still alive at the Reformation, and left its marks in sacred
+vessels and ecclesiastical vestments as well as in sculpture. Façades,
+portals, buttresses, and gargoyles of church exteriors, and cloisters,
+chancels and chapels of interiors, were decorated with animal forms.
+As an emblem of priestly chastity, the elephant was embroidered on
+sacerdotal vestments. Lamps, censers, and sacramental vessels repeated
+the outline or carried the effigy of the griffin, the pelican, the
+dolphin. Sculptured lions ramped at cathedral doors, lizards peeped
+from crevices, and all about the sanctuary were the figures of foxes
+and ferrets, harts and hedgehogs, panthers and partridges, the whale,
+the crocodile, the tortoise, and a hundred other flying, walking,
+creeping, or swimming things.
+
+Though St. Bernard denounced this as “the foul and tattered vesture of
+pagan allegory,” every animal was a text, or was designed to be. The
+lion typified majesty, the ox patience, the ram spiritual leadership,
+the turtle-dove constancy, the skin-sloughing snake the repentant
+believer, the salamander the righteous who extinguish the flames of
+desire. The sun-staring, youth-renewing eagle was an admonition to
+those grown old in sin to face the day star of revelation. Ravens
+symbolized Jews who battened on the carrion of the Law. Sometimes
+virtues and vices were pictured as women riding animals or bearing
+animal devices--Humility on a panther, Chastity on a unicorn, Devotion
+on an ibex, Patience with a swan helmet, Love with a pelican shield,
+Lust with a siren-buckler.
+
+Animal symbolism had also its secular phases. Amorous troubadours
+likened themselves to flame-walled salamanders; or, disappointed in
+love, likened woman to the double-natured dragon and the hooting owl.
+By degrees the secular impulse invaded the churches. Animal sculptures
+were admitted as such and not as cipher characters of divine script;
+and satire, inspired or tolerated by the regular body of clergy, raided
+the sheepfold of allegory. This was directed against the preaching
+friars and the failings of the monastic orders, all the actors in
+the beast-epos of Reynard the fox entering the sanctuary as its
+auxiliaries. The animals overran windows, balustrades, cornices, and
+capitals; foxes were significantly depicted in palmer weeds; a stall
+in the cathedral at Amiens showed Reynard preaching to a flock of
+fowls and with pious gesture reaching for the nearest hen. Death, “the
+sarcastic and irreverent skeleton,” capered among the creatures in the
+dance macabre. At the outset an attack on religious abuses, the secular
+phase became in effect a lampoon of the very rites of the church.
+
+Among other figures that caricatured its principal ceremonies under
+its own roof, says Evans in his authoritative study of the period,
+were “apes in choristers’ robes, swine in monks’ hoods, asses in
+cowls chanting and playing the organ, sirens in the costume of nuns
+with their faces carefully veiled and the rest of their persons
+exposed, stags in chasubles ministering at the altar and wolves in the
+confessional giving absolution to lambs.” The ass, which the east had
+long celebrated for its devoted service and which has a high niche in
+biblical story, attained a place in the churches of the west which
+neither fact fully accounts for. There was thought to be some mystic
+relation between its anatomy and the architecture of a cathedral. In
+a catechism of the last century used in a French town it was recited
+among other details that the head of the ass signified the bell of the
+town cathedral, its paunch the poor-box and its tail the aspergill
+for sprinkling holy water. In the one-time popular Feast of the Ass,
+a living ass was led up the nave into the chancel, the chants were
+sung in a braying tone, and the officiating priest dismissed the
+congregation with a loud hee-haw.
+
+The ceremony has passed. Most of the beast figures have been removed
+from the cathedrals. Animal symbolism still lives, but more in letters
+than in stone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V. The Fabulous Beasts
+
+
+In the world that was, the fabulous animals that roved the land were
+creatures of unusual interest, though of limited number. More species
+were to be found in the deep. Thither, Pliny explains, fall the seeds
+from the innumerable figures of beasts impressed as constellations
+upon the heavens, and these seeds, being mixed together in the watery
+element, produce a variety of monstrous forms.
+
+With animal life abounding in the thickets and fields of the earth,
+and for every bird and beast a fable, there was less incentive to
+invent new species of them than there was to make stories of ghosts,
+dæmons and faeries, or of men with beast attributes or lineage or some
+quality of caricature in their anatomy. With the coming of heraldry
+the category of strange creatures is greatly enlarged, but the shapes
+added by blazonry do not purport to be living things and have no place
+in geography or in literature, save in massive volumes where the quaint
+designs and quainter jargon of a curious erudition are preserved.
+
+The ancient had naïve ideas about cross-breeding. Every unusual
+animal seemed a hybrid of two known species. These were produced in
+hot climates. Hence, says Pliny, arose the saying, common even in
+Greece, that “Africa is always producing something new.” The males and
+females of various species in that singular land, he thought, coupled
+promiscuously with each other, but not always with impunity. “The lion
+recognizes, by the peculiar odor of the pard, when the lioness has been
+unfaithful to him, and avenges himself with the greatest fury.”
+
+There was a belief, which lasted nearer to the present time, that the
+savage dogs of India, two of which would make no scruple of attacking
+the lion, had tigresses for their dams. Diodorus noted that eastern
+Arabia produced beasts of double nature and mixed shape, and he deemed
+it reasonable that “by the vivifying heat of the sun in southern parts
+of the world many sorts of wonderful creatures are there bred.” Among
+these he cites the crocodiles and river horses of Egypt. He strains
+a point in support of his theory in the account of what he calls the
+Struthocameli of Arabia, “who have the shape both of a camel and an
+ostrich.” He describes their bodies “big as a camel, newly foaled,”
+their small heads with large black eyes, their long necks, the “hairy
+feathers” on their wings, their strong thighs, and “cloven hoofs.”
+This creature, says the Sicilian geographer, “seems both terrestrial
+and volatile, a land beast and a bird”--after all, only an inexact yet
+graphic portrait of the ostrich. That this fowl is a cross between a
+camel and a bird is an Arab notion; according to Aristotle it is of an
+equivocal nature, part bird and part quadruped. So its Persian name
+signifies, and sacred writers liken its voice to the bellowing of a
+bull.
+
+Even the breezes take part in the creation of hybrids, so men have
+thought. That there is actual generative power in the wind is a belief
+older than the discovery of its function in carrying the fertilizing
+pollen of plants. Pliny records the popular belief that barren eggs are
+breeze-begotten; hence their name of Zephyria. The modern “wind-egg”
+for an egg without a shell laid by a fat hen, but supposed by Doctor
+Johnson not to contain the principle of life, comes from a similar
+notion. Male sheep are conceived when the northeast wind blows, and
+females when the south wind blows, according to the Romans. One of the
+heroic ballads of the Tartars personifies the wind as a foal which
+courses about the earth. The fable about Portuguese mares, widely
+credited by the ancients and roundly asserted by Pliny, is an echo
+of sailor reports on the fertility of Lusitania: “In the vicinity of
+Olisipo and the river Tagus, the mares, by turning their faces toward
+the west wind as it blows, become impregnated by its breezes, and the
+foals thus conceived are remarkable for their fleetness; but they never
+live beyond three years.”
+
+
+_The Unicorn_
+
+Best known animal of legend is the unicorn. There are two veritable
+unicorns, or animals with one horn--the rhinoceros and the narwhal.
+The accepted description of this animal gives it the narwhal’s straight
+and spirally twisted horn but none of the parts of the rhinoceros. It
+is pictured with the legs of a buck, the tail of a lion, and the head
+and body of a horse. Its markings suggest the zebra’s; its head is red,
+its body white, its eyes blue, while its horn is red at the tip, white
+at the base and black in between. The high authority of Aristotle has
+determined these points.
+
+The ancients mention five different animals as having one horn set in
+the middle of the forehead. The most famous of these were the Egyptian
+oryx and the Indian ass. Pliny says the oryx gazes at the Dog Star
+when it rises, and sneezes in a sort of worship. It has the stature
+of a bull, the form of a deer, and hair that sets forward instead
+of backward. The Indian ass is described by Ctesias as having the
+traditional shape and hues of the unicorn, solid hoofs, and a horn a
+cubit in length. Filings of this horn, if taken in a potion, are an
+antidote to poison. Drinking cups made from it give immunity also from
+epilepsy. The Indian ass is so fleet it can be seized only when it
+leads its foal to pasture. In defense of its young it uses its horn,
+teeth, and feet, killing horses and men. It is sought for the horn and
+huckle bones, the latter, Ctesias declares, “the most beautiful I have
+ever seen”; they are as heavy as lead, he says, and of the color of
+cinnabar.
+
+The third animal was the monoceros, on which the Orsæan Indians preyed.
+It had the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of
+the boar, while the rest of its body was horse-like. The single black
+horn projecting from the middle of its forehead was two cubits long. It
+lowed like a bull, was of ferocious nature, wandered alone, and could
+not be taken alive. The two other unicorns of ancient story were the
+single-horned horse and the single-horned ox.
+
+There was a second growth of the fable in the Middle Ages and the
+unicorn took on new dignities. It was the only animal that would
+attack the elephant, disembowelling the pachyderm with one blow of its
+sharp-nailed foot; and it charged the lion at sight. The king of beasts
+was constrained to kingly craft, dodging behind a tree. His assailant,
+says Topsell, “in the swiftness of his course runneth against the tree,
+wherein his sharp horn sticketh fast”; and the lion dispatches him at
+leisure. In his _Display of Heraldry_ (1724) Guillim says the unicorn
+is never taken alive because “the greatness of his mind is such rather
+to die.” Mediæval intelligence at last hit upon a characteristic device
+to secure this creature without slaying him, and the bestiaries of
+the time record it. This was to place a young virgin near his haunts.
+As soon as he saw her he would run to her and lie down at her feet,
+placing his head in her bosom, when the hunters could halter him.
+
+It was the alexipharmic virtues of the unicorn’s horn that most engaged
+the ages of faith, when the poisoning of princes was almost an article
+of statecraft. As late as 1789 it was used to test food at the court of
+France, and horns, usually of the narwhal, were in the royal museums.
+The ancients had made little of this. The reference of Ctesias to the
+horn of the Indian ass as an antidote for poison and a cure of the
+falling sickness stands alone. What was later made of this reputed
+power is shown in a passage from John of Herse, who pilgrimed to
+Jerusalem in 1389: “Near the field Helyon in the Holy Land is the river
+Mara, whose bitter waters Moses struck with his staff and made sweet,
+so that the children of Israel could drink thereof. Even now evil and
+unclean spirits poison it after the going down of the sun, but in the
+morning after the powers of darkness have disappeared, the unicorn
+comes from the sea and dips its horn into the stream, and thereby
+expels and neutralizes the poison, so that the other animals can drink
+of it during the day.”
+
+According to Guillim, it became “a general conceit that the wild beasts
+of the wilderness used not to drink of the pools, for fear of venomous
+serpents there breeding, until the unicorn hath stirred them with his
+horn.” Thus its office was that of water-conner for the other beasts of
+the forest.
+
+Cosmas Indicopleustes said he had seen the brazen statues of four
+unicorns set upon towers in the royal palace of Ethiopia. Frobisher
+found a dead “sea unicorne” on the Canadian coast with a broken horn
+two yards long. Into the hollow of the horn the sailors put spiders,
+where they presently died. In his second voyage (1564) Sir John Hawkins
+found the Florida Indians wearing pieces of the unicorn’s horn about
+their necks.
+
+The unicorn was celebrated in Christian symbolism before it found a
+permanent niche in heraldry. When Balaam blesses Israel he says, “God
+led him out of Egypt even as the glory of the unicorn.” According to
+the _Bestiare Divine de Guillaume Clerc de Normandie_, the animal
+represents Christ, and its horn signifies the Gospel of Truth. It
+became a favorite charge in Scottish heraldry and James I of England
+made it the sinister support in the arms of Great Britain, replacing
+the red dragon of Wales.
+
+Purchas the Pilgrim was always expecting news of the unicorn, hearing
+of it and doubting report. Browne avows his belief in the animal in a
+sardonic dissertation. Far from doubting its existence, he says, “we
+affirm there are many kinds thereof,” and he mentions the five classic
+animals, several fishes, and “four kinds of nasicornous beetles.” What
+he wants to know is which one possesses the alexipharmic horn. He
+complains that the animal is not uniformly described: “Pliny affirmeth
+it is a fierce, terrible creature; Vartomannus, a tame and mansuete
+animal; those which Garcias ab Horto described about the Cape of Good
+Hope were beheld with heads like horses; those which Vartomannus beheld
+he described with the head of a deer: Pliny, Ælian, Solinus, and Paulus
+Venetus affirmeth the feet of the unicorn are undivided and like the
+elephant’s; but those two which Vartomannus beheld at Mecca were footed
+like a goat. As Ælian describeth, it is in the bigness of an horse; as
+Vartomannus, of a colt; that which Thevet speaketh of was not so big as
+an heifer; but Paulus Venetus affirmeth that they are but little less
+than elephants.”
+
+Browne proceeds remorselessly: The horns of the unicorn, as described
+by writers or preserved in collections, are too various. Some are red,
+some are black, and some have spiral markings, while “those two in the
+treasure of St. Mark are plain and best accord with those of the Indian
+ass.” Albertus Magnus describes one ten feet long, a narwhal’s, Browne
+suggests. Others are but fossil teeth and bones and petrified tree
+branches.
+
+Yet the tradition long survived Browne. His contemporary, the
+Portuguese Jesuit Lobo, said that in Abyssinia he had seen the unicorn,
+in shape like a beautiful bay horse with a black tail. He could give no
+minute account, for it ran with prodigious swiftness from wood to wood,
+and never fed save when surrounded by animals that protected it. “The
+unicorn really exists in Tibet,” Huc affirmed after traveling there in
+1846. At Kordofan, in 1848, a man, whose custom was to provide Baron
+Von Mueller with animal specimens, offered to sell him an _a’nasa_,
+which he described as of donkey size with a tail like a boar’s, and a
+single pendulous horn which it erected when it saw an enemy. In 1876
+Prejevalski gave an account of the _orongo_, a stag-like creature with
+two vertical horns, which he said was common in Tibet; according to
+natives there were a few single horned individuals among the herds.
+
+Every feature in the unicorn legend of the west has its counterpart
+in the Chinese books. Six species of unicorns are mentioned; one
+figures in the crest of the Mikado of Japan; another is sculptured in
+the avenue of animals that leads to the Ming tombs north of Peking.
+Another, and the best known, the _ki-lin_, appeared only in the reign
+of upright monarchs. It was called a spiritual beast, chief of the
+360 kinds of hairy creatures. Its pace was regular, it ambled only on
+selected grounds, and its voice was like a monastery bell. So softly it
+trod that it left no footprints and crushed no living thing.
+
+All a moon myth, says one ingenious writer. But Gould declares, “I
+find it impossible to believe that a creature whose existence has been
+affirmed by so many authors, at so many different dates, and from so
+many countries, can be the symbol of a myth.” He thinks it either a
+hybrid occasionally produced by the crossing of the equine and bovine
+families, or else the generic name for extinct missing links between
+horses, cattle, and deer.
+
+Whence the world’s long belief in the unicorn? Was there such an
+animal, now extinct? Cuvier returns an emphatic negative: “The nations
+of modern days have only been able to drive back the noxious animals
+in the deserts, but have never yet suceeded in exterminating a single
+species.” He goes further: there could never have been a cloven-footed
+ruminant with a single horn, because its frontal bone must have been
+divided, and no horn could have been placed on the suture.
+
+Ctesias may have woven some rhinoceros details into his picture of the
+so-called Indian ass. The Egyptian unicorn was called an oryx--a word
+perhaps related to the Sanscrit and Teutonic aurochs. There is a large
+African antelope the modern name of which is oryx. It is probable that
+the correct name has been retained, and that the oryx, or gemsbok, of
+to-day, is the unicorn of Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, Lampridius, et al.
+But the real oryx has two horns, while the fabled animal had but one
+because the Egyptians did not understand perspective in drawing.
+
+
+_The Griffin_
+
+Greek and Persepolitan griffins are curiously alike, and both may
+have derived from the winged lion of the Assyrians, emblem of the
+god Nergal. Griffin lore, however, is rich in details which have no
+religious significance. Herodotus speaks of the animal as guarding the
+gold of the one-eyed Arimaspians in Asia north of the Altai Mountains.
+Ctesias places it in the mountain barrier of India.
+
+According to Ælian the griffin was a winged and feathered lion with
+an eagle’s head and a color scheme that suggests the German imperial
+flag--the breast plumage red, the wings white, and the dorsal plumage
+black; “a mixed and dubious animal,” Browne calls it. Ctesias says it
+had also blue neck feathers and red eyes. He describes the species as
+a race of four-footed birds the size of wolves, but Maundeville says
+they were as large and strong as eight lions and could carry to their
+nests “a great Horse, or two Oxen yoked together as they go to the
+Plough.” Of their talons the Indians made drinking cups. The griffins
+built their nests like the eagle, but laid therein agates instead of
+eggs. The Bactrians said that these birds dug gold out of the mountains
+and made their nests therewith, and the Indians carried off so much of
+it as falls to the ground. The Indians denied that the griffins were
+watchmen for the gold of their district or had any use for it; they
+said that when the birds see them coming to gather gold, they fear the
+intruders are after their young and assail them. Also they attack all
+other beasts and prevail over them, save only the lion and the elephant.
+
+Fearful of their vengeance, the natives go not out to gather gold
+in the daytime, say the chroniclers, but under cover of night make
+their raids into a frightful desert where griffin and gold are found
+together. Companies of one thousand or even two thousand men set out,
+equipped with mattocks and sacks. The expeditions take from three to
+four years, for this region lies afar. If successful, the members
+return wealthy; but should they be detected in the act of theft, says
+Ælian, certain death would be their fate.
+
+There are four explanations of this four-footed bird of classic
+legend and Welsh heraldry--that the winged Assyrian lion was taken
+for a portrait instead of a symbol; that the Samoyeds mistook mammoth
+bones in the gold-bearing district of the Ural Mountains for remains
+of monster fowls; that the griffins were merely Tibetan mastiffs of
+singular ferocity and reputed tigrine decent, and that they are an
+early form of the dragon. The so-called griffin’s claws in the museums
+of Dresden and Vienna and in the churches elsewhere are horns of the
+Caffrarian buffalo. Drinking cups made of them were used in treating
+epilepsy.
+
+
+_The Hippogrif_
+
+It would be vain to seek among animals the original of the hippogrif,
+a creature related to the griffin, though of more involved lineage,
+and like it treated sometimes as a bird, sometimes as a beast. The
+hippogrif is a product of mediæval romance, and wings its way as the
+courser of more than mortal knights over countries of fable, albeit
+they bear such names as Brittany, Abyssinia, Circassia, and Cathay.
+As the griffin was called a hybrid between the lion and the eagle, so
+the hippogrif was supposed to be a hybrid between the griffin and the
+horse. It had the head, wings, and fore claws of the griffin and the
+body, hind hoofs and tail of the horse. Its habitat was the Riphæan
+Mountains, source of the north wind. The hippogrif enters the Orlando
+cycle as the mount of an enchanter with a castle on the Pyrenees, but
+later serves the far adventures of the paladins of Charlemagne.
+
+
+_The Monster Rat_
+
+The Samoyeds and Chinese who found in the river banks of the north the
+frozen bodies of mammoths, with skin and flesh intact as if they had
+died but yesterday, reached the strange yet natural conclusion that
+this was a kind of monstrous burrowing rat. It figures in Chinese books
+as _fen-shu_, the “digging rat,” or _yen-men_, the “burrowing ox.” Why
+was it always dead when men came upon it? Because air and sunshine were
+both fatal to it; evidently in its wanderings underground it had broken
+the crust above it and died in the daylight. Sometimes the Yakuts saw
+the earth tremble and knew this great rat walked beneath. “There is got
+from it,” says the _Chinese Encyclopedia_, “an ivory as white as that
+of the elephant, but easier to work, and not liable to split. Its flesh
+is very cold and excellent for refreshing the blood.”
+
+
+_The Martikhora_
+
+In the jungles of Ind roved the martikhora--a creature with unpleasant
+affinities to men, the great cats, and the serpents. Its face was
+like a man’s with pale blue eyes and human ears but with three rows
+of teeth. Its body was as big as the lion’s and in color red like
+cinnabar. It had a tail like the scorpion’s and more than a cubit long.
+The martikhora, indeed, was a sort of anticipation of the machine gun,
+for it had one sting at the end of its tail, two at the roots of this
+member, and a fourth on the crown of its head; and these it projected
+to the distance of a hundred feet. The missiles, which were about a
+foot long and no thicker than fine thread, were fatal to every animal
+save the elephants. The natives, says Ctesias, hunted it from the backs
+of elephants. The name of the animal means man-eater, so-called because
+the beast carried off men and women. Its size, also, and general
+description, and the manner of hunting it all suggest the tiger as
+fearful Indians might report it. To this day the Cambodians think the
+whiskers of the tiger are a strong poison. The Malays call it a demon
+in beast form and speak of its Village where the houses are raftered
+with men’s bones and thatched with human hair.
+
+In heraldry the martikhora is called the montegre, manticora, or
+man-tyger, and is pictured with the body of a lion, the head of an old
+man, the horns of an ox, and sometimes with dragon feet.
+
+
+_The Scythian Lamb_
+
+To match the barnacle goose which came from a nut, the ages of faith
+had the Scythian lamb which grew in a gourd. Maundeville has the best
+account, for did he not make a meal of one? The creature is found in “a
+kingdom that men call Caldilhe,” one of “the Countries and Isles that
+be beyond the Land of Cathay.” In this country “there groweth a manner
+of Fruit, as though it were Gourds. And when they be ripe, men cut them
+in two, and Men find within a little Beast in Flesh and Bone and Blood,
+as though it were a little Lamb without Wool. And men eat both the
+Fruit and the Beast. And that is a great Marvel.”
+
+Friar Odoric makes a similar report. In other stories the Scythian
+lamb is a true animal attached to the earth by its umbilical cord. The
+Scythian lamb of botany is a woolly fern (_Cibotium barometz_) with a
+prostrate stem turned upside down. It is also called vegetable lamb
+and Tartarian lamb. In his _Travels into Muscovy and Persia_ (1636)
+the ambassador from the Duke of Holstein describes it as a gourd like
+unto a lamb in all its members and with the lamb’s sacrificial relation
+to the wolf. It grows wild in the district of Samara, in Russia, and
+its growing is a kind of destructive browsing. “It changes places in
+growing, as far as the stalk will reach, and wherever it turns the
+grass withers, which the Muscovites call feeding.” When all available
+grass fails, it dies. The rind of the gourd is covered with a sort of
+hair, which makes a good substitute for fur. The natives showed the
+traveler certain skins, covered with a soft frizzled wool “not unlike
+that of a lamb newly weaned”--vegetable lamb, they affirmed. Scaliger
+declares that alone among animals the wolf feeds on this gourd and that
+wolf traps are baited with it.
+
+[Illustration: _In Caldilhe There Groweth a Manner of Fruit, and Men
+Find Within a Little Beast as Though It Were a Lamb Without Wool_]
+
+Erasmus Darwin has these lines upon the Scythian lamb in his _Botanic
+Garden_:
+
+  /*
+  Rooted in earth each cloven hoof descends,
+  And round and round her flexible neck she bends;
+  Crops the gray coral moss and hoary thyme;
+  Or laps with rosy tongue the melting rime,
+  Eyes with mute tenderness her distant dam,
+  And seems to bleat, a Vegetable Lamb.
+
+So until 1915 stood the fable--seemingly just a tale of the credulous
+Middle Age, rationalized by later science and gently derided in still
+later rhyme. Then the scholarship of Berthold Laufer, basing itself
+mainly upon Chinese texts, gave it long backgrounds. The Scythian lamb
+has been in turn a mollusk, a marine sheep, a bird, the cotton-plant, a
+strange half-human creature and--this part is surmise--an allegory of
+the early Christian Church, the Lamb of Revelation that “stood on the
+mount Sion.”
+
+Unto this day fabrics are made of the undyed fleece of the true
+Scythian lamb. Byssus silk is the name it bears in commerce, and
+Taranto is the seat of its manufacture. The silk is derived from the
+fibrous foot by which mollusks of the species called the pinna, found
+in the waters about southern Italy, attach themselves to rocks. The
+original Scythian lamb was this mollusk and its umbilical cord was
+the byssus, or foot, which anchored it. The genesis of the legend
+seems to be a statement of Aristotle that these creatures have within
+them a parasite, a small crab, nicknamed the “pinna-guard” which in
+gathering its own food collects fishes also for its blind, stationary,
+and helpless host. Without the pinna-guard, says Aristotle, the mollusk
+soon dies; and he cites the latter to illustrate his observation that
+in the sea “there are certain objects concerning which one would be
+at loss to determine whether they be animal or vegetable.” After
+Aristotle’s time, and in the first centuries of the Christian era,
+byssus fabrics, which may have been a by-product of pearl fisheries in
+the Persian Gulf, appeared in the Mediterranean countries.
+
+Here, then, is an animal living within what passed for a vegetable
+that was “rooted in earth,” and that produced a substance later known
+as marine wool. But how did the Adriatic mollusk and its tenant crab
+become a lamb-tenanted gourd, or a veritable sheep attached to the soil
+by a fleshy stem, in the plains of Asiatic Scythia? And how did this
+tiny partnership of the sea floor become in turn a phœnix-like creature
+of the air and the grisly Yedua, man-monster of Talmudic legend?
+The process illustrates the part that travel tale, the carrying of
+confused reports from place to place, has in creating myth. Though the
+fable grew up in the Roman Orient and reached China only through such
+reports, the superior historical sense of the Chinese has made their
+annals the key to its meaning.
+
+The first Chinese record in point, not later than A. D. 220, speaks
+of a fine cloth in the Roman Orient “said by some to originate from
+the down of a water sheep.” This may be inference from the almost
+contemporary phrase of Alciphron, the Greek sophist, who calls byssus
+textiles “woolen stuffs out of the sea.” In the sixth century Procopius
+recites that each of the five hereditary satraps of Armenia had from
+the Roman emperor a golden-hued cloak made from “wool gathered out of
+the sea.” In an account by the Arab Istakhri, written about A.D. 950,
+it is said that an animal runs out of the sea and rubs itself against
+the rocks, “whereupon it deposes a kind of wool of silken texture and
+golden color.” Robes of this, worn by the Ommiad princes at Cordova,
+were valued at a thousand gold pieces each.
+
+By etymological error and a device of ancient trade, the mollusk, which
+had already become a water sheep, got itself wings. Pinna, its name, is
+also the classic Latin word for “feather,” an ambiguity which may have
+confused the Arabs; and the filaments of the shellfish are rather like
+the plumage of fowls. Byssus weaves were held at so high a price that
+they were counterfeited in feather fabrics, and to promote their sale
+the discovery of a wonderful bird was at length announced. The Arab,
+Kazwini, calls it _abu baraquish_ and pictures it as like the stork;
+but “every hour its plumage glitters in another color, red, yellow,
+green and blue.” The fabric from its plumage is named “phœnix-feather
+gold” in a Chinese work of the Mongol period. Skilled artisans, it is
+related, weave a soft golden brocade from the neck feathers of the
+phœnix, which in the spring drop to the foot of the mountains. These
+were probably the feathered headskins of peacocks, which in China are
+still made into jackets.
+
+When the _Annals_ of the T’ang Dynasty (618-906) were compiled, the
+water sheep had become a land animal of Syria, or Fu-lin as that
+country was called. Here is the Chinese account: “There are lambs
+engendered in the soil. The inhabitants wait till they are going to
+sprout, then build enclosures around as a preventive measure for wild
+beasts that might rush in from outside and devour them. The umbilical
+cord of the lambs is attached to the soil, and when forcibly cut off
+they will die. The people, donning cuirasses and mounted on horseback,
+beat drums to frighten them. The lambs shriek from fear and thus their
+umbilical cord is ruptured. Thereupon they set out in search of water
+and pasture.”
+
+It was part of the tradition of the marine sheep that it yielded its
+fleece of its own accord, and this was carried over into the later
+Chinese story that the Scythian or Syrian lamb must itself rupture the
+umbilical cord, which others could not sever without killing it. The
+appearance of men in armor to frighten it to this end is elucidated
+by a passage from the thirteenth-century Arab traveler, Abul Abbas.
+After the pinna comes ashore and lets its wool escape, he records, it
+is pounced upon by large crabs. In the Chinese story, these crabs have
+become men on horseback and their shells are the cuirasses worn by the
+horsemen.
+
+A debased version of the same story appears in the Mongol period when
+a thirteenth-century Chinese traveler describes the “sheep planted on
+hillocks” in the countries of the western sea. The umbilical cord of a
+sheep is planted and watered. At the time of the first thunder peals it
+begins to grow. When matured, the creature is frightened by the sound
+of wooden instruments and, breaking off the cord that attaches it to
+the ground, roams about in search of herbage. This was the tale Odoric
+and Maundeville heard; that the lamb was inclosed in a gourd may have
+been their own invention, or the report of some early attempt to relate
+it to the cotton pod, which about a generation ago was conjectured to
+be the basis of the fable.
+
+“Creatures called Lords of the Field are regarded as beasts,” says
+the Talmud. The same creature is also called the Man of the Mountain.
+“It draws its food out of the soil by means of the umbilical cord; if
+its navel be cut, it cannot live,” says Simeon a thirteenth-century
+rabbi. In the detailed portrait by Rabbi Meir the timid vegetable lamb
+undergoes a wolfish transformation: “There is an animal styled Yedua,
+with the bones of which witchcraft is practiced. It issues from the
+earth like the stem of a plant, just as a gourd. In all respects the
+Yedua has human form in face, body, hands, and feet. No creature can
+approach within the tether of the stem, for it seizes and kills all. As
+far as the stem stretches, it devours the herbage all around. Whoever
+is intent on capturing this animal must not approach it, but tear at
+the cord until it is ruptured, whereupon the animal soon dies.”
+
+Laufer thinks that the Jewish legend is early Christian allegory
+misunderstood; that the Man of the Mountain is “the lamb that stood on
+the mount Sion,” a symbol of the Church itself the followers of which
+are attached to the earth by sensual pleasures; and that the mounted
+horsemen of the Chinese version, who cause the lambs to break their
+connection with the earth, may be the two hundred thousand horsemen of
+Revelation that symbolize the Last Judgment.
+
+
+_Gold-guarding Ants_
+
+Bits of turquoise, chips of obsidian arrow heads, and fragments of
+prehistoric jewelry are found in the little heaps of earth which ants
+bring up from underground on the sites of vanished cities in New
+Mexico. On the Pajarito plateau ant-gold is not unknown. Ant-gold is
+the theme of one of the most circumstantial and puzzling stories told
+by ancient travelers. Herodotus lays its scene somewhere near Cabul.
+The Indians of that district send forth men in search of gold into a
+sandy desert “where live great ants in size somewhat less than dogs,
+but bigger than foxes.” A number of these were caught by hunters and
+sent to the Persian king. The ants live underground and, “like the
+Greek ants, which they very much resemble in shape, throw up sand-heaps
+as they burrow.”
+
+There is gold in the sand, but the ants are formidable enemies and
+fleet in pursuit. So the Indians harness a female camel between two
+males, and the female is one that has lately dropped a foal. The inroad
+is timed so that the caravans arrive when the sun is hottest and the
+ants are hiding from the heat. Herodotus continues:
+
+“The Indians fill their bags with the sand and ride away at full speed;
+the ants, however, scenting them, as the Persians say, rush forth in
+pursuit. Now these animals are so swift, they declare, that there
+is nothing in the world like them; if it were not, therefore, that
+the Indians get a start while the ants are mustering, not a single
+gold-gatherer could escape. During the flight the male camels grow
+tired and begin to drag; but the females recollect the young which they
+have left behind, and never flag. Thus, say the Persians, the Indians
+get most of their gold.”
+
+In substance the story is repeated in the letter which Prester John
+sent to the Pope in the twelfth century. The “emmet valley” also
+appears in the _Arabian Nights_. Megasthenes said that the plain
+tenanted by the monster ants is three thousand stadiæ in circumference
+and lies eastward in the mountains in the kingdom of the Dardæ. In
+winter the ants dig holes and pile the auriferous earth in heaps at the
+pit mouths. Pliny declares the ants are of the color of cats and the
+size of Egyptian wolves; that they work in winter and are despoiled
+in summer. “The horns of the Indian ant,” he remarks, “fixed up in
+the temple of Hercules at Erythræ were objects of great wonderment.”
+Nearchus, admiral of Alexander, reports having seen skins of these
+ants as large as leopard skins. Ctesias speaks in his _Persica_ of a
+horse-pismire which was fed by the magi and became of such monstrous
+size that it took two pounds of meat a day to victual it. As late as
+the sixteenth century there is a story by Busbequius that the Shah of
+Persia sent one of the Indian ants as a present to Sultan Soliman at
+Constantinople. Maundeville transfers the whole scene to Taprobane
+(Ceylon) and varies the incidents: Men do not enter ant-land but send
+thither mares to which empty vessels are suspended. “It is Pismire
+nature that they let nothing be empty among them, but anon they fill
+it, and so they fill those Vessels with Gold.” When the foals neigh in
+the distance their dams return to them with a golden burden.
+
+What were these ants, and whence the fable?
+
+It will be noted that the griffins were cast in a similar rôle in
+another Indian gold quest. It may be accepted that good-sized animals,
+or the skins of animals, were seen in menageries, museums, and temples,
+and identified with the ant custodians of the Scythian metal. It
+has been suggested that these were some other burrowing animal--the
+anteater, or the marmot; but neither is fleet of foot. M. de Weltheim
+thought the Herodotoan ant might be the corsac, a small Asiatic fox.
+
+Philology has a word to offer. The gold collected on the plains of
+Little Tibet is popularly known as _pippilika_, or “ant gold,” from
+the belief that ants bring it up, or bare the veins which carry it.
+McCrindle asserts that the gold-diggers were neither ants nor other
+animals, but “Tibetan miners, who, like their descendants of the
+present day, preferred working their mines in winter when the frozen
+ground stands well and is not likely to trouble them by falling
+in.” Thus the raid and retreat would be accomplished with the same
+expedition with which any tribe would make a sudden foray on another
+tribe equipped with equal ordnance and cavalry. Metaphor still speaks
+of the miner as a mole or a human ant.
+
+
+_The Questing Beast_
+
+In _Le Morte d’Arthur_, Malory describes a singular animal with an
+economy of phrase that whets curiosity. Arthur had had a heavy dream
+of griffins and serpents that devoured his land, and to put it out of
+his mind he went a-hunting. And he followed a white hart until his
+horse fell dead under him and his quarry was embushed. “He set him down
+by a fountain, and there he fell in great thoughts. And as he sat him
+so, him thought he heard a noise of hounds, to the sum of thirty. And
+with that the king saw coming toward him the strangest beast that ever
+he saw or heard of; so the beast went to the well and drank, and the
+noise was in the beast’s belly like unto the questyng of thirty couple
+hounds; but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in the
+beast’s belly; and therewith the beast departed with a great noise,
+whereof the king had great marvel.”
+
+Followed a knight hight Pellinore, and sought to borrow the king’s
+horse to pursue this animal, and the king would have taken over his
+quest for a twelvemonth, but he would not. After Pellinore’s death it
+is Palomides that rides across the pages of romance, well in the rear
+of the questing beast.
+
+
+_The Beasts of Revelation_
+
+The beasts of Revelation were but symbols; yet they moved like
+realities through the imagery of the Church, and, undergoing a sea
+change, appeared alive in the distant Atlantic Islands of Irish epic.
+St. John beheld the shapes of locusts like unto horses prepared for
+battle; “and their faces were as the faces of men, and they had hair as
+the hair of women, and they had tails like unto scorpions.” He saw also
+a beast coming up out of the earth; “and he had two horns like a lamb,
+and he spake as a dragon.” Above all, John saw the beast that came up
+out of the sea, a leopard with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a
+lion, and with the dragon’s authority; and the beast had seven heads
+and ten horns, “and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” The Whore of
+Babylon rode this beast--composite of seven mountains and ten kings,
+the text explains--to world power and to downfall; and rode on into
+literature, and an unending controversy.
+
+
+_American Contributions_
+
+Animal elders are America’s main contribution to the collection
+of fabulous beasts. The Indian believed that every species had a
+giant ancestor like itself in form, but with supernatural powers to
+protect it. Hunters who killed more animals than they needed for food
+felt the vengeance of the elder beasts. The latter gave a tribe its
+medicine, and themselves became totems. They are sometimes represented
+as in human form and living in stately lodges. The Pacific coast of
+South America has also stories of a house-haunting ram, a repulsive
+tree-dweller, a water-monster resembling a distended cowskin, and a
+creature with the head of a heifer and the body of a sheep.
+
+According to members of the Forest Service, American lumberjacks have
+their own mythology. Product of camp-fire chaff and a whimsical humor,
+the creatures that people it are noted here only because, both in name
+and in nature, they illustrate the traditional instinct for composites
+that elsewhere has wrought to more serious ends. They include the
+tote-road shagamaw, with the head of a lion, the forepaws of a bear
+and the hind legs of a moose; the splinter cat, which crushes hollow
+trees in search of raccoons; the hugag, with buffalo body and jointless
+legs, which sleeps leaning against a tree; the sausage-like wapaloosie,
+which lives on fungi; the billdad, which kills fish with its tail; the
+gumberoo, which explodes when it gets too near a fire; the snoligoster,
+a spiked and legless crocodile, and the lachrymose squonk. A common
+human figure in these tales is the grotesque giant, Paul Bunyan.
+
+
+_The Prodigies of Heraldry_
+
+In the later totemism, which is called heraldry, the following fabulous
+creatures with human, animal, or bird attributes, or an admixture of
+all of these, were represented on crests and coats of arms: allerion,
+chimera, cockatrice, dragon, griffin, harpy, hydra, lyon-dragon,
+lyon-poisson, mermaid, montygre, martlet, opinicus, pegasus, sphinx,
+sagittary, satyr, tarask, tityrus, unicorn, wyvern, winged lyon, winged
+bull.
+
+Several of these are noted elsewhere in this study, and a word will
+serve for the rest. The allerion is an eagle without beak or claws. The
+chimera, says Bossewell, is “a beast or monstre having thre heades,
+one like a Lyon, an other like a Goate, the third like a Dragon.” The
+hydra is a seven- or nine-headed water serpent. The lyon-dragon is
+a composite of a lion and a dragon, and the lyon-poisson of a lion
+and a fish. The martlet is a swallow without feet. The opinicus is a
+composite of camel, dragon, and lion. The pegasus is a winged horse.
+The sphinx is a figure with a woman’s head and breasts, a lion’s body,
+and usually eagle’s wings. The sagittary is the centaur of antiquity
+with the head, arms, and body of a man from the waist up, united to
+the body and legs of a horse. The heraldic satyr has a human face, a
+leonine body, and the horns and tail of an antelope. The tarask is a
+dragon-basilisk on the shield of Tarascon. “The tityrus is ingendred
+between a sheep and a buck-goat,” says Guillim. The wyvern is a
+serpentine dragon with a long tail and only two legs. The winged lyon
+is an achievement of Venice, the winged bull a memory of Assyria.
+
+Other heraldic creatures, not so well authenticated, are mentioned
+by Randle Holme in his _Academy of Armory_. These include the
+ass-bittern, the cat-fish, the devil-fish, the dragon-tyger, the
+dragon-wolf, the falcon-fish with a hound’s ear, the friar-fish, the
+lamya, compounded of a woman, a dragon, a lion, a goat, a dog, and a
+horse; the lyon-wyvern, the minocane or homocane, half child and half
+spaniel dog; the ram-eagle, the winged satyr-fish, and the wonderful
+pig of the ocean.
+
+The menagerie of blazonry has been enlarged by representing nearly
+all of the animals at times with fish-tails, when they are said to be
+marined. The zodiacal sign of the capricorn, shown as half goat and
+half fish, is a familiar example. Sometimes the sea-horse is drawn as
+an enlarged hippocampus, sometimes with the forequarters of a horse and
+a fish tail. Griffins and unicorns are marined in German heraldry.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI. Fable upon Wings
+
+
+For the most part the winged creatures of fable are exiles from
+mythologies broken down or forgotten. They are imperfect and confused
+embodiments of the phenomena of the heavens. In them one sees, what the
+men who repeated stories about them did not see, the diurnal journeys
+of the sun into the west, the shadowing storm-cloud, the lightning
+flash, the fury of evil winds, the hail, and the snow. But the poetry
+of the air, of which these creatures are the flying shreds, is weighted
+with terrestrial prose. Extinct birds of colossal size, prehistoric
+winged reptiles, and the bones of fossil mammals are reflected in
+the shapes of cloudland. Few of the creatures that hover there can
+be called fowls at all; their wings carry bodies that belong upon
+the earth. Thus Pliny, in one of the most flagrant of his carelessly
+credulous passages, makes the casual statement that Ethiopia produces
+“horses with wings, and armed with horns, which are called pegasi.”
+Because of its human affinities the dragon must be considered by itself.
+
+
+_The Phœnix_
+
+Of the phœnix, a true fowl of legend and its most renowned, Maundeville
+has a vivacious picture. This bird, he says, “is not much more big than
+an Eagle, but he hath a Crest of Feathers upon his Head more great than
+the Peacock hath; and his Neck is yellow after the Colour of an Oriel
+that is a fine shining Stone; and his Beak is coloured blue as Azure;
+and his wings be of purple Colour, and the Tail is yellow and red, cast
+in streaks across his Tail. And he is a full fair Bird to look upon,
+against the Sun, for he shineth full gloriously and nobly.”
+
+Other men were not so sure about the phœnix. Herodotus said he had
+never seen it and Pliny declared he was “not quite certain that its
+existence is not all a fable.” Herodotus, however, had seen its
+picture, and the Maundeville account is copied from him.
+
+The bird was Arabian, its legend Egyptian. It was said that there
+was only one phœnix in the world, and that it appeared at very long
+intervals. The Roman Senator, Manlius, wrote that no person had seen
+it eat since its food was air, that in Arabia it was sacred to the
+sun, and that its lifetime was five hundred and forty years. When
+stricken with age it built a nest of cassia and sprigs of frankincense
+and lay down to die; from its bones and marrow issued a worm which in
+time changed into a small bird. The first duty of the new bird was to
+perform the obsequies of its predecessor, and carry the nest containing
+its myrrh-swathed remains to the City of the Sun in Egypt, placing it
+upon the altar of that divinity.
+
+According to the more familiar account, when the phœnix is full of
+years it flies to Heliopolis, sings its own dirge there, flaps its
+wings to fan the funeral pyre, and presently is utterly consumed; the
+next day emerges the new bird, fully feathered; and on the third day,
+its wings well grown, it salutes the priest and returns to the East.
+Still another account has it that in its old age the bird casts itself
+on the ground, receiving a mortal wound, and the new bird issues from
+the ichor.
+
+In the censorship of the Emperor Claudius what purported to be a phœnix
+was brought to Rome and exhibited in the Comitium, but it was adjudged
+an imposture. Plutarch ventures the daring statement that “the brain of
+the phœnix is a pleasant bit, but that it causeth the headache.” He may
+have meant the golden pheasant, or even wine from cocoanuts, but it is
+said that Heliogabalus made a fruitless attempt to secure this unique
+tidbit for his table.
+
+Popular art reflects the phœnix legend, metaphor still more. It is
+the favorite symbol of self-regeneration. The burned city, the ruined
+country or cause, “rises like the phœnix from its own ashes.” Jesus,
+whose death coincided with one of the reported flights of the fowl to
+Egypt, was called the Phœnix by monastic writers, and St. Clement of
+Alexandria cites the fowl as proof that the dead will rise again. Its
+effigy was taken over from the pagan urn by the Christian sarcophagus.
+Browne, however, thought that the notion of a solitary phœnix was
+repugnant to Scripture, “because it infringeth the benediction of
+God concerning multiplication.” At one time its image hung before
+chemists’ shops because of its association with alchemy. Sometimes the
+Arabs confused it with the salamander and pictured the latter as a bird.
+
+The relation of the phœnix to astronomical reckoning gives a clue to
+the legend. It reappeared, according to some authors, at intervals of
+250, 500, 654, 1,000, 1,461 or even of 7,006 years, but the accepted
+Phœnix Period or Cycle was 540 years, and Egypt reports having seen the
+fowl five times, the first in the reign of Sesostris, and the last time
+in A.D. 334. This relates the appearances of the phœnix to the Great
+Year, which Hardouin says is 532 years.
+
+It was an ancient belief that the same aspect of heaven and order
+of the stars that had prevailed when the world began recurred
+every 532 years, and that at one of these periods, with all the
+planets in conjunction or all the stars returned to the same point
+in the ecliptic, the world would be destroyed; or else that it
+would perish and revive again to go through the same sequence of
+celestial phenomena. The phœnix, self-regenerating, sun-dedicated,
+westward-winging, arrayed in the gold and purple of dawn and twilight,
+seems to be an obscure form of the sun myth; and this inference is
+strengthened by the fact that at Heliopolis a bird called the bennu
+was a symbol of the Egyptians for the rising sun. It was a heron which
+“created itself” and rose in a “fragrant flame” over a sacred tree.
+Bennu in Egyptian and phœnix in Greek are the same word, and signify
+the palm tree.
+
+
+_The Fung-wang_
+
+There was a Chinese phœnix called the fung-wang which at long intervals
+and only in the reigns of upright monarchs emerged from the deserts.
+Six feet high, with plumage reflecting the five colors that the Chinese
+recognized--red, white, yellow, azure, and black--it was something
+like an immense bird of paradise. It was called the chief of the three
+hundred and sixty kinds of birds, and classed with the dragon and the
+unicorn as a spiritual creature. On its poll appeared the Chinese
+character for uprightness, on its back that for humanity, while its
+wings enfolded the character for integrity. Its low notes were bell
+tones, and its high like those of a drum. When you play the flute,
+in nine cases out of ten the fung-wang comes to hear, says the _Shu
+King_. It frequented only groves and gardens and would not peck living
+grass. The _Bamboo Books_ record its visits as far back as 2647 B.C.
+The emperor in whose reign it first showed itself recast his cabinet so
+that officers bore the names of birds, and the Minister of the Calendar
+was called the Phœnix. “Another example of an interesting and beautiful
+species of bird which has become extinct within historic times,” rashly
+concludes Gould.
+
+
+_Flying Serpents of Araby_
+
+Another winged creature besides the phœnix sought to go out of Arabia
+into Egypt, but its passage was opposed. This was the flying serpent.
+Herodotus says he went to “a certain place in Arabia” to ask about
+it. He saw the backbones and ribs of these reptiles in inconceivable
+number, piled in a gorge, and learned why they got no further. They
+are met in this place by “the birds called ibises, who forbid their
+entrance and destroy them all.” Hence the Egyptians hold the ibis in
+reverence.
+
+Josephus uses the incident as basis of a story about Moses that is not
+in the Pentateuch. The Ethiopians had successfully invaded the land of
+Egypt, and an oracle advised the defenders to choose for their general
+Moses the Hebrew. His choice pleased the scribes of both nations--the
+Egyptian because they apprehended that Moses would be slain, and the
+Jewish because they expected that he would be the instrument of their
+deliverance. The line of march lay through the country of winged
+serpents, powerful and mischievous creatures that came out of the
+ground unseen or fell upon men from the air. But Moses “made baskets
+like unto arks of sedges, and filled them with ibes, and carried them
+along with him, which animals are the greatest enemies to serpents
+imaginable, for these fly from them when they come near them, and as
+they fly they are caught and devoured.” So Moses passed on unscathed,
+and into the heart of an Ethiopian princess through whose aid her
+father’s forces were routed.
+
+After centuries of discussion the sacred ibis of the Egyptians was
+finally identified by the traveler Bruce with the bird the Abyssinians
+call Father John; but the winged serpents have not been satisfactorily
+explained. It has been suggested that what Herodotus saw in the Arabian
+gorge was the remains of a locust invasion--a difficult surmise,
+although Pliny reports that the legs and wings of grasshoppers three
+feet long were dried in the sun and used by the Indians for saws.
+
+
+_The Roc_
+
+The case for the roc--a creature unknown to either Greek or Roman
+legend--rests mainly upon three beguiling names of travel tale. These
+are Aladdin and Sindbad of the _Arabian Nights_, and Marco Polo of the
+_Diversities_. By the magic of his lamp Aladdin, the wayward gamin of a
+Chinese city, had won a princess and a palace; and he had poisoned the
+African magician who sought to use him as a tool and then to take the
+lamp from him. Bent on vengeance, the magician’s brother stabbed a holy
+woman with the very un-Chinese name of Fatima, disguised himself in her
+habiliments and won entrance into the palace of Aladdin and into the
+confidence of his princess. The latter asked the false Fatima what she
+thought of her residence, and this was the reply.
+
+“My opinion is that if a roc’s egg were hung up in the middle of the
+dome, this hall would have no parallel in the four quarters of the
+world, and your palace would be the wonder of the universe.”
+
+“My good mother,” said the princess, “what is a roc, and where may one
+get an egg?”
+
+“Princess,” replied the pretended Fatima, “it is a bird of prodigious
+size, which inhabits the summit of Mount Caucasus; the architect who
+built your palace can get you one.”
+
+The princess consulted Aladdin, and, retiring to his apartment, he
+rubbed the lamp; when a genie appeared, he bade him procure the roc’s
+egg. Whereupon the hall shook as if about to fall, and the genie
+exclaimed in a loud and terrible voice, “Is it not enough that I and
+the other slaves of the lamp have done everything for you, but you, by
+an unheard-of ingratitude, must command me to bring my master and hang
+him up in the midst of this dome? The attempt deserves that you, the
+princess, and the palace should be immediately reduced to ashes; but
+you are spared because this request does not come from yourself.” Then
+he told of the presence of a conspirator in the household. Aladdin’s
+killing of the latter is the final episode of the tale, the fortunate
+adventurer and his spouse soon mounting the throne of China.
+
+Sindbad encountered the parent bird on his second voyage, after he
+had been abandoned on an island; and first he saw its egg. He mistook
+the egg for a white dome of prodigious height and extent and found it
+fifty paces around and too smooth to climb to the top. All of a sudden
+the sky became dark as by a thick cloud and a huge bird came flying
+toward him. It alighted on the egg, and Sindbad, creeping close to the
+shell, tied himself by his turban to one of its legs, which was as big
+as the trunk of a tree. The next morning he hoped the roc would carry
+him away. Nor was his hope disappointed, and after an immense journey
+in the air--quite from Madagascar to India--the bird alighted in the
+Valley of Diamonds. There Sindbad disengaged himself, only to fall into
+other adventures.
+
+Marco Polo was the first veracious traveler to bring to the west a
+report of the roc, and he was careful to state that he did not see
+the bird; he only heard of it. The roc, he said, comes to Madagascar
+from the south. It resembles the eagle, but is so much larger that
+it can carry away an elephant. “Persons who have seen the bird,” he
+continues, “assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen
+paces [forty feet] from point to point, and that the feathers are eight
+paces [twenty feet] long and thick in proportion.” Messer Marco guessed
+that these creatures might be griffins, half birds and half lions, and
+particularly questioned those who claimed to have seen them. No, was
+the reply, they were fowls altogether. Kublai Khan sent messengers to
+Madagascar to confirm the story. They brought back, as Marco heard,
+“a feather of the roc positively affirmed to have measured ninety
+spans, and the quill part to have been two palms in circumference.” The
+delighted khan sent valuable gifts.
+
+Two centuries afterward the roc reappears in the narrative of Father
+Joano dos Santos, a Portuguese Dominican friar traveling in eastern
+Ethiopia. He tells of a fellow Portuguese faring inland in Madagascar
+to purchase ivory, and leading a large monkey on a chain. This he
+fastened to the trunk of a tree and lay down to rest; a monstrous bird
+snatched up both the monkey and the tree and flew away. The Shoshones
+have a story of an owl which carries men away to its island larder.
+Mewan legend speaks of the cannibal bird Yel-lo-kin with wings like
+pine trees which snatched children by the top of the head and bore them
+through the hole in the middle of the sky to its nest on the other side.
+
+While the roc belongs to nature myth, matter-of-fact has a word to
+say. The extinct dodo is recalled, which, however, could not fly. The
+feather brought to Kublai, and the monstrous stump of a roc’s quill
+which it is said was brought to Spain by a merchant from the China
+seas, may have been taken from a species of palm growing in Madagascar
+which has quill-like fronds. Southern Madagascar is frequented by very
+large birds--the albatross with a wing-spread of fifteen feet, and the
+condor, which may measure more than ten from tip to tip.
+
+Everybody in the east believed that the roc, or more correctly the
+rukh, really existed. When the utmost depths of Arabic credulity
+are sounded, one reaches the probable basis of a legend into the
+superstructure of which exaggerated details of natural history have
+been built. One Arab writer says the length of the roc’s wings is ten
+thousand fathoms, or nearly twelve miles, and these dimensions would
+make a fair-sized storm cloud. A Chinese tale describes the bird as
+a fowl which in its flight obscures the sun, and of whose quills
+“water-tuns” are made. One of the riders of the roc in another tale
+from the _Thousand and One Nights_ is admonished to stop his ears from
+the wind, “lest thou be dazed by the noise of the revolving sphere and
+the roaring of the seas.” It is shrewdly surmised that the roc is the
+storm cloud and the egg it covers is the sun--true master of the slaves
+of Aladdin’s lamp.
+
+
+_The Rhinoceros of the Air_
+
+Another monstrous fowl, the rhinoceros of the air, was reported in
+mediæval travel and still commands the faith of the Samoyeds. Purchas
+abstracts the description given by Andrea Corsali in his Abyssinian
+travels. The bird is much bigger than an eagle and has a bow-fashioned
+bill or beak four feet long, with a horn between the eyes streaked
+with black. “It is a cruel fowle and attends on battels and campes.”
+The Siberian myth gives this winged rhinoceros gigantic dimensions.
+The tusks and bones of the great pachyderms, found in the tundras, are
+thought by native hunters to be the beaks and talons of monster birds.
+The nearest approach of fact to the Abyssinian prodigy is perhaps the
+horned screamer, or unicorn bird, whose cries “resembling the bray of a
+jackass, but shriller,” unpleasantly disturbed for the naturalist Bates
+the solitude of the Brazilian forest.
+
+
+_The Harpies_
+
+Those forbidding sister groups, the gorgons, the sirens, and the
+harpies, are perhaps different aspects of the storm clouds and the
+storm wind--the baleful lightning, the shrieking sea gales, the violent
+gusts that snatch (_harpazo_) away soul and body. Of the three, the
+gorgons and sirens will be left within the domain of nature myths.
+The harpies may be migrants from the religions of Egypt, in which
+Nekhbet, the vulture-goddess, is sometimes represented as a woman with
+a vulture’s head, and the soul is depicted as a human-headed bird
+fluttering from the mouths of the dying. Yet they have that savor
+of the soil, that touch of the grotesque, that suggestion of coarse
+reality that belong rather to travel tale. Though with woman faces,
+their attributes are animal.
+
+Hesiod describes them as maidens, winged and golden-haired, who
+harassed the blind King Phineus at his banquets. The myth is retold
+in grosser form in the story of the Argonauts, whence these sisters,
+driven away by the comrades of Jason, make their flight to the Æneid
+and find roost in an isle where the Trojans cast anchor. The picture
+Virgil drew of them superseded the more flattering accounts of poets
+before him, and the immense vogue of this poet in later ages led
+the romancers of the Charlemagne cycle to adopt his report without
+abatement.
+
+The harpies of Virgil are, as the poet Morris pictures them, “dreadful
+snatchers,” like women down to the breast, with scanty, coarse black
+hair, dim eyes ringed with red, bestial mouths, gnarled necks, and
+birds’ claws. Their faces are pale with hunger. When the Trojans slay
+the island cattle and prepare meat for a feast, the birds swoop down
+with a horrible clamor, seize part of the meat, and defile the rest.
+Nimbly they dodge the Trojan swords, and their feathers are like
+steel mail. From a cliff they reproach the visitors for slaying their
+cattle and warring upon them, and as Æneas departs they shriek direful
+predictions after him.
+
+In the legends of Charlemagne the bird-sisters reappear when Astolpho,
+cousin of Orlando, reaches Abyssinia riding the hippogrif. Here is
+another blind king, like Phineus, “prey to a flock of obscene birds
+called harpies, which attacked him whenever he sat at meat, and with
+their claws snatched, tore, and scattered everything, overturning the
+vessels, devouring the food, and infecting what they left with their
+filthy touch.” They are put to flight with one blast of Astolpho’s horn
+and driven by him and his hippogrif into a cavern, the entrance of
+which he blocked up so that they are seen no more.
+
+That is, so far as the romancer of that time knew. They reappeared in
+the New World on the Isthmus of Darien, where Balboa was pursuing,
+amid the fens of a haunted land, the adventure of the mines of Dobayba
+and the elusive golden temple. The Indians told him there had been
+a horrible tempest, and when they ventured forth again they found
+that two monstrous creatures had come in with the storm. They were
+apparently a mother and her daughter. They had woman faces and eagle
+claws and wings; the branches of the trees where they perched broke
+with their weight. Swooping down, they would seize a man and carry him
+away to the hilltops to devour him. At last the natives killed the
+older bird by a stratagem, and, suspending her body from their spears,
+bore it from town to town to appease the alarm of their people. The
+younger harpy disappeared.
+
+Natural history has given the name of harpy to a buzzard, an eagle,
+a fly, and two species of bats. Neither of the last named, however,
+is the vampire bat of which Bates has left a portentous portrait.
+Its spread of wing is nearly two and a half feet. “Nothing in animal
+physiognomy can be more hideous than the countenance of this creature
+when viewed from the front; the large, leathery ears standing out from
+the sides and top of the head, the erect, spear-shaped appendage on the
+top of the nose, the grin and the glistening black eye, all combining
+to make up a figure that reminds one of some mocking imp of fable.” It
+seems to be fact that villages in Central America have been abandoned
+because of the nocturnal attacks of this animal. Dampier professes to
+have seen on an island near Sebo bats “with bodies as big as ducks and
+with a wing spread of eight feet.” The custom of nailing up dead bats
+as witch-or-devil forms is common. “An animal,” says Buffon, “which,
+like the bat, is half quadruped and half bird, and which, in fact, is
+neither the one nor the other, is a kind of monster.” He suggests that
+“the wings, the teeth, the claws, the voracity; the nastiness, and all
+the destructive qualities and noxious faculties of the harpies bear no
+small resemblance to those of the Ternat bat.”
+
+
+_The Stymphalian Birds_
+
+The Stymphalian birds, according to Greek legend, frequented a lake
+in the northeast of Arcadia, which lay on the main route from Argolis
+and Corinth westward. To disperse or destroy them was the sixth labor
+of Hercules. These birds were anthropophagous, used their feathers as
+arrows, and were equipped with brazen claws, wings, and feet. Diodorus
+has a milder account in which they figure merely as voracious poachers
+of the fruits of the neighborhood. With a brazen pan the hero made such
+an uproar that they flew away, appearing again, in the story of the
+Argonauts, as tenants of the island of Aretias.
+
+Pausanias visited the township of Stymphalus in his tour of Greece.
+He describes a temple to Artemis Stymphalia standing there, and the
+figures of the birds Stymphalides under its roof; behind the temple
+were marble statues of young women with the legs of fowls. The birds,
+he says, are as large as cranes, but resemble the ibis save that they
+have stronger beaks and less curved; so, indeed, they are represented
+on coins of Stymphalus. Herodotus rationalizes the legend by intimating
+that their feathery arrows were, in truth, hail or snow.
+
+
+_The Cockatrice_
+
+“The weaned child,” said Isaiah, prophesying the good time coming,
+“shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.” The cockatrice was a
+monster with the head and plumage of a cock and a barbed serpent’s
+tail, and so it is represented in heraldry. The word is an old French
+corruption of the Latin for crocodile, but popular etymology attributed
+the name to the fact that the prodigy was hatched from an aged cock’s
+egg by a serpent. Because of the crest crowning its head it is also
+called a basilisk, from the Greek _basilikos_, or “little king.”
+
+Its habitat was Africa. It was horrid to look upon and its glance
+and breath were alike fatal, while its voice struck terror to other
+serpents. Its own image, reflected in a mirror, would kill it. The
+basilisk of Cyrene, Pliny said, was not more than twelve fingers in
+length, but it destroyed all shrubs save the rue, and consumed grasses
+and shattered stones merely by breathing upon them. “He infecteth the
+water that he cometh neare,” according to Leigh. It was believed that
+if a horseman killed a basilisk with a spear-thrust, its poison would
+ascend the weapon and destroy not only the rider, but his mount. Even
+its dead body hung in a temple kept swallows from building and spiders
+from spinning there. However, if a man saw the basilisk first, he went
+scatheless and the creature itself might die, while women could seize
+it without suffering harm. The effluvium of the weasel and the crow
+of the cock were alike fatal to it. Travelers passing near its haunts
+sometimes took a cock along.
+
+While its deadly nature has persisted, the shape of the cockatrice has
+changed. To the ancients it was merely a baleful lizard. Its confusion
+in the Middle Ages with the cock gave it feathers and a beak. As soon
+as hatched by a toad or snake from a cock’s egg laid in a stable it
+hid itself in crevice, cistern, or rafter, for to be seen was to die.
+Later the heralds and painters represented it with the head of a hawk,
+sometimes even with the head of a man. Its ashes would turn base metals
+into gold. People thought that cock’s eggs were used in the devil’s
+chrism whereby his anointed hags could assume beast form or ride the
+clouds. In Browne’s time there was traffic in counterfeited cockatrices
+made by joining the dead bodies of pheasants and serpents, or out of
+the skins of thornbacks. The basilisk of natural history, which may
+have been the original of the fable, is a harmless creature, although
+of frightful aspect.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII. The Dragon
+
+
+The dragon of pagan and early Christian legend was a winged crocodile
+with a serpent’s tail. As the word is used by travelers, often a
+crocodile or a snake rather than a fabulous composite animal is
+intended. There are three animals listed in natural history which
+somewhat resemble this creature. The dragon-fly is a frightful-looking
+but entirely harmless insect; how the supersession of myth by science
+has shifted values is illustrated by the fact that the ninth edition
+of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ gives nearly four pages to the insect
+and only a dozen lines to the fabulous monster, the destruction of
+which in another age was the crowning exploit of gods and men. There is
+also a small flying lizard, native to the East Indies, which is called
+a dragon and which in miniature is a fair copy of fable. The primeval
+world knew a veritable dragon in the pterodactyl, a flying lizard with
+a wing span of seventeen feet.
+
+In the Far East the dragon was a four-legged serpent with rugged head
+and spiked ears, and, though without wings, it flew. There was more of
+the crocodile in the dragon of the Near East. It had four short paws, a
+forked tongue, and bat wings, and fire came from its mouth. The dragon
+of heraldry had a squat, scaly body, a head with horny projections,
+long clawed legs, a barbed tongue, and bat wings.
+
+There were four noteworthy things about the dragon. It was watchful, it
+spat fire and smoke, it ejected poison, and it had control of water.
+The dragon watched the golden apples in the garden of Hesperides where
+Hercules found and slew it. It guarded the Valkyrie Brynhild in a
+castle on the Glistening Heath. Although ecclesiastics of the Middle
+Ages used the word to symbolize sin and particularly pagan worship,
+yet until very recent times the world accepted the dragon. The elder
+naturalists, such as Gesner and Aldrovandi, picture it in their
+works. A mediæval writer says that at the midsummer celebration lads
+burned bones and filth to generate a noxious smoke, and so to drive
+away dragons, which, excited by the summer heat, copulated in midair,
+poisoning the wells and springs by dropping their seed in them.
+
+For what it is worth there is documentary evidence of dragons in the
+Alps, all of it attested by oath. The depositions were gathered early
+in the eighteenth century by Prof. Johann Jacob Scheuchzer and are
+thus summarized in Francis Gribble’s _Early Mountaineers_: “There are
+dragons with and without wings, with and without legs, with and without
+crests; dragons with cat faces, with human faces, and with nondescript
+faces; dragons that breathe fire and dragons that do not breathe fire.”
+
+Scheuchzer was impelled to this inquiry when he found there were graven
+images of dragons on Swiss public buildings and a “dragon-stone” in
+a Lucerne museum. The latter item he says is a jewel cut out of a
+dragon’s head in its sleep. If the monster awakes before the operation
+is complete, it will die and the stone will vanish. To forestall
+awakening, drowsy herbs are scattered about, and sometimes incantations
+are muttered. The dragon-stone is a remedy against plague, poison,
+dysentery, and nosebleed. Scheuchzer concludes that the Lucerne
+dragon-stone is no imposture because it does effect cures, because the
+Alps afford many caves for dragon haunts and because of the testimony
+of eye-witnesses as above.
+
+In June, 1673, Joliet and Marquette saw two dragon forms carved
+and painted along a bluff that overlooks the Mississippi at Alton,
+Illinois. Says Père Marquette: “As we coasted along rocks, frightful
+for their height and length, we saw two monsters painted on one of
+these rocks, which startled us at first, and on which the boldest
+Indian dare not gaze long. They are as large as a calf, with horns on
+the head like a deer, a fearful look, red eyes, bearded like a tiger,
+the face somewhat like a man’s, the body covered with scales, and the
+tail so long that it twice makes a turn of the body, passing over the
+head and down between the legs, and ending at last in a fish’s tail.
+Green, red, and a kind of black are the colors employed.”
+
+These outlines, which have been called the highest attainment of early
+Indian pictorial art, and which Marquette said the best painters of
+France could scarcely equal, became known as the Piasa petroglyph.
+Quarrymen destroyed them shortly before the Civil War, but drawings
+were made of them by artists who followed descriptions. One surmise is
+that they represented the Algonquin thunder bird.
+
+A copious and curious literature treats of the dragon as a veritable
+creature of natural history. According to Ælian, although the
+Ethiopians call it the slayer of elephants, it conceals itself when it
+hears the noise of the eagle’s wings. When it lies in wait for man or
+beast, it consumes deadly roots and herbs. At Lanuvium naked virgins
+paid it the annual tribute of a barley cake to insure a fruitful year.
+Passing the cave of a sacred Indian dragon, the army of Alexander was
+affrighted by hissing and blowing and the apparition of a head with
+eyes “of the size of a Macedonian shield.” Artemidorus adds the detail
+that the Indian and African dragons have grass growing on their backs.
+“You burst asunder vast bulls” is Lucan’s apostrophe. Ignatius reports
+that the library of Constantinople had the intestine of a dragon 120
+feet long on which the Iliad and Odyssey were inscribed.
+
+Chinese reports are very detailed. In the great Materia Medica of
+the early seventeenth century it is said that the dragon has nine
+resemblances--its head like a camel’s, its horns like a deer’s, its
+eyes like a hare’s, its ears like a bull’s, its neck like a snake’s,
+its belly like an iguanodon’s, its scales like a carp’s, its claws
+like an eagle’s and its paws like a tiger’s. It is whiskered and its
+voice resembles the beating of a gong. The dragon, however, cannot hear
+itself, for it is deaf. It is fond of gems and jade and excessively
+fond of swallow’s flesh; but it dreads iron, beeswax, the mong plant,
+the centipede, the leaves of the Pride of India, and silk dyed in the
+five colors. It passes the winter in muddy water contemned by the fish
+and turtle, and in summer the moles, crickets, and ants annoy it. At
+five hundred years it grows horns. “If you do not ride on a dragon,”
+says one writer, “you cannot reach the weak waters of Kwan-lun hill.”
+Another suggests that if you eat dragon’s flesh soaked in acid “you can
+write essays.”
+
+It was a belief among Chinese that dragons did not die, but merely
+sloughed off their bones as a snake its skin. These were used to cure
+a variety of diseases and are still sold in apothecaries’ shops. The
+records speak of a bone-covered dragon plain east of the hills of
+Fang-chang, and of isles where the dragons shed their bodies; “teeth,
+horns, spines, feet, it seems as though they are everywhere.” The
+identification is perhaps with those deposits of dinosaur and other
+paleontological remains which modern exploration has uncovered.
+
+The naturalistic side of Chinese dragon lore is not far removed
+from the position taken by Charles Gould, the stoutest defender of
+the literal basis of wonder stories (_Mythical Monsters_, 1886). He
+finds nothing impossible in the dragon of tradition and thinks it
+more likely that it once lived than that fancy engendered it: “It
+was a long, terrestrial lizard, hibernating and carnivorous, which
+dragged its ponderous coils and perhaps flew; which devastated herds
+and on occasions swallowed their shepherd; which, establishing its
+lair in some cavern overlooking the fertile plain, spread terror
+and destruction around, and, protected from assault by dread
+or superstitious feeling, may even have been subsidized by the
+terror-stricken peasantry, who, failing the power to destroy it, may
+have preferred tethered offerings of cattle adjacent to its cavern, to
+having it come down to seek supplies.”
+
+But the dragon reached a place in the political and spiritual life of
+China such as a mere saurian hardly could attain. The empire was called
+“the dragon empire”; the imperial throne, “the dragon throne”; the
+emperor’s countenance, “the dragon’s face”; his beard, “the dragon’s
+beard.” In pictured effigy, the dragon rears itself upon house fronts
+and draws its scaly folds over garments and utensils as well as across
+the imperial flag; and there are annual processions of dragon images,
+regattas of dragon boats, and sacrificial ceremonies in dragon temples.
+To a third of mankind, for five thousand years or more, the dragon has
+been the bestower of rain and the great giver of good, and the emperor
+its earthly representative.
+
+As in other matters, China has merely preserved and exaggerated beliefs
+which were world-wide. Nearly all of the thrones of earth were once
+dragon thrones. On the shield of Agamemnon, king of kings, was “the
+unspeakable horror of a dragon glancing backward.” Persians, Parthians
+and Scythians had dragon flags and Rome borrowed them for its cohorts.
+The dragon flew on the battle standards of German, Celt, and Saxon,
+and breasted the foam of the seas as the figurehead of Norse longboats.
+In the older Europe, as in the China of to-day, it was carved on house
+gables, bells, musical instruments, goblets, weapons, chairs, and
+tables.
+
+Under these world-wide customs, was there only a giant reptile not long
+extinct, an inference from fossil remains, some frightful-seeming but
+diminutive lizard contemporary with man and magnified a thousand times
+by the aberrations of fancy? All of these things there may have been,
+for the myth is so complex that its development has been called the
+history of civilization. But inevitably speculation had to rise higher
+than a saurian to account for phenomena of such consequence; it was
+conceived that the dragon was the storm-cloud and he who slew it the
+sun. So, it may be, ingenious minds surmised thousands of years before
+modern conjecture first spoke of solar myths and found in forgotten
+texts not the heart of the thing, but allegories in which ancient solar
+mythologists had wrapped it. Or, it was guessed, the dragon typified
+the spirit of evil, a power to be placated by sacrifice and politic
+devil-worship, but destroyed as opportunity offered. So the world long
+thought, and so far as it thinks at all of the dragon, that is what it
+thinks now.
+
+To assume that the myth is an allegory of satanic forces is to explain
+much, but does it explain all? Powerful as is the motive of fear,
+it is negative. Was it potent enough to coil a dragon at the roots
+of all the world’s religions; and when these arose, were men able
+to speculate on so abstract a thing as evil and symbolize it as a
+composite beast? The Bible narrative begins with the dragon of Genesis
+in the Garden of Eden and ends with the dragon of Revelation, “that
+old serpent which is the Devil and Satan,” in the bottomless pit. The
+slaying of the dragon is the central point of Norse and Saxon epic,
+the great deed of the heroes. The water monster of Navaho legend is a
+dragon; the elephant-headed thunder god of the Mayan inscriptions is
+a dragon deity; the legendary founders of both Athens and Mexico were
+dragon-tailed. Snake worship is dragon worship and, like the Midgard
+serpent, it encircles the earth. Everywhere the myth is a thing of
+thrones and temples.
+
+Perhaps its secret is to be found, as later in this study it will be
+seen that the secret of the Amazon myth is to be found, in the time
+when thrones and temples were one. Clues that lead to it are: (1) the
+world has still a dragon throne, or rather a recent memory of one; (2)
+always in the lore of dragon or serpent, whether as victim, votary, or
+mate, appears the figure of a daughter of Eve; (3) the snake is the
+badge of Æsculapius and the symbol of healing; (4) the dragon, whether
+haunting cloud or pool, is associated with water.
+
+Woman is the physical source of human life. Water is healing,
+fertilizing, and regenerating. Use the Scriptural figure, “the water
+of life,” and it relates itself to woman and to the serpent symbol of
+the art that lengthens life. When the throne and temple were one, the
+creation and continuation of life was the function of the priest-king,
+though only in China has his tradition come down to the modern time.
+The Chinese emperor was himself the dragon. In the spring festivals of
+his people he supplicated heaven for rains that would revive the land,
+and in the autumn festivals he rendered thanks for nature’s bounty or
+took upon himself the blame for dearth.
+
+The dragon myth is not a myth of fear, nor was the dragon in the
+beginning a personification of evil. It was an expression of the
+deepest desire of man, the desire to defeat chance and change, to
+repeal “the sad laws of time” and to live forever. Of all myths, that
+of the dragon is the fundamental, for the forces with which it deals
+are the forces which have impelled man, in a long grapple with destiny,
+to construct societies, build religions, and create an art and a
+literature. In China both the significance and the origin of the legend
+lie almost on the surface. In most other places and at most other times
+its meaning has been distorted, inverted, weighted down with fancies
+and guesses. As it stands, it is like the fabric of a vision in which
+tatters of experience are woven on the looms of sleep by the master
+weavers of hope and fear; and in this faded grotesque one may decipher
+the eternal dream of mankind.
+
+The theory which will be interpreted here is that of Grafton Elliot
+Smith (_The Evolution of the Dragon_: 1919). It is too sweeping in its
+implications and too revolutionary yet to have received the general
+sanction of writers upon mythology; but among all dragon theories
+it must take precedence because alone it has the elemental breadth
+demanded by the phenomena to be accounted for. A difficult thing about
+it is that the author rejects the doctrine accepted of the time, that
+the same beliefs and practices can arise independently in two or more
+places. Unless there is in any case definite evidence to the contrary,
+he assumes that “no ethnologically significant innovation in customs or
+beliefs has ever been made twice.” It is his contention that the dragon
+myth was born in Egypt, developed in Babylonia, and in a time remote
+carried to China, India, and the Americas, and to all other parts of
+the earth. Granting this, it becomes not merely the one world-epic, but
+the proof that, before history began even as now, all races of men were
+in effectual contact.
+
+The primitive custom at the basis of the myth is well established. The
+post of priest-king was enviable but dangerous. With each recurring
+spring he was expected to bring fertility to his land; but sometimes
+he was killed and a successor appointed each year, in imitation of
+the death of vegetation that preceded the resurrection of spring; and
+always when age overtook him he was slain, for what vital magic over
+nature was there left in his aging frame? To avoid this fate a mock
+king was erected to suffer in his stead; or a virgin was sacrificed; or
+in elaborate mummery a ritual murder was merely simulated.
+
+Here in their simplest form appear all the elements of the dragon
+myth--a king who was thought to control the sources of water and the
+fertility of which it was the symbol; a slaying to be accomplished, and
+a woman who was at once a fertility symbol and a vicarious sacrifice.
+The king himself was the dragon, in its original form just a serpent
+symbol of his reputed control over water.
+
+Thus stated the story is understandable, but it becomes confused and
+infinitely complex when it is dramatized in the mythology of ancient
+Egypt. A king who through his beneficent irrigation works is identified
+with the river Nile is translated by legend into the skies and becomes
+the water god Osiris, a member of the earliest Trinity. The second
+member of the Trinity, but the first in point of time, is Hathor,
+the Great Mother,--at one time identified with the cowry shell, the
+earliest form of fertility emblem, and then identified with the moon
+and translated into the sky when primitive minds saw the lunar rhythm
+repeated in the sex life of woman. The third member of the Trinity is
+Horus, the Warrior Sun God, a son of Osiris. How an aging king, not yet
+a god, resolved that he would not be slain to make way for a younger
+man and called upon the Great Mother, already a goddess, to provide
+him with an elixir of life, which was blood, and how, in compliance
+with his entreaty, she nearly wiped out mankind before a substitute
+was provided--in reality the red waters of the Nile inundation--is
+allegorically recited in the ancient Egyptian narrative called the
+Destruction of Mankind.
+
+In this and its companion legends, the Story of the Winged Disk and
+the Conflict between Horus and Set, are all the elements of the dragon
+saga. It would be futile to recite them in detail, for the thing has
+become so confused that in the words of Doctor Smith it amounts to
+this: “The early Trinity as the hero, armed with the Trinity as a
+weapon, slays the dragon, which is the same Trinity.” But the confusion
+has produced a concrete and comprehensible result, a composite
+wonder-beast in which are blended parts of real animals that symbolize
+both regeneration and destruction and that are the attributes of the
+several members of the early Trinity, and of Set, enemy of Horus and
+lord of chaos.
+
+An archaic conception this may seem now, but what is there of the human
+or the cosmic that does not lie in it? The desire for unfading youth
+and continuing life on one side of the grave or the other is in it, and
+that is the heart history of humanity. The conflict between order and
+chaos is in it, and that is the story of nature. The theme of vicarious
+sacrifice is in it, and that is the deep mystery of religion. There is
+that in the tale which impelled the story-tellers of five millenniums
+to repeat it, to enrich its incidents and to weave the tissues of new
+meanings through it until it was at once a treatise on astronomy, a
+theory of meteorology and a philosophy of destiny; a record of the
+strife between winter and summer, night and day, justice and injustice,
+and good and evil fates, which is the world as men have found it.
+
+Unquestionably the dragon of classic story and mediæval blazonry is
+the devil of Scripture; the biblical identification is complete,
+and the bird-like features, leathern wings, and forked tail of this
+elemental creature of fable all are reproduced in familiar portraits
+of the enemy of mankind. This and the inner meaning of the dragon myth
+may be accepted, while its origin in Egypt and dissemination from one
+place throughout the world is probable. Doctor Smith, whose contentions
+are all-embracing, makes other inferences which here will be outlined
+without comment:
+
+The serpent in the Garden of Eden, the tree of life and Eve herself
+are all one. The deluge of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hebrew legend
+is a disastrous Nile inundation dramatized. The ark is the moon-boat
+of Hathor. The pig owes its evil name to its identification with
+Set, who represents the evil side of the dragon’s nature. The cowry
+shell, suspended from the girdle as a fertility emblem and not from
+any motives of modesty, became the origin of all clothing. Inland
+tribes which had no access to the shore copied the cowry in a plastic
+yellow metal, and this was the origin of the world-old quest for gold
+and the occasion of its use as money. The object of mummification
+was the continuance of life beyond the grave, the purpose in burning
+gums and spices was to restore to the mummy the odor and warmth of
+life; and these customs, related to each other and to the theme of the
+dragon saga, are also related to the development of architecture, sea
+trade, and medicine. Jade reached its mystic estate in China and other
+lands, because the men who sought gold for cowry amulets in Turkestan
+sought jade at the same time for seals, and in popular thought the
+two substances became confused. Through a similar confusion, diamonds
+attained in India the value they have since had everywhere. Pearls
+ranked beside both because they were thought to be particles of moon
+substances, emanations of the moon goddess herself. The precious metals
+and precious stones became so not because of their rarity or beauty,
+but because of their magical power as symbols of the divine actors in
+the dragon story. The griffin of legend is merely a tentative dragon.
+The mandrake of legend is merely a stranded pearl shell, and the dog
+used to extract it from the earth is a terrestrial version of the
+Mediterranean dogfish to which had been transferred the demoniac powers
+of the sharks that guarded the pearl treasures of the east. With the
+dragon began the unending search for the elixir of life.
+
+These conclusions, some of which offer novel explanations for
+enigmatical things noted in this study, are at least a testimony that
+the dragon myth has traveled far, and in its travels has become related
+to many things. It is the most vital of all growths that have found
+root in the fecund soil of the imagination. It is a richly pictorial
+history of the groping sublimities of human thought. The dragon is one
+of two portraits which man has painted of himself.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII. Denizens of the Deep
+
+
+Belief that the sea was in every respect like the land, and that its
+very waves were only a thicker atmosphere, was the main source of
+marine fable. In Celtic story, for example, Manannan sings to Bran that
+what he is sailing across is not the sea but a flowery plain, and the
+speckled salmon are lambs and calves. Mældune, voyaging over the ocean,
+descries beneath him a country with castles, people, and cattle. In
+the _Pih T’an_ it is said that in the midst of the waters off Shantung
+there is sometimes the misty semblance of a palace, with towered walls
+about it, and the appearance of men and carriages and horses busily
+engaged; and this is called the Market of the Sea.
+
+It was long held that every land animal had its counterpart in the
+ocean. So there had to be mermen to match the men of the land. Such
+names as sea-mice, sea-spiders, sea-kites, sea-hares, sea-dragons,
+sea-lions, sea-oxen, and sea-horses, “the grisly wasserman” and “the
+horrible sea-satyr,” are the records of old belief. Pliny tells of
+a number of strange marine creatures, including elephants and rams,
+stranded on a Mediterranean beach, and of others with the heads of
+horses, asses, and bulls, which despoiled grain fields beside the
+Indian Ocean. The Chinese believed that all domestic animals in the
+Roman Orient came out of the sea. Proclaiming that the atmosphere was
+only diluted water, De Maillet, a French naturalist of the eighteenth
+century, contended that in the ocean was the original type of
+everything; that dogs descended from seals and men from tritons, while
+parroquets had their brilliant colors from gold, green, and violet
+fishes in the sea. There were fierce tribes of men in the north who
+seemed to him only lately emerged.
+
+In classic legend, danger and marvel met mariners upon the strands
+along which they sailed in coasting voyages, and there was no need to
+go inland for adventure. The sirens sang their shrieking songs by
+the water’s edge, the Polyphemus-folk flung masses of rock into the
+breakers, and from their island palaces enchantresses kept watch for
+passing ships. The voyages of fable were thus a sort of parade between
+shores thronged with perilous romance. A writing on the Catalan map of
+1375 is in this spirit. In the Spice Islands, it recites, are “three
+kinds of sirens--one is half woman, half fish; another is half woman,
+half bird; and the third is half woman, half horse.”
+
+Elder fancy peopled the deep itself with tritons riding sea-horses and
+stilling the waves with blasts from their shell trumpets, and with
+divine nymphs of great beauty and often of engaging nature, as well as
+with singular animals. The legate of Gaul wrote Augustus that a number
+of nereids had been found dead on its shore, and men from Olisipo
+(Lisbon) brought word to Tiberius that a triton had been heard blowing
+a conch shell in a cavern retreat. Sea marvels multiply, but somehow
+take on a coarser texture, in the mediæval time.
+
+
+_The Sailors’ Favorite_
+
+Among the marine populations the dolphin has always been a favorite
+with sailors, as Greek and Roman bas-reliefs and the coins, medals, and
+coats of arms of Mediterranean countries bear witness. It was supposed
+to be the swiftest of animals; it was fond of men and of music,
+particularly that of the water organ; it had a turned-up nose, and
+according to Pliny recognized in a surprising manner the name of Simo
+(flat-nose) and “preferred to be called by that name rather than any
+other.” Ajasson thought it was attracted merely by the hissing sound of
+the word. Pliny has a tale of its friendship with mankind which should
+have a better ending:
+
+“A dolphin at Hippo Diarrhytus on the coast of Africa used to receive
+his food from the hands of various persons, present himself for their
+caresses, sport about among the swimmers, and carry them on his back.
+Proconsul Flavianus rubbed him with unguents whose odor rendered him as
+if dead, and he kept aloof for months afterward, as though affronted.
+But he returned to familiar intercourse later. At last the vexations
+that were caused them by having to entertain so many influential men
+who came to see this sight, compelled the people of Hippo to put the
+animal to death.”
+
+
+_Monster Whales_
+
+The ancients held the great cetaceans in terror. The Talmud declares
+that it would take a ship three days to sail from the head to the
+tail of Leviathan. Pliny speaks of whales in the Indian Ocean nine
+hundred feet long, and of others which would cover two acres of
+ground. The traditional fear of them is in the account by Nearchus of
+his battle--his own word--with a school of whales when he was taking
+Alexander’s fleet back from the mouth of the Indus to the Persian Gulf.
+The sailors saw columns of foam shooting up from the sea and at first
+mistook them for waterspouts. When they learned that these came from
+whales, “they were so terrified that the oars fell from their hands.”
+But Nearchus rallied them, drew up his ships in order of battle, and at
+a given signal dashed toward the monsters. Oars splashed loudly, rowers
+shouted, trumpets sang defiance. The astonished whales plunged out of
+sight, and his men hailed Nearchus as savior of the fleet.
+
+Sailors in the Indian Ocean of a later time told of the head of a fish
+“that might be compared to a hill; its eyes were like two doors, so
+that people could go in at one eye and out at the other.” In these
+waters Sindbad’s companions mistook a whale for a green meadow. The
+whales of Norse lore carry witches, while the monster that bore
+Glooskap, the Algonquin culture hero, could hear the song of clams as
+they lay under the sand.
+
+St. Brendan and his seventeen monkish brethren repeated the Sindbad
+adventure when they sailed into the western seas in search of the Isle
+of the Blessed. Bearing a lamb without blemish, they landed on a low
+island to celebrate the Easter festival. But when a fire was lighted
+and the pot set over it, the island began to move, and they fled to
+their osier ship. What they had taken for an islet was “the beast
+Jasconius, greatest of things that swim, which laboureth night and day
+to put his tail in his mouth, but for greatness he may not.” In stories
+of this kind in the _Physiologus_ the whale was supposed to represent
+the devil, the sea the world, and the ship the human race.
+
+
+_The Kraken_
+
+“Oh, silly mariners,” exclaimed Arngrim, “that in digging cannot
+discern whale’s flesh from earth!” Bishop Pontoppidan pondered these
+accounts and in his _Natural History of Norway_, published in 1752, he
+concluded that the whale, large as it was--and science knows no extinct
+monster of equal bulk--was not large enough to explain them. These are
+not floating islands, but a vast sea-monster called kraken, kraxen, or
+krabben. “What the credulous Olaus Magnus writes,” says he, “of the
+whale being so large that his back is looked upon as an island, and
+that people might land, light fires, and do various kinds of work upon
+it, is a notoriously fabulous and ridiculous romance.” No, this is the
+kraken, the back of which “seems to be about an English mile and a half
+in circumference.”
+
+People, thinks the bishop, had some imperfect idea of the kraken for
+ages back. Pliny heard an obscure account of it in the Gaditanian sea;
+he likens it both to a wheel with spokes and to a tree with such large
+branches that it could not get through a ship channel. The Kors Trold
+or Soe-Drawl which sailors deemed an evil spirit, and which they said
+could stop a ship under full sail, must be the kraken, concludes the
+Norwegian.
+
+Pontoppidan draws a spirited picture of this prodigious creature
+showing itself among a fleet of fishermen. They are several miles out
+at sea on a hot summer day. Their lines should show from eighty to one
+hundred fathoms of water under them, but show only twenty or thirty.
+Fish are plentiful, above all cod and ling. As fast as the sailors cast
+in they draw out their finny prey. They are angling right over the
+monster, and his back is the bottom the lines have sounded. Then they
+see the water shallowing still further; the kraken is raising himself.
+So they hasten out of danger and lie on their oars.
+
+“In a few minutes,” says the historian, “they see this enormous
+monster come up to the surface of the water; he there shows himself
+sufficiently, though his whole body does not appear, which in all
+likelihood no human eye ever beheld. His back looks at first like a
+number of small islands, surrounded with something that floats and
+fluctuates like seaweeds; and several bright points or horns appear,
+which grow thicker and thicker the higher they rise above the
+water. Sometimes they stand up as high and as large as the masts of
+middle-sized vessels. These are the creature’s arms, and it is said if
+they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it
+down to the bottom. After this monster has been on the surface a short
+time, it begins slowly to sink again, causing a whirlpool that draws
+down everything with it.”
+
+Pontoppidan believes the kraken is a polypus, one of the starfish kind.
+It has a strong and peculiar scent by means of which it attracts other
+fish. Those islands, among the Faroes, that suddenly appear and as
+suddenly disappear and that people deem inhabited by evil spirits are
+krakens.
+
+All of which is set down in the famous eighth chapter of the _Natural
+History_ which, as its author says, “treats of the Norwegian
+Sea-Monsters, or those animals of enormous size and uncommon form
+which are sometimes seen in the ocean.” In this chapter the Norse
+cleric seeks seemingly to outmatch in the colder seas of Scandinavia
+the marvels of the Mediterranean. He makes himself chief sponsor for
+the sea-serpent. He describes the trold-fish, or unlucky-fish, that
+sailors hasten to throw overboard. He has much to say of mermaids. He
+tells of the Maelstrom in the Lofoden district of Nordland--an abyss
+which penetrates the globe and issues in the Gulf of Bothnia; “within
+a Norway mile of it, boats, ships, and yachts have been carried away.”
+Whales are sometimes swept into it, “and then it is impossible to
+describe their howlings and bellowings.”
+
+
+_The Sea Serpent_
+
+The sea serpent of Pontoppidan has a venerable past and a present of
+conjecture and recurrent report. Insensibly a legend has been built up
+in the modern time as strange as any in the whole range of fable. Men
+say, not “a sea serpent,” but “the sea serpent.” It is assumed that
+there is but one, and that for ages it has haunted the deep, appearing
+sometimes in the Atlantic, sometimes in the Indian Ocean, sometimes in
+the South Pacific--a plesiosaurus, perhaps, wandering the seas, the
+lonely survivor of a vanished age.
+
+Olaus Magnus described the great marine snake--the Soe-Ormen of old
+lays--as two hundred feet long and twenty feet around, and as rising up
+like a mast before ships and snapping men off their decks. Hans Egede,
+the Greenland missionary, saw it in July, 1734. When it reared itself,
+its head was higher than the ship’s maintop. When it flattened itself
+upon the water, its tail was a ship’s length behind its head. “The
+following evening,” says Mr. Egede, “we had very bad weather.”
+
+From all accounts, Pontoppidan concludes that this monster is of about
+the length of a cable, or six hundred English feet. The body is as big
+around as two hogsheads. “The head has a high and broad forehead, but
+in some a pointed snout, though in others that is flat, like that of
+a cow or horse; with large blue eyes like a couple of bright pewter
+plates, large nostrils, and several stiff hairs standing out on each
+side like whiskers.” Its skin is smooth, except for a mane, like
+seaweed.
+
+These great snakes, the Norse writer declares, haunt the floor of the
+North Sea, rising in July and August, their spawning time. The wind is
+destructive to them, and they appear only in calms. They cannot face
+the sun, and the fisherman may escape them by rowing toward it. Nor can
+they endure the smell of castor or asafœtida, and anglers who go out
+on Stor Eggen in the summer provide themselves with one or the other.
+Sometimes, however, the monster rises under small boats and upsets
+them, or throws its heavy folds across vessels even of some hundred
+tons burthen, and sinks them.
+
+The appearances of the sea serpent are well enough documented. It was
+reported off the Norway coast in 1819, 1822 and 1837, off the New
+England coast in 1815, 1817, 1819, 1833, and 1869, and off the American
+coast farther south in 1895. It was seen in the South Atlantic in 1841
+by the frigate _Dœdalus_, and in 1875 by the bark _Pauline_, when
+seemingly it was dragging under a large whale. A few years ago it was
+seen by the bark _Harvard_ near Borneo. In the nineteenth century it
+was sighted so often near Boston that it became known as the American
+sea serpent. The accounts were circumstantial and so well vouched
+for that there could be no reasonable doubt that a strange marine
+monster was abroad. A committee of the Boston Linnaean Society, for
+example, drew up a report signed by eye-witnesses in 1819. The serpent,
+they said, was from eighty to ninety feet long, with buoy-like
+protuberances on its back and was swimming at twenty miles or more an
+hour, and driving frightened mackerel before it.
+
+These reports have been variously explained--that a low-ranging flight
+of sea fowl could produce the semblance of a snake upon the water; that
+a mass of seaweed had created this effect; that a pair of gigantic
+basking sharks, swimming in a line, had seemed to be one creature;
+that twenty-foot ribbon fish were the basis of the legend, and that
+a monster squid had been mistaken for a snake. The preponderance of
+scientific opinion inclines to the last named view. Cephalopods more
+than sixty feet long have been seen off Newfoundland and the coasts of
+northern Europe, and it may be that what the _Pauline_ saw was not a
+serpent crushing a whale, but a whale killing a giant cuttle fish. But
+it is not at all certain that a monster of some species unknown, or
+too hastily assumed to be extinct, a stray from the Mesozoic or Eocene
+seas, does not haunt the ocean.
+
+Cousins of this prodigy, of vaguer outline, rove the deeps of myth and
+romance. The sea serpent of Arab story is the waterspout. The spotted
+snake of Navajo story caused the flood. The bunyip of Van Diemen’s
+Land carried off women to his water abode. The yacu-mama, or mother
+of waters, of Brazilian story--fifty paces long and twelve yards in
+girth--drew anything within a hundred yards into its jaws, but could
+be placated by bugle music. The orc of the Charlemagne cycle, a
+horrible mass of tossing and twisting body with nothing of the animal
+but head, eyes, and tusked mouth, haunted an island off the Irish
+coast and menaced the manacled and beauteous Angelica. Rogero with
+his hippogrif and magic buckler released her, and Orlando slew the
+monster afterward. The killing by a Moslem of a like creature that had
+been devouring beautiful virgins led to the conversion of the Maldive
+islanders, according to Ibn Batuta; at times it reappears in the offing
+in the seeming of a ship with lighted candles. The orc of science is
+no serpent, but a large dolphin, and when it pursues the whale, says
+an old writer, the latter makes “a hideous bellowing, like a bull when
+bitten by a dog.”
+
+
+_Tortoises_
+
+A quaint humor animates much of tortoise tradition. By stringing cords
+across a tortoise shell the infant Hermes invented the lyre. According
+to the Sicilians a tortoise executed the decree of fate that Æschylus
+should die of a blow from heaven; an eagle mistook the tragic poet’s
+bald head for a stone and dropped a tortoise upon it to break the
+shell. Pliny says that tortoises betray themselves to fishermen by
+overeating at night on land and snoring loudly after they return to
+the water. “Some persons are of opinion,” he reports, “that the female
+refuses to have any intercourse with the male until he has placed a
+wisp of straw on her back, and that she hatches her eggs merely by
+looking at them.” From the tortoise the Romans obtained no less than
+sixty-six remedies for bodily ills.
+
+Sea turtles may attain a weight of a thousand pounds, and legend has
+enlarged this figure. In their shells, says Diodorus, the Chelonophagi
+(turtle-eaters) of the East African islands, sailed to the mainland for
+fresh water. They used them also as roofs, nature’s bounty providing
+them “by one gift food, vessels, shipping, and habitations.” Ælian
+speaks of tortoise shell houses fifteen cubits long: “nor does the rain
+beating against them sound otherwise than if it were falling on tiles.”
+Odoric overtops this. In Cochin-China he saw a tortoise “bigger in
+compass than the dome of St. Anthony’s Church in Padua.”
+
+
+_Eels_
+
+The Romans thought that the murænas, or sea eels, had a language
+of their own, and that their voices were “low and sweet, with an
+intimation so fascinating that few could resist its influence.” The
+Emperor Augustus, it was believed, could understand the language. How
+eels were generated was long a puzzle, their origin being imputed
+to May dew, horse hairs, rocks, mud, the carcasses of animals, and
+even to Jove and the goddess Anguilla; hence their scientific name of
+_Anguillina_. A cod of the German coast and a Sardinian water beetle
+have each been called the “eel-mother.” It has lately been ascertained
+that the eggs are spawned in Bermuda waters, and the young reach Europe
+after a two years’ journey.
+
+
+_Three Traditions_
+
+A German folk-tale has it that when Christ was crucified all the fishes
+were terror-stricken and dived under water, save the pike, which thrust
+forth its head and witnessed the scene. Hence the pike’s head shows
+some of the parts of the crucifixion--the cross, three nails, and a
+sword. Another fish, the remora, decided the fate of the world by
+attaching itself to Antony’s galley and keeping it out of the battle
+line at Actium; or so says Pliny. There are monstrous crabs on the
+beaches of Japan, some of them seven feet across, which bear what seems
+to be a human mask on their backs. The natives say they appeared after
+a pirate fleet had been destroyed and its leaders beheaded on the shore.
+
+
+_Water Horses_
+
+The water gods of northern Europe usually had the horse form, and their
+memory survives in Shetlandic tales of the njogel and tangi. The former
+appeared as a sleek pony or decrepit gray horse; its hair grew forward
+instead of backward; its fetlocks pointed upward instead of downward;
+its hoofs were reversed. At dusk it would stand beside a trail, and
+seemed to invite the benighted traveler to mount it. Then it galloped
+over a waterfall, or dashed into a lake, leaving him to drown while it
+vanished on the other bank in a blue light. The tangi was like it, but
+had its ranging ground on the seashore. People became insensible for
+days when it ran around them.
+
+
+_Sharks_
+
+Human attributes among the sea’s inhabitants are divided between
+sharks and the merfolk. The latter are the graceful creatures of an
+imagination at play with itself. The former are always things of
+terror, not only because they attack man, but because they seem to have
+some special and sinister relation to him. They have been thought to
+be enchanted men. Savages tell of their taking human form and human
+mates. The West African sacrificed children to a shark god. In the
+shark temples of the Sandwich Islands priests rubbed their own bodies
+with salt water so as to seem to have scaly skins. Offerings of coins
+were made to the basking shark in northern Europe. In New Calabar it
+was a capital offense to kill a shark. Sailors still think that this
+fish will follow vessels on which some one is to die, and in the days
+of the slave ships it was said to have a special fondness for the flesh
+of blacks. In former times its teeth, set in gold, were used as amulets
+and its powdered brains had a place in medicine; shark’s oil is still
+in the pharmacopœias, shark fins are a Chinese dainty, and shark skins
+an article of commerce. The source of these beliefs and practices may
+be in the world-wide dragon myth, wherein pearls were thought to be
+emanations of the moon goddess and were sought as givers of life. The
+sharks that harassed the pearl fisheries came to be looked upon as
+demons guarding the treasure houses of the sea floor, and embodiments
+of evil like the dragon itself.
+
+
+_Merfolk_
+
+Under mermaid legend is the old notion that because there are men and
+women on the land there must be men and women in the sea. The texture
+of the legend has become about as complex as human nature itself, and,
+like it, shows the divine, the semi-divine and the coarsely animal
+subsisting together. In turn the mermaid has been goddess, enchantress,
+and fresh meat at sea.
+
+The oldest known form of the myth may be glimpsed on tavern signs,
+where the mermaid is depicted with a circular mirror in her hand and a
+fish tail. She is Chaldean and Phœnician. Derceto, the moon goddess,
+was represented as half woman and half fish because it was conceived
+that she divided her time between the earth and the waters under the
+earth, plunging into the sea with every moonset. Baring Gould thinks
+that the mirror she holds may be the moon disk.
+
+Other shapes of poetry were merged in the legend before it entered the
+prose period of maritime discovery. Among them were the tritons and the
+nereids, “half-naked, natural, loving, and antique”--lesser divinities
+of classic fable. At some time the sirens, who had been pictured as
+half human and half bird, were immersed, and thereafter were pictured
+as half human and half fish. Browne protests this representation, but
+the mermaid myth does carry siren features, song included. The song of
+the Rhine maidens is mermaid song, their prophecy mermaid prophecy. Of
+the same family are the nixies who love music and foretell the future.
+
+The legend has become further entangled--with tales of banshees whose
+wailing portends death, of gull-befriended seal people who could take
+human form, of swan maidens who wed mortals, of forward sea fairies
+who leave their red caps on the shore of Ireland for young men to pick
+up, even of the female demon or nightmare. There are both foam and
+cloud-flock in mermaid story, and they meet in the gentle Phæacian,
+Nausicaa, whom Ulysses discovers bathing on the shore.
+
+In Fouqué’s _Undine_ the legend achieves its purest poetry. It is the
+story of a nymph who lives with her foster parents on the edge of an
+enchanted forest where a knight of the old German Empire finds and woos
+her. Riding thither through the wood, a bear mocks him with human voice
+from the branches of an oak, a troll shows him the goblins at play with
+their gold beneath the earth, and what seems at one moment a tall white
+man and at the next a foaming brook guides him to the cottage. These
+were Undine’s familiars, and when the knight meets the water maiden the
+brook rises and for days roars about the cottage, secluding him there
+until he has won the nymph’s heart, and she his hand and with it an
+immortal soul. Through the remainder of the story until its inevitable
+disaster in the unwitting breaking of a vow--the end of all unions
+between nymphs and mortals--water foams and flashes and strange shapes
+dissolve in spray.
+
+This is the type of a hundred mediæval tales, of which the best known
+is that of Melusina, a fountain nymph wedded to the head of the house
+of Lusignan, but lost to him because he did not keep his pledge to
+respect her Saturday privacy. He discovered her in the bath, a serpent
+from the waist downward. According to report her blood flowed in the
+veins of the Luxembourg and Rohan families and in Henry VII, sovereign
+of the Holy Roman Empire. Her spirit was seen whenever the death of a
+Lusignan impended. The tale has an extensive bibliography.
+
+Other accounts of water maidens are of a wilder cast. The judy of
+Slavic folk tales lived in the lakes and rivers of the Rhodope
+Mountains and danced in meadows, and him whom they coaxed to dance with
+them they destroyed. When they saw a man in the water they entangled
+him in their long hair and drowned him. The pariks of Armenian story
+are erotic female demons of the river banks. In a Celtic tale Rath saw
+mermaids as “grown-up girls, the fairest of shape and make above the
+waters; but huger than one of the hills was the hairy-clawed, bestial
+lower part which they had beneath.” They sang the hero to sleep and
+tore him to pieces. The ships of another Celtic adventurer, Ruad, were
+stopped, and when he went over the side he saw “three of the loveliest
+of the world’s women” holding to the keels; the rest of the story is
+dalliance. Pacific coast Indians have legends of beautiful, long-haired
+women who lived in a round house under the ocean and made trouble for
+people above. An Arab traveler tells of joyous water maidens caught and
+caressed by sailors in the bright straits of Greece, and then returned
+to the sea.
+
+The prose of the legend was reached when men began to capture what
+they conceived to be mermaids and mermen, and failed in most cases to
+find kindred beings. There is a considerable list of these creatures
+captured or sighted on the beaches of the Old and the New World.
+Only one of these talked, and Pontoppidan mentions the story but to
+discredit it. Two senators of Norway caught a merman, but let him go
+on his threatening them in Danish to sink the ship with all its crew.
+Of the so-called bishop-fish or sea bishop, said to have been netted
+for the King of Poland in the Baltic in 1453, a similar tale is told.
+It wore a dalmatic and mitre and carried a crosier. With gestures of
+entreaty it besought the intercession of its brother prelates of the
+court. When it was released into the sea the grateful creature made
+the sign of the cross and gave the episcopal benediction with its fin
+before it submerged. In one other instance there were points of human
+contact. Milkmaids of Edam in West Friesland in 1430 found a mermaid
+which had been swept over the dykes by a storm. They brought it home,
+as the story goes, and dressed it in female attire; it learned how to
+spin, to eat with them, to adore the crucifix, but it never spoke.
+
+Through many other accounts runs the belief that merfolk were
+weather-breeders. The _Speculum Regale_, an Icelandic work of the
+twelfth century, describes a mermaid with a “very horrible face” that
+haunts the deep near Greenland and before heavy storms is seen with
+fish in its hands. If it casts the fish toward the ship, it is an omen
+of death in the coming storm; if it casts the fish away from the ship
+it is a good omen. Hakluyt’s _Voyages_ tell of a monster, from the
+middle upward proportioned like a man and with a tawny skin, which was
+discovered near Bermuda in the sixteenth century. The clerks of the
+expedition put the account in writing, to be certified to the English
+king. “Presently after this,” it is recited, “for the space of sixteen
+days we had wonderful foule weather.” Knud Leems in his account of
+Danish Lapland asserted that horrible tempests followed the appearance
+of a merman and merwoman in those seas. The male, or hav-manden, was
+like a robust man with brown skin and long hair and beard; the female,
+or hav-fruen, had the human shape and hair and a ghastly visage.
+
+It appears that a merman, captured in the Baltic in 1531, lived for
+three days at the court of Sigismund, King of Poland, and there is a
+story that to determine ownership of another the King of Portugal and
+the Grand Master of the Order of St. James had a suit at law.
+
+Merolla tells of a ship’s crew in a South African port who saw at a
+distance “a sort of sea monsters like unto men” gathering herbs, with
+which they plunged into the sea. The sailors gathered herbs for them,
+and the grateful creatures “forthwith drew from the bottom of the sea a
+quantity of coral” and laid it in the place where the sailors had piled
+the herbs. Human perfidy ends a pretty story. The sailors spread a net
+to catch the mermen, who lifted it and fled.
+
+The purely animal quality predominates in other of the circumstantial
+accounts repeated of the mer people. A merman was captured off the
+coast of Suffolk in 1187, but escaped. Hendryk Hudson reports that his
+crew saw a mermaid near Nova Zembla, and “from the navel upward her
+back and breasts were like a woman’s,” while the tail was like the tail
+of a porpoise. In 1560 fishermen netted seven mermen and mermaids in
+the seas west of Ceylon; several Jesuit priests were witness thereto.
+Captain Weddell, the Antarctic explorer, records the sworn testimony
+of one of his crew that he had seen a creature with human form and the
+tail of a seal, and with red face and green hair. In the sea of Angola,
+says Pontoppidan, mermaids are heard to shriek and cry like women;
+negroes net and eat them, and their flesh is considered much like pork.
+Sigismundus ab Herbenstein had it from Muscovite sources that in the
+river Tachnin there was “a certain fish with head, eyes, nose, mouth,
+hands, feete and other members utterly of humane shape, and yet without
+any voyce, and pleasant to be eaten.” In Pinkerton’s _Voyages_ there
+is an account of the woman fish found “among the islands Boccias,” the
+flesh of which is “of excellent savour when eaten boiled like other
+meat, and which also serves to make highly savoury sausages.”
+
+The dugong, manatee, or sea cow has been called the Old Man of the
+Sea as well as the mermaid. It has figured in legends with a biblical
+background; the people about the Red Sea took these creatures for
+survivors or descendants of the army of Pharaoh that was drowned in
+pursuing the Israelitish host. The three mermaids that Columbus saw on
+his first voyage to the New World are supposed to have been of this
+species. When white men first came to America the manatees thronged the
+waters of Florida, but have since become nearly extinct there, although
+there is a protected herd in the Miami River.
+
+Reports of actual captures present the rationalization and degradation
+of the mermaid legend. The divine daughters of the deep with their
+lovely bodies and flowing hair become strange animals of the seal or
+cetacean species with ugly faces and bodies that may be converted into
+pork--sea apes, as the credulous and yet cautious Pontoppidan calls
+them. They grow so common that the _Aberdeen Almanac_ of 1688 predicts
+the periods when mermaids may be expected near the mouth of the Dee.
+
+Sir Humphrey Davy argued that if God had created the mermaid, her
+deficient means of locomotion and of self-defense would have left her
+a prey to the fish. Yet the seas would have been poorer of romance if
+the logic and poetry of men had not led them to correct, in ages more
+naïve, what seemed to them an oversight of their Maker.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX. The Peoples of Prodigy
+
+
+In his _True History_ Lucian relates what he is at pains to point out
+is a fictitious voyage to the moon and to various isles of the outer
+seas. Grotesque half-human beings people his narrative. There are grape
+vines, the upper parts of which have the shape of women, and these
+entwine themselves about his men. There are Hippogypi, or men carried
+upon vultures; Onoscileas, or ass-legged women, with long robes and a
+free manner of harlotry; Bucephali, or men with bulls’ heads and horns
+and lowing voices; Schorodomachi, or garlic-fighters; Psyllotoxotæ, or
+flea-archers; Acroconopes, or gnat-riders; cloud-centaurs, nut-eaters,
+pirates riding dolphins that neigh like horses, and a variety of other
+fantastic creatures. The Samosatan wrote, he says, “about such things
+as neither are nor ever can be.”
+
+Yet races of men very much like these were long supposed to live
+upon earth. Their descriptions are in the ancient histories, their
+habitats are defined in the classic geographies, their effigies are
+upon mediæval maps. As late as the century after Columbus, travelers
+were still coming upon them, and repeating the interrogatory of _The
+Tempest_, “What have we here, a man or a fish?” Perhaps twoscore of
+these imaginary tribes are better documented, and not so long ago were
+better known, than most of the tribes of real men and women upon the
+earth; the documents are on dusty shelves of the larger libraries.
+
+Some of the singular folk entered literature by the double gates of
+mistaken etymology and literal acceptance of figurative language.
+In the lineaments of others one discerns races that are still upon
+earth, but divested of the masks of fable. In the rest one sees the
+creative fancy of man following its natural bent--cartooning humanity
+by exaggerating a limb or feature or by eliminating it; borrowing
+something from the brute; making men taller or shorter, or longer-lived
+or shorter-lived, than reality; fashioning the moon calves, the
+Calibans; setting up a realm in which paradox is law. Thus mankind gave
+itself new and interesting neighbors.
+
+
+_Singular Speech_
+
+Men judge one another by the testimony of the ear as well as of the
+eye; and the speech of all these peoples, no less than their anatomy,
+proclaimed the law of paradox. Sometimes the surprise was in hearing
+Indian or Greek or Arab words from lips that seemed bestial rather
+than human. Often no words came at all, but only unintelligible animal
+sounds. This, indeed, was to be expected from races whose bodies varied
+from the normal; but the list of prodigious folk is lengthened by the
+addition of other men who, while looking like ordinary mortals, were
+not quite human in their speech.
+
+There were nations which used dumb-barter because they had no
+language. There were tribes in Ethiopia which, as Pliny says, “have
+to employ gesture by nodding the head and moving the limbs instead
+of speech.” On the Atlantic seaboard were troglodytes that “have no
+articulate voice, but only utter a kind of squeaking noise.” “Like the
+screeching of bats,” says Herodotus of the same people. Another tribe
+of troglodytes, according to John Lok, “have no speech, but rather a
+grinning and chattering.” The Arabians dwell in caves and have shrill,
+boyish voices, declares Jordanus. In the eastern mountains of Ind, says
+Tauron, are the Choromandæ, a forest folk with hairy bodies, canine
+teeth, and sea-green eyes who “screech in a frightful manner.” Kazwini
+speaks of hairy little men in Ramni with a speech like the chirping
+of birds. Carpini names among the peoples of Ind the dog-faced men
+who speak two words in human wise and bark for the third. There were
+people with a small hole in place of the mouth, whose conversation was
+a whistling. Among the isles of Maundeville is one “clept Traconda,
+where the Folk be as Beasts and unreasonable, and dwell in Caves; and
+they eat Flesh of Serpents, and they eat but little; and they speak
+Nought, but they hiss as Serpents do.” In a desert beyond paradise this
+authority says there are wild men “that be hideous to look on, for they
+be horned and they speak Nought, but they grunt as Pigs.” However,
+there was speech in that country, for “Popinjays speak of their own
+Nature and say ‘Salve’ to Men that go through the Deserts.”
+
+Neither classical nor mediæval relators mention the device which has
+given a South African tribe its name, and rumors of which may have
+provided a basis for fable. Merolla, who went to the Congo in 1682,
+heard that the Hottentots “have not the gift of human voice, but
+understand each other by a sort of hissing tone and motion of the
+lips.” This is the Hottentot “click” which the Portuguese called a kind
+of stammering and the Dutch likened to the turkey’s gobble. It is made
+by applying the tongue to the roof of the mouth, the teeth, or the
+gums, and suddenly drawing it back. There are four of these clicks--the
+dental, like the smack of a kiss; the palatal, like the tap of a
+woodpecker; the cerebral, like the pop of a cork; and the lateral, like
+the quack of a duck.
+
+
+_The Dog-headed People_
+
+The Amazon and pygmy, and certain tribes of the satyrs, had speech
+entirely human. Because in them credulity has won unlooked-for triumphs
+over skepticism, these three peoples, best known of the races of
+legend, are reserved for separate treatment later. The men of another
+race vie with the Amazons as figures in plastic art, although only
+in its more grotesque manifestations. The Cynocephali, or dog-headed
+people, writes Ctesias, are a swarthy and extremely just people living
+in the mountains of northern India at the sources of the Hyparkhos. The
+tribe numbers about one hundred and twenty thousand persons and pays
+tribute to the King of the Indians.
+
+These people have the heads of dogs, but with larger teeth, and the
+bodies of men; and they have dog claws. They cannot use human speech,
+although they understand it. They converse with one another by barking,
+and with other people by barking and the sign language. They practice
+no arts but live by the chase, using the bow and spear; and they can
+outrun wild animals. Their staple food is raw flesh, which, however,
+they roast in the sun. They rear numbers of sheep, goats, and asses
+and drink the milk and whey of the ewes. They are fond of the fruit of
+the siptakhora, the tree that produces amber. The surplus fruit they
+dry and pack in hampers as the Greeks pack raisins. Every year they
+freight rafts with the hampers and with two hundred and sixty talents
+weight of amber, and a like weight of a pigment which they make from
+a purple flower. This they convey as tribute to the Indian king. They
+ship other raft-loads of the same commodities to their neighbors,
+receiving bread and flour in return and a cloth made from a stuff grown
+on trees (cotton). They also sell arms to other peoples.
+
+The dog-headed people are troglodytes, sleeping on a litter of straw
+or leaves spread in caves. The women bathe once a month, the men not
+at all, merely washing their hands; but thrice a month they anoint
+themselves with butter. They are clad in skins and the richest have
+cotton raiment. Some of them live to be two hundred years old.
+
+The inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, says Marco Polo, are a
+savage race “having heads, eyes and teeth resembling those of the
+canine species”; and they kill and eat strangers. Odoric is equally
+uncomplimentary, but Ibn Batuta, always sensitive to female charm, says
+their naked wives are of exquisite beauty. Carpini speaks of India’s
+dog-faced men. Even Greenland has a similar legend as to an older race
+of barbarians who had magic, but not the bow and arrow. These were men
+with dog paws. They disappeared in battle with the Eskimos, or from
+natural causes, since “the world was too small to hold both races.”
+Myths of dog descent are found among the Aleuts, Dog-ribs, and Ojibwas
+in North America, as well as in Madagascar, Java, the Nicobars, New
+Guinea, Indo-China, and even Europe. In North America the wild dog
+(coyote) frequently figures as the creator of mankind.
+
+Sunamukha is the Indian name of the Cynocephali, and a manuscript of
+the Prabhâsakhanda recites that this people lives on the Indus. What
+Ctesias has set down seems to be an account of an actual race, a tribe
+of black aborigines.
+
+When Hayton, the intrepid traveler-king of Armenia, paid a visit in
+the thirteenth century to Batu, the Mongol prince, he brought back a
+related and still stranger story. Beyond Cathay, a journey of two years
+and two months from Nakin, was a country where the women had the human
+shape and speech, but the men were like hairy dogs and had no speech.
+These dog-men repelled all strangers from their land, and supported
+themselves and their wives by the chase, the men eating flesh raw, the
+women cooking it. When children were born, the males had the shape of
+dogs, the females that of women. The _Chinese Encyclopedia_ also has a
+tale of the Kingdom of Dogs, and it was a Chinese traveler who broke up
+this curious commonwealth. The women wished to escape from it and gave
+him little sticks, asking him, when he went back to his native land, to
+drop one of these every ten li. They got away by the trail he marked.
+
+
+_The One-Eyed Arimaspians_
+
+Lying between the gold-guarding griffins and the cannibal Issedones was
+the country of the one-eyed Arimaspians. They first appear in a poem
+of Aristeas of Proconesus, a semi-mythical person who made a northward
+journey, as his verses declare, in a mood of “bacchic fury.” Herodotus
+bases his account on these, but cannot persuade himself that there is
+a race of men born with one eye who in all else resemble the rest of
+mankind. Arimaspi, he says, is a word of Scythic origin, a compound of
+_arima_ (one) and _spou_ (eye).
+
+There Herodotus drops the legend, and after it has thriven in the tales
+of the fabulists for some thousands of years, modern criticism takes
+it up again from the same angle. It is suggested that, after all,
+Arimaspi never meant one-eyed, and that the race, the tradition of
+whose deformed aspect arose from a mistaken translation of its name, is
+still in existence in the Russian tribe known as the Tsheremis, which
+occupies the left bank of the Middle Volga. This is near enough to the
+Ural gold districts to meet the general topography of the legend.
+
+Strabo also describes a one-eyed nation, the Monomatti, with the ears
+of dogs, bristling hair, and shaggy breasts.
+
+
+_Folk That Live on Odors_
+
+The folk that live on odors dwell, says Megasthenes, near the sources
+of the Ganges. They have no mouths, hence their name of Astomi. Their
+bodies are rough and hairy and they clothe themselves with a down
+plucked from trees--silk or cotton. They use neither meat nor drink and
+subsist only by breathing and by inhaling scents. When they start on a
+long journey they lay in a supply of odoriferous roots, flowers, and
+apples. But, says Pliny, “an odor which is a little more powerful than
+usual easily destroys them.” Pope’s “die of a rose in aromatic pain”
+may define such a fate.
+
+According to other ancient writers the Astomi also supported life by
+sniffing at raw meat, and their susceptibility to rank smells made it
+hard to keep them alive in camp. In Ethiopia Pliny places a people
+that “have the mouth grown together, and being destitute of nostrils,
+breathe through one passage only, imbibing their drink through it by
+means of a hollow stalk of the oat, which there grows spontaneously and
+supplies them with its grain for food.” Maundeville removes the Astomi
+to an island and gives them the stature of pygmies and a hissing speech.
+
+
+_The Noseless Nations_
+
+There were several noseless nations. The flexible-footed Scyritae, says
+Megasthenes, had only two breathing orifices above the mouth; and he
+sketches pygmies similarly made. Maundeville improves on the sketch:
+“And in another Ile be Folk that have the Face all flat, all plain,
+without Nose and without Mouth.” In contrast still another island had
+“Folk of foul Fashion and Shape that have the lip above the Mouth so
+great that when they sleep in the Sun they cover all the Face with that
+lip.” Megasthenes had named and described these seventeen centuries
+before. They were the Amycteres, with upper lips projecting far beyond
+the lower--an omnivorous people, fond of raw meat, and short lived.
+Tudela tells of desert-ranging, infidel Turks who worship the wind,
+eschew bread and cooked meats, and, lacking noses, breathe through two
+small holes. The Noseless People of the Eskimo shore are evil spirits
+that drag fishermen to gloomy abodes under the sea.
+
+To men with the bold Roman profile, the Levantine contour, or the
+scimitar-shaped visage of the Sephardic Jew, Tartary’s small-nosed,
+flat-faced peoples would indeed present a countenance very like a plane
+surface. The scanty hair of the same peoples may be responsible for the
+ancient notion of bald northern nations. The Eskimo legend suggests a
+skeleton tenanted by a demon.
+
+
+_Large-eared Races_
+
+An Indian race called the Enotocoitæ had ears hanging down to their
+feet--“great Ears and long that hang down to their Knees” is for once
+the more restrained phrase of Maundeville. The philosophers who had
+told Megasthenes of so many interesting folk told him also of these.
+They could sleep upon their ears as upon a rug, or under them as under
+a canopy, or inside them as in a sleeping bag. These appendages were
+like winnowing fans, Tzetzes puts it. Their owners were so strong they
+could pluck up trees. So could the elephant, which also has flapping
+ears and a prolonged upper lip--the pattern, it would seem, for at
+least two fables.
+
+Ctesias describes a people who could blanket the upper parts of their
+bodies with their ears. These were the Pandore, a mountain race who
+lived to be two hundred years old, yet were destined evidently to
+become extinct, for they numbered only thirty thousand persons and the
+women bore children but once. The infants were hoary-headed at birth,
+but at thirty the hair began to turn black, and at sixty no white hairs
+were left. Five thousand bowmen and spearmen of the tribe followed the
+Indian king. There was even a Scandinavian tribe with all-enveloping
+ears, if Pliny had it right.
+
+
+_Headless Peoples_
+
+  The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
+  Do grow beneath their shoulders.
+  --SHAKESPEARE: _Othello_.
+
+To the west of the Troglodytes in distant mountains of Ind, says
+Ctesias, live tribesmen who are without necks and have eyes in their
+shoulders. In the north of Africa, says Pliny, are the Blemmyes who
+“are said to have no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their
+breasts.” These were also called the Acephalites. Maundeville shifts
+their habitat. They occupy one of fifty-four great isles under the
+jurisdiction of the king of Dondun. This island is somewhere toward the
+south of Asia. In it dwell “Folk of foul Stature and of cursed Nature
+that have no Heads. And their Eyes be in their Shoulders, and their
+Mouths be round shapen, like an Horse-shoe amidst their Breasts.” The
+_Arabian Nights_ locates these same people in the City of Brass. Abu
+Mohammed, hight Lazybones, in quest of his wife, who has been carried
+thither by a Marid, “heard a noise of cries and found himself in the
+midst of a multitude of folk whose eyes were in their breasts.” They
+gave him the news he sought and volunteered, “Now we be brethren of the
+white serpent.” The Eskimos speak of a headless people living in the
+moon and in remote regions of the earth.
+
+Here is a story of a curious race domiciled by various writers in
+various parts of the Old World, and yet lacking details to give it
+verisimilitude. These are supplied by Sir Walter Raleigh in his report
+on the wonders of Guiana. The headless people are Indians of the tribe
+of Ewaipanoma living in a district near the Orinoco. He has seen none
+of them, but “every childe in the provinces” affirms the story. Their
+eyes are in their shoulders, their mouths in the middle of their
+breasts, “and a long traine of haire groweth backward between their
+shoulders.” A chief’s son whom they had made a prisoner told Raleigh
+they were “the most mighty men of all the land, and use bowes, arrowes,
+and clubbes thrice as big as any of Guiana.” This confirms, concludes
+Raleigh, what was written of them by “Mandevile, whose reports were
+holden for fables many yeeres.”
+
+In the interior of Guiana Sir Walter had a trading transaction with
+a nation of kindred appearance. He bartered jew’s-harps for fowls at
+a town of five hundred houses, where he found Indians plentifully
+provisioned with venison, fowls, and wine. He asked their chief “whence
+hee had those Hennes.” The answer was that they were brought from a
+mountain less than a mile away, “where were many Indians, yea so many
+as grasse on the ground, and that these men had the points of their
+shoulders higher than the Crownes of their heads, and had so many
+Hennes as was wonderful; and if wee would have any wee should send them
+Jewes harpes, for they would give for every one two Hennes. Wee tooke
+an Indian, and gave him five hundred Harpes; the Hennes were so many
+that hee brought us, as were not to be numbered.” Raleigh wanted to
+visit these mountain Acephali, but was warned that they were in their
+drunken feasts and would kill him.
+
+One may explain the headless peoples about as one will. The Tartar
+tribes north of India certainly have short necks. Thus Pliny on the
+African Acephalites: “On the invasion of the Persians the Blemmyes were
+in the habit of falling on one knee and bowing the head to the breast,
+by which means, without injury to themselves, they afforded a passage
+to the horses of the enemy.” Buffon accepts and interprets the Raleigh
+tale. “This monstrous deformity cannot be natural,” he says. “It is
+probable that savages, who are so pleased in disfiguring nature by
+flattening, rounding, and lengthening the head, might likewise contrive
+to sink it into the shoulders. These fantasies might arise from an idea
+that, by rendering themselves deformed, they became more dreadful to
+their enemies.” This passage would have interested Sir Walter.
+
+
+_Half-men_
+
+There were people in the Philippines whose bodies suffered temporary
+subtraction at the other extremity. These were the asuangs--men who had
+acquired powers of sorcery by eating human livers. When they willed
+it their persons divided at the waist line, the lower part remaining
+behind and the upper growing wings and long nails and a horrible black
+tongue, and flying away on vampire errands. An orifice in the armpit
+contained an oil which rendered this human bat invisible. If salt was
+cast on his abandoned half he could not assemble himself on his return.
+Wak-wak was one of his names. The reality behind this grim fiction was
+the learned counselor, called the asuang, whom each datto had at his
+court before the Spaniards came. His evil repute is a Spanish slander.
+
+If there were men whose stature had been reduced as by a transverse
+sweep of the knife, there were others whose appearance was as if they
+had been sliced. These were the half-men of Moslem legend called the
+Shikh and the Nesnas, each with a single arm, leg, and eye, as though
+one man had been split in twain. The Zulus had the same story, perhaps
+from Moslem sources. They tell of half-men discovering a Zulu girl in
+a cave and thinking her two persons. When they discovered their error
+they exclaimed: “The thing is pretty! But, oh, the two legs!” The fable
+may have sprung from figurative speech, in which men of backward
+culture are described as only half-men.
+
+
+_Diminutive Husbands_
+
+American Eskimo legends tell of a tribe called Ardnainiq living far
+to the northwest, whereof the men, small as children and covered with
+hair, were carried around in the hoods of their wives, who were of
+normal size. The detail oddly parallels Darwin’s statement that he had
+found a female crustacean of the common cirripedial character, “and in
+two valves of her shell she had two little pockets, in each of which
+she kept a little husband.”
+
+
+_Eel-like Men_
+
+A race of eel-like men, says Julius Scaliger, dwell in Malabar. They
+have the serpent’s form, are eight feet long, and, while of horrible
+aspect, are harmless unless provoked. They will “stand bolt upright for
+hours together, gazing on the boyes at their sportes, never offring to
+hurte any of them.” In the upright posture they lose the likeness of
+serpents and “spread themselves into such a corpulent breadthe, that
+had they feet they would seeme to be men.” This is a tale brought to
+Europe by the Portuguese; and at a time when it was debated whether the
+serpent assumed a human form in tempting Eve, it was thought this might
+be the creature whose body Satan borrowed.
+
+The tale is based in part on the cobra’s power to dilate its neck
+into a broad hood. Back of it are Buddhist traditions of the Nagas, a
+race of serpents that lived in dragon palaces under the earth. There
+were naga-kings, and naga-maidens who assumed human form, had their
+mortal lovers, and became the founders of dynasties. The original
+inhabitants of the Andamans were reputed to have been of this race, and
+according to a popular belief their descendants were oviparous. The
+interpretation of this legend is complicated by the surmise that the
+Nagas were actually an ancient, non-Aryan people whose emblem was the
+cobra.
+
+
+_Strangely Footed Folk_
+
+Certain races the ancients classified and named according to their
+means of getting over the ground. With his instinct for balanced
+statement Pliny unearths a passage from Eudoxus which says that “in
+the southern parts of India” the men have feet a cubit in length,
+“while those of the women are so remarkably small that they are
+called Struthopodes.” The word may mean either “sparrow-footed” or
+“ostrich-footed.” In the context it probably means the former; the
+dames with diminutive feet hopped around as sparrows do. It may be they
+were Chinese women.
+
+Near the Indian troglodytes, according to Ctesias, dwelt the Monocoli,
+who had only one leg, but were able to leap with surprising agility.
+These people were also called the Sciapodes, which means “making a
+shadow with the foot.” It was their custom in the time of extreme heat
+to lie on their backs and shield themselves from the sun, each under
+the shade of his own foot. A later century knew the shadow-footed folk
+as the men with parasol feet. Maundeville places them in Ethiopia. In
+Armenia, or bordering upon it, the Mongols found another one-legged
+nation, but with different structure. Its citizens had only one arm
+also, which was attached to the middle of the breast, but they had
+two gaits. Hopping, they covered ground with remarkable speed, and
+when tired of hopping the men and women whirled themselves around like
+cartwheels.
+
+When the Norsemen were exploring America, they encountered a Uniped,
+or one-legged man, who launched a lethal arrow at Thorwald Ericson, as
+he sat at the boat helm. The dying leader drew it out and exclaimed,
+“There is fat around my paunch; we have hit upon a faithful country,
+and yet we are not like to get much profit by it.”
+
+The stiff-legged men, Carpini heard, lived south of the country of the
+Kara-Khitai, upon a great desert. They had no speech and no joints in
+their limbs, and when they fell down somebody had to help them up. They
+wore felt of camel’s hair and made wind shelters thereof. When wounded
+in battle they stanched the blood with grass and fled swiftly away.
+
+A related tale is told by Rubruquis, who had it from “a certain priest
+of Cathaya who sat with me clothed in a red-coloured cloth.” When the
+friar asked him whence he had such a color, “he told me that in the
+east part of Cathaya there were high craggy rocks, wherein certain
+creatures dwell, having in all parts the shape of men, but that they
+bow not the knees, but leap instead of walking; which are not above one
+cubit long, and their whole body is covered with hair, who have their
+abode in caves, which no man can come unto; and they who hunt them, go
+to them, and carry strong drink with them, and make pits in the rocks
+like wells, which they fill with that strong drink. The hunters hide
+themselves, and then these creatures come out of their holes and taste
+the drink, and cry ‘chin-chin’ and drink till they are made drunk, so
+that they sleep there. Then the hunters come and bind them hand and
+foot, while they are sleeping, and afterwards open the veins in their
+neck and draw forth three or four drops of blood from every one, and
+let them go free; and that blood, as he told me, is the most precious
+purple.”
+
+Megasthenes describes a race of Indians living upon a mountain called
+Nulo, who had their feet turned backward with the heel in front and
+with eight toes on each foot. Pliny places this race “beyond the
+other Scythian Anthropophagi in a country called Abarimon situate in
+a certain great valley of Mount Imaus” (Himalayas). They had great
+rapidity of movement and wandered about indiscriminately with the wild
+beasts. The fable may have originated in the Caucasus, where there is
+still a tradition that dæmons take the shapes of armed men, and have
+their feet reverted. Farther north dwelt an ox-footed race.
+
+Classic note is made of two writhing nations. The Scyritæ of India who
+“have merely holes in their faces instead of nostrils” have “flexible
+feet like the body of the serpent,” says Megasthenes. There was also
+the thong-footed people or Himantopodes, residents of northern Africa,
+who moved with a serpentine, crawling gait. This may be a traveler’s
+impression of some sinuous dance of the desert.
+
+Under the hand of Maundeville the centaurs pass out of mythology into
+history. The “Folk that have Horses’ Feet” are in his collection of
+marvelous islanders: “And they be strong and mighty and swift Runners,
+for they take wild Beasts with Running and eat them.” These are the
+Hippopodes of Pliny, tenants of a Baltic island. A related folk are
+the islanders permanently mounted on ostriches, with which they seem
+to form one body. Kazwini, who records this Arab legend, says they
+devour the bodies of drowned persons cast up by the sea. On another
+isle Sir John seems for the once to have invented a people rather than
+revived a legend. Here be “Folk that go always upon their Knees full
+marvellously. And at every Pace that they go, it seemeth that they
+would fall.”
+
+In Ethiopia, “on that side of the Nile which extends along the borders
+of the Southern Ocean,” Pliny domiciles the Artabatitæ, who have four
+feet and wander about after the manner of wild beasts. Maundeville is
+more detailed: “And they be all skinned and feathered, and they would
+leap lightly from Tree to Tree.” Farther south were the Aigamuxa, theme
+of a Hottentot story cycle, whose eyes were in the back of their feet.
+Regarding human beings as zebras, they hunted them down and tore them
+to pieces.
+
+Chinese marvel tales describe a race of people living somewhere in the
+west. They have a hole right through their bodies at the breast. When
+their mandarins would take the air, they thrust a stick through the
+aperture, and two domestics carry them so. “If the bearers are strong
+enough,” says Huc, “they often string on several gentlemen at once.”
+
+
+_In the Russian East_
+
+There was an east other than the sun-bathed lands whose fabulous
+peoples are in literature. It lay just beyond northern Europe, on the
+farther flanks of the Urals and beside the Obi. To the Russians of the
+Middle Ages it was a land of strange races and weird happenings. About
+these a body of legends grew up which in a measure parallel the classic
+stories, but give them backgrounds of ice and snow and add new actors
+and enriching details. A Russian manuscript of the fifteenth century,
+found at Novgorod a few years ago and entitled “The Unknown Peoples of
+the East,” pictures these forgotten folk. Nine different races, all
+called Samoyeds, are described, and six are races of marvel.
+
+There were Samoyeds who shed their skins like snakes. For a month each
+year they stayed in the water, avoiding dry land, lest their bodies
+crack open. The Russian anthropologist, Professor Anutschin, whose
+interpretation of the narrative is followed here, says that these
+are natives who fish and hunt in the watery domain of the tundras,
+where the summer attacks of mosquitoes and horse flies give their
+skins a rough and bloody aspect, as if cracking before sloughing off.
+There were also Samoyeds like other people from the navel up, but all
+shaggy-haired from the navel down--in reality wearing trousers of
+reindeer skins with the hair outside. There were other and speechless
+Samoyeds with their mouths on the top of their heads. When they would
+eat, says the Novgorod manuscript, “they crumble the meat or fish,
+stick it under their fur caps and then move their shoulders up and
+down.” This is the account of a people whose speech the Russians did
+not understand, who wore the head skin of the reindeer, ears and all,
+for a cap, and whose sack-like garments had collars so high as to
+conceal their mouths.
+
+There were also headless Samoyeds with eyes in their breasts and the
+mouth between the shoulders, and their diet was raw reindeer heads and
+bones; in warfare and the chase their weapon was an iron tube through
+which they drove an iron arrow by hitting it with a hammer. This, it
+is thought, was an early race of ironworkers who wore peaked head-caps
+which concealed the shoulder line and made the face of the wearer seem
+to be in the breast. Another explanation is that several Siberian
+tribes had faces painted on the leathern fronts of their garments.
+The descriptive phrase, “with the face upon the breast,” might easily
+become “headless” when translated into Russian.
+
+Then there was a strange Samoyed race--an independent creation of
+Russian fantasy--the members of which died every winter and revived
+two months afterward, if let alone. When the fatal hour had come, they
+sat down and a stream of water gushed from their nostrils and froze to
+the ground. If a stranger came from another land and broke this icicle
+or removed it, the Samoyed never woke up. If he merely jarred it, the
+refrigerated native would open his eyes and ask, “Why, little friend,
+have you disfigured me?” Others were brought to life by the warmth
+of the spring sun. According to a German writer the day of death was
+November twenty-seven and revival came on the twenty-third day of the
+following April. It is supposed that the wooden idols scattered over
+the Obi country, three hundred of them on a single river island, were
+the basis of this curious story. Covered with ice and drifted snow,
+they looked human enough, and there were native reports that these were
+ancestral Samoyeds.
+
+[Illustration: _The First People Engaged in Such Cosmic Adventures as
+Warfare Against Stone Giants_]
+
+One race of Samoyeds, says the Novgorod manuscript, travels day and
+night with torches by underground ways and comes out upon a sea over
+which a strange light falls and beside which is a great fortress and
+a deserted city. When the stranger approaches he hears a tumult in
+the streets, but, entering, he sees no one and the clamor dies away.
+In each house, however, there are things for him to eat and drink,
+and other commodities. He takes what he needs, lays down money in its
+stead, and goes his way. Should he fail to make payment, the wares
+he takes with him vanish and return to the silent town. And when the
+stranger leaves, “then he hears again a tumult as in other inhabited
+cities.”
+
+This story has the Celtic magic and might be a chapter from Malory.
+It is thought that the mysterious sea is Lake Koliwan in the western
+Altais. Granite rocks in the semblance of towers, terraces, and
+dismantled fortifications rise from its shores, and in the hills are
+the pits and galleries of a copper camp long abandoned by the Tchudi.
+These are the underground Samoyed ways of legend. Perhaps dumb barter
+was once carried on here. The radiance across the lake, if not the
+northern lights, may have glanced from some Russian tale, like that in
+which Bishop Theodor saw the earthly paradise on a mountain side with
+an azure light upon it.
+
+
+_New World Prodigies_
+
+The New World, it has been seen, had its own prodigious peoples. In
+Spanish America their legends are overlaid with imported material, but
+elsewhere there is little alien alloy. North America has traditions
+of stone giants, pygmies, one-eyed cannibals, hermaphrodites,
+flint-armored warriors, double-headed men, dog-headed tribes. There are
+also storm-raising mermen, phantom boatmen, underwater folk, otter-men,
+seal-men, pug-nosed people, skeletons that resume human shape at night,
+talking skulls. Many stories tell of the marriage of mortals with
+unearthly beings, of the living with the dead, and of the union of
+women with animals. The best known Indian myth has two versions, in
+one of which the people of the First Age had human forms but an animal
+nature, and took the animal guise before the real men appeared; in the
+other, which is of the southwest, the first people had bestial forms
+but a human nature, and presently laid aside their animal masks. In
+the latter version there was an Amazonian phase in the ascent of the
+primitive people. Their women seceded from society and lived with a
+water monster. Hunger drove them back, but they brought into the world
+a number of prodigious beings whom their lords had to destroy.
+
+In the First People who had the human form but became animals the
+Eastern Algonquins and the Pacific tribes have a myth which ranks
+beside the Greek myth of the Titans that were before Zeus, and
+the myths of the Golden Age. Its quality is at once haunting and
+challenging, the more so because these dawn-folk are nowhere described.
+“In old times,” a Micmac Indian told Leland, “men were as animals and
+animals as men; how this was no one knows. But it is told that all were
+at first men, and as they gave themselves up to this and that desire,
+and to naught else, they became beasts. But before this came to pass,
+they could change to one or the other form; yet even as men there was
+always something which showed what they were.”
+
+The story cycle of the Mewan Indians of California pictured the First
+People as living in great ceremonial houses and engaging in such cosmic
+adventures as sun-capture, fire-theft, and warfare against stone
+giants. How nearly human and how much animal they were the Western
+Indians left in doubt. When they became animals and went forth from
+the ceremonial house, they carried to their future haunts not only
+their old names, but their distinctive traits, such as Grizzly Bear’s
+appetite for acorns, Frog’s aptitude at water jumps and the clamorous
+voice of Sandhill Crane. After the transformation was effected--and
+only casual reasons for it are suggested--man was created. Coyote made
+him out of feathers, or sticks, or clay, and Lizard gave him five
+fingers because he had five himself and knew their value. In Popol
+Vuh, the Guatemalan saga, the First People were manikins that the
+gods carved out of wood and endowed with life; but so frivolous and
+irreverent were these that a flood was invoked to destroy them; “the
+little monkeys that live in the woods” are descended from survivors.
+
+All over North America were stories of stone giants, and crudely
+archaic as are these stalking figures of legend, the myth has the
+elemental vigor of Norse epic. According to the Iroquois, a cannibal
+race--“stonish giants,” Schoolcraft calls them--who made their bodies
+hard by rolling in sand, overran America seventeen centuries ago, and
+nearly exterminated the natives. The Holder of the Heavens took giant
+form in order to destroy them. These are the icy-hearted Chenoos of
+Algonquin story who lived in northern Canada; in summer they rubbed
+themselves with fir balsam and rolled on the ground so that moss,
+leaves, and twigs adhered to them. The California Indians have tales of
+a cannibal rock-giant who went abroad with a rock basket on his back
+into which he tossed people. There was another stony Titan, tall as a
+pine tree but vulnerable under the heel. Only after the First People
+had killed him by planting sharp sticks in his path did they elect to
+become animals. The theory that these clanking folk typify mountains is
+not convincing.
+
+Maundeville has a tale of a bodiless head, but North America is the
+true home of this weird legend. Glooskap, culture hero of the Eastern
+Algonquins, played at ball with a snapping skull. There were Indians
+who went all to pieces leaving only the head, which ate the other
+members. Everywhere stories were told of heads that pursued people and
+devoured them. The skull of a mother chased her children over hill and
+plain. In nightmare flight the heroes of Indian epic cast obstacles or
+attractive things behind them to delay or divert the rolling skull.
+Reading a new meaning into the legend, the Arapahoes used it to explain
+the railroad.
+
+A Sioux story describes a duel between the Monster and the Bladder,
+twin sons of the Turtle. They kept striking off each other’s heads,
+and these flew into the sky and, falling back, adhered again to their
+necks. But at length Bladder pushed Monster’s body aside, and the head
+rebounded, and to this day it rebounds, for it is the sun, and Bladder
+is the sky; but only to old men or wise is this part of the story told.
+It may be that these tales derive from the conception of the sun and
+moon as traveling heads, or from the use of a skull as tribal medicine,
+or from the war custom of decapitation later supplanted by scalping,
+or even from the appearance of the tumbleweed of the western prairies,
+which wanders like a ball before the autumn wind.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X. The Satyrs
+
+
+The tail is a symbol of the animal nature. Stories of tailed humans are
+found all over the world. They signify a belief that certain races of
+men are descended from the apes, or that the apes are descended from
+certain races of men. Both beliefs have been stressed in the modern
+debate on evolution; yet neither is new. They are almost the oldest of
+the philosophical myths. They trace back to primitive animism--to the
+notion that animals are endowed with human intelligence, can understand
+the speech of men, and may well be propitiated with worship. Early
+man accepted them as cousins. He could change natures with them, and
+sometimes it seemed to him he did. Père Lafitau said of his American
+flock, “These men are living in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”
+
+Sometimes men were content enough with this kinship, erecting it into
+totemism, wearing the tail of the buffalo or horse as an emblem of
+power. Sometimes they were ashamed of it. They plucked off all hair
+from their bodies, because animals were hairy, and resented it when
+their women bore them twins, because the young of animals came in
+litters instead of singly. Constantly they confused brute and human
+nature, using identical terms of neighbor folk, whether these were
+apes or men. The confusion was carried over into literature. One
+African tribe was said to have an ape king. There are passages in which
+travelers seem to themselves to be speaking of men while to their
+readers it is evident they are speaking of monkeys. There are other
+passages in which they set out to describe monkeys, yet draw pictures
+of men like themselves, but of more primitive cast. The creatures
+called satyrs embody this confusion and the sense of kinship behind it.
+
+According to Isidore, the satyrs have done something to make their own
+nature clear. One of them, he says, appearing to St. Anthony in the
+desert, explained, “I am mortal, one of the inhabitants of the waste,
+whom the heathen, misled by error, worship as the Fauns and Satyrs.”
+He pictures them as manikins with upturned noses, horns on their
+foreheads, and goat feet.
+
+The heathen world, however, never was quite sure what it meant by
+the satyrs. If it be true that the fable began with ritual mummers
+who donned the nature of fertility dæmons when they put on the heads
+of asses, horses, or goats, and danced in them--as men still do--the
+memory of this was forgotten. The satyrs were supposed to be spirits,
+half human, half bestial, that haunted woodland and mountain side
+and fellowshipped with Pan and Dionysus. They had bristly hair, flat
+noses, and pointed ears, with two small horns, and a tail like that of
+a horse or goat. Earlier Greek art represented them as ugly, withered,
+and ape-like. But Attic sculpture in the time of Praxiteles shows them
+with the beast nature well-nigh submerged--graceful figures instinct
+with poetry. They took over the attributes of the kindred sileni, and
+as Roman influence grew they were confounded with the fauns and were
+depicted as half men and half goats. In Scripture they are the “hairy
+ones” of Hebrew folklore, a sort of demon of waste places. So is the
+word intended in the prophecy of Isaiah as to Babylon: “Wild beasts of
+the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful
+creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.”
+
+Satyrs, as the ancients conceived them, were a wanton, music-loving,
+merry-hearted and yet timid folk, their symbol the hare. They roved
+about, drinking, dancing to the pipe and cymbal, pursuing the nymphs,
+killing the cattle of men and making love to their women. Men feared
+them, as embodying the loneliness of waste places, feared them with the
+sudden panic fear, which the apparition of their leader, the leering
+goat-god, always excited. Equally, the shy creatures feared men, but
+not women. Gradually these timid spirits moved out of mythology into
+geography. There were satyr isles, and there were satyr tribes in
+distant mountains and deserts, alike in Africa, India, and the spaces
+of the sea. Always they were described as avoiding contact with men,
+screening themselves in the thickets and seen only from afar. The
+satyrs of western Africa, says Pliny, “beyond their figure have
+nothing in common with the manners of the human race.” Ælian speaks of
+Indian satyrs that have human features, that go sometimes on four feet
+and sometimes on two and are too swift to be caught.
+
+[Illustration: A SATYR _By_ Jacob Jordaens]
+
+Thus the classic conception of this creature passes from spirits of
+the waste to tailed men, to apes, retracing the path which Greek art
+followed from simian beings to spirits of the waste. These were the
+wild men and wild women whom Herodotus locates in western Africa.
+Hanno, the Carthaginian explorer, had been before him. His narrative
+tells of finding an island full of wild people on the west coast of
+Africa: “For the greater proportion were women, whose bodies were
+covered with hair, and whom our interpreters called Gorillæ. Though we
+pursued the men, we could not catch any of them, since all fled from
+us, escaping over the precipices and defending themselves with stones.
+However, we took three women, but they attacked their conductors with
+their hands and teeth, and could not be prevailed on to accompany us.
+We therefore killed and flayed them and brought their skins with us to
+Carthage,” where they were hung up in the temple of Juno.
+
+This narrative betrays the ancient confusion as to the satyrs’ real
+nature. They are described as wild men and women, and it would even
+seem that the Carthaginians undertook to reason with their captives;
+but their captors killed and skinned them, as they certainly would not
+have done to creatures they deemed to be of their species. The terms
+gorilla and orang-utan both mean men-of-the-woods. They are borne by
+large apes, but when the Malays speak of the orang-utan they mean a
+savage and not a simian.
+
+The Hindu term for man-of-the-woods is bunmanus, and here is a Hindu
+sketch of him. “The bunmanus is an animal of the monkey kind. His face
+has a near resemblance to the human; he has no tail and walks erect.
+The skin of his body is black, and slightly covered with hair.” Then
+the account proceeds to enumerate the dialects of the peninsula and
+includes among them “the jargon of the bunmanus.” These animals of the
+monkey kind are really the dark-skinned, non-Aryan aborigines.
+
+A Portuguese manuscript cited by Tylor tells of an Indian tribe in
+Brazil called the Cuatas. “This populous nation,” it says, “dwells
+east of the Juruena, in the neighborhood of the rivers San Joao and
+San Thome. It is a very remarkable fact that the Indians composing it
+walk naturally like the quadrupeds, with their hands on the ground;
+they have the belly, breast, arms, and legs covered with hair, and are
+of small stature; they are fierce, and use their teeth as weapons;
+they sleep on the ground, or among the branches of trees; they have no
+industry, nor agriculture, and live only on fruits, wild roots, and
+fish.” The author of this account seemed not to know that the coata he
+was describing was an ape and not a man.
+
+Customs of speech and sometimes motives of self-interest have shaded
+the differences between the two species. The belief is widely held,
+both in Africa and in South America, that apes know how to talk, but
+hold their peace lest they be put to work, as it seems they were put
+to work in gathering the fig harvest in ancient Egypt and perhaps in
+ceremonial processions as torch-bearers. On the other hand, sailors,
+pioneer colonists, and slave dealers betray a tendency to rate the
+savages among whom they are thrown, and whom they may wish to exploit,
+as little, if any, above the brutes.
+
+It has become almost a principle of ethnology, wherever a story of
+a neighboring race of tailed men is current, to look for a tribe of
+aborigines who have been dispossessed by men of a higher culture. Thus
+the conqueror asserts his contempt, and justifies his treatment, of the
+conquered. The latter may accept it in good part and admit a monkey
+descent. The Marawars of South India trace their lineage back to Rama’s
+monkeys, and the Kathkuri avow an ape ancestry. Even the Jaitwas of
+Rajputana, although classed as Rajputs, derive, they say, from the
+monkey-god, Hanuman, and allege that their princes have still a vestige
+of tails. There are tribes in Tibet and in the mountains of the Malay
+peninsula whose traditions tell of ape progenitors.
+
+By a sort of poetic justice, savages sometimes tell a like story about
+civilized men. Why should these wear so much clothing if there were
+not something they wanted to conceal? In the Land of Lamary, says
+Maundeville, men and women go all naked, “and they scorn when they see
+any strange Folk going clothed,” hinting that these are not formed
+as are other men. Captain Cook was not the only explorer to tell of
+natives demanding that the white men strip so that it might be seen if
+they were everywhere of the human kind. Buchanan gives this account in
+his Indian travels:
+
+“When I passed through among the gardens near houses, I have observed
+the women squatting down behind the mud walls, in order to satisfy
+their curiosity by viewing a stranger. When they thought that I
+observed them, they ran away in a fright. This does not arise from the
+rules of caste in Malabar requiring the Hindu women to be confined,
+for that is by no means the case; but in the interior parts of North
+Malabar the Nairs, being at enmity with Europeans, have persuaded the
+women that we are a kind of hobgoblins who have long tails, in order to
+conceal which we wear breeches. The women and children are therefore
+afraid of Europeans.”
+
+Stories of man’s descent to the ape match stories of the ape’s ascent
+into man. One of these is recited in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, where
+for their treachery Jove degrades the Cercopes. A Moslem legend tells
+of Solomon passing through the Valley of Apes, between Jerusalem and
+Mareb, and finding monkeys dwelling in the houses, wearing the clothes,
+and using the speech of men. The river which flowed by their city
+had been full of fish, they said, and these showed themselves freely
+on the Sabbath day, trusting to the Jewish fishermen to keep the
+Commandments. The temptation proved too strong, and for their offense
+of Sabbath-breaking Jehovah turned all the citizens into apes.
+
+There is a Zulu story of a lazy tribe of negroes who would not dig the
+soil. Their chief led them into the wilderness, where the pick handles
+which had hung useless at their backs became tails, and they themselves
+baboons.
+
+In both hemispheres there are legends of cross-breeding between the
+human and the simian species. The Quoyas Morrov, or wood-man of Angola,
+which was sent to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, was supposed by
+his age to have an ape father or an ape mother. The First People of
+Central American myth were manikins who became monkeys, and Count
+Castelnau repeats a story by Father Ribeiro, a Carmelite missionary,
+of a tribe of tailed Indians in the Amazonian region, whose descent
+was from both apes and men. In British Central Africa, says Sir Harry
+H. Johnston, the negro women profess to go in terror of the large male
+baboons, and it is a fact that these animals will descend upon parties
+of unarmed women, but only if they are carrying well-filled market
+baskets.
+
+The forests of South America are haunted by two legendary creatures of
+related natures, in whom the myths of tailed men return to their Greek
+originals. One of these is the salvaje, or hairy man-of-the-woods,
+of whom Humboldt first heard among the cataracts of the Amazon. This
+creature, the natives, planters, and missionaries were agreed, carried
+off women, constructed huts, and sometimes ate human flesh. For five
+years, everywhere the explorer traveled in the Americas, the story
+followed him, and he was censured for doubting it. He surmises that the
+legend is decked out with features taken from African ape-lore, but
+adds that it may be that the man-of-the-woods, if not some rare ape, is
+one of the large bears, the footsteps of which resemble a man’s, and
+which are believed in every country to attack women.
+
+“Father Gili,” says Humboldt, “gravely relates the history of a lady
+in the Llanos of Venezuela, who so much praised the gentle character
+and attentions of the man-of-the-woods. She is stated to have lived
+several years with one in great domestic harmony, and only requested
+some hunters to take her back because she and her children (a little
+hairy, also) were weary of living far from the church and sacraments.”
+A Spanish author wonders, however, if the fable of the man-of-the-woods
+has not sprung from the artifice of Indian women who pretended to have
+been carried off in default of a better excuse for long absences from
+their husbands.
+
+The other legendary creature is the Curupira, or Diable Boiteux. Among
+the noises of the Brazilian forest that used to startle Bates was “a
+sound like the clang of an iron bar against a hard, hollow tree, or a
+piercing cry.” This was never repeated, and the silence that followed
+tended to deepen the unpleasant impression. With the natives it was
+always the Curupira, the wild man or spirit of the forest, that made
+these inexplicable sounds. “Sometimes,” says Bates, “he is described as
+a kind of orang-otang, covered with long, shaggy hair, and living in
+trees. At others he is said to have cloven feet and a bright red face.
+He has a wife and children, and sometimes comes down to the rocas to
+steal the mandioca.”
+
+All accounts agree that the Curupira is not footed like normal men. He
+is lame, with one foot larger than the other, or his feet turn backward
+so that his trail deceives. He is bald and dwarfish, with hairy person,
+huge ears, and blue-green teeth, and he rides a deer, a rabbit, or a
+pig. The spirit of the wood, the guardian of all wild things, he is
+beneficent or mischievous, as occasion or mood offers. He insists that
+game shall be killed, not maimed, merely, and for a gift of tobacco he
+will return lost cattle. Where the forest is darkest, sometimes he will
+appear in friendly but treacherous human guise, luring hunters from the
+path and at last vanishing in mocking laughter. When the hunter sees
+footprints of unequal size on the woodland trail ahead, if he is well
+advised he will hasten back, and avoid the forest for weeks afterward.
+
+Farther north one finds again the tracks of this strange old man,
+or of beings like him. The Maidu Indians of California tell of the
+Chamlakhu, a bearded ancient with clawlike hands and feet who lived
+in trees; running on the ground, his gait was shambling and his arms
+fanned the air like wings. The Indians of Costa Rica tell of a king of
+the tapirs, a man of stately bearing, who rebukes hunters that kill
+out of wantonness. Among the Indians of Guatemala there are stories
+of a forest sovereign and protector of game whom the ladinos call the
+Sombreron, from the enormous hat which he wears. Short and sturdy of
+figure, he rides his domain astride a deer. He has a rustic stronghold,
+and a hunter following a wounded deer once came upon it. The Sombreron
+was swinging in a hammock in the courtyard. He led the hunter to an
+inclosure in which were many deer. Pointing out the wounded animal, he
+said, “Kill it, but another time shoot better and do not torture my
+subjects.”
+
+This creature is Arcadian Pan, master of the satyrs, generative dæmon
+of the flocks and herds, somehow an emigrant to the New World. The
+Filipinos call him the Tig-balang, picture him with long ears, legs of
+grasshopper slenderness, and goat hoofs, and know him for a treacherous
+jungle guide. The Russians call him the Lesiy. He guards their forests,
+misleads wanderers, removes boundary stones and sign-posts. It is he
+that makes the echo. Shouting and whistling in his domain he cannot
+abide. A bearded, shaggy, green-eyed old man, he yet entices girls into
+his thickets, whence after a long time they may escape, but with honor
+forfeited; and he substitutes his stupid changelings for the children
+of men. The same or a like figure is Tapio, “the golden king of the
+forest” in Finnish magic songs. Wild animals are his flocks and herds,
+his queen is the charcoal wife, the bear is his bastard son, and he
+lives in Brushwood Town.
+
+Satyr geography covers a good many countries and centuries and
+specifically includes at least one civilized race. It was long the
+vulgar belief upon the Continent that Englishmen had tails. This was
+first the story that the people of one shire told about another, and
+its birthplace was Kent. Kentishmen, according to their neighbors,
+were tailed, as a punishment for one or the other of two acts of
+sacrilege. Their first offense was committed, says Bailey, when they
+were still pagans. They abused “Austin the monk and his associates, by
+beating them and opprobriously tying fish tails to their backsides; in
+revenge of which such appendants grew to the hind parts of all that
+generation.” The second offense was against Thomas À Becket when it was
+noised abroad that he was out of favor with Henry II. The inhabitants
+of Strood cut off the tail of his horse, and by the will of God, says
+Polydore Vergil, “all their offspring were born with tails like brute
+animals”; not until their race was extinct did tailed men pass from
+Kent.
+
+Pliny numbers among the nations of India “men born with long hairy
+tails, and of remarkable swiftness of foot. In Indo-China, southwest
+of Yunnan, were the Tailed Pu mentioned in the _Sung Geography_. Ma
+Tuan-Lin allows them tails from three to four inches long and classes
+them among anthropophagi who eat their aged relatives. The Yao, a
+subtribe of the Miaotze, have tails like monkeys, their neighbors say.
+They live in leaf lodges or caves in the Lipo district south of the
+Nanling range, and access to their habitations is by bamboo ladders.
+Yet they are skillful weavers and musicians.
+
+[Illustration: _Men Feared Them, as Embodying the Loneliness of Waste
+Places_]
+
+There are numerous reports of tailed tribes in the large islands of
+the East. Marco Polo speaks of “a kind of wild men” in Sumatra, in
+the kingdom of Lambri, with hairless tails a palm in length. The
+_Merveilles de L’Inde_ tells of tailed cannibals on the west coast
+of Sumatra, and Galvano has an account of Sumatrans with tails like a
+sheep’s. The fifteenth century _History of the Ming Dynasty_ pictures
+the Borneo village of Wu-lung-li-tan and its tailed citizens. When
+they see other men approaching they flee with their hands over their
+faces. The resemblance of the name to orang-utan, or “wild men,” will
+not escape notice. Colonel Yule tells of a trader who had examined the
+tails of a tribe on the northeast coast of Borneo. These appendages
+were long and so stiff that the natives had to use perforated seats;
+Arab, Malay, and native travelers report having seen them squatting
+on these little stools. John Struys, a Dutch traveler in Formosa, saw
+there in 1677 a man with a tail “more than a foot long, covered with
+red hair, and very like a cow’s.” The man said the tail was the effect
+of climate and all the natives on the southern side of the island had
+them.
+
+There were two archipelagoes known as the Satyr Islands. Ptolemy
+mentions one of them, and Gerini identifies it with the Northern
+Anambas lying off the Indo-Chinese mainland. Hsi-tung, supposed to
+be a transcript of Syatan, was their name of old; the resemblance of
+Syatan to the Greek Satyron may have led Levantine sailors to make this
+jest at the expense of ill-favored little people living then in the
+Anamba group. To reach the other archipelago one must steer through
+the Pillars of Hercules in company with a Carian sailor of the second
+century. Him Pausanias asked what he knew about the satyrs. The Carian
+replied that in a voyage to Italy he was driven from his course to
+a distant sea whither people no longer sail. Here were many islands
+which the crew did not care to touch, and these they called the Satyr
+Islands. Their inhabitants were red-haired and had tails not much
+smaller than a horse’s.
+
+Many African tribes wore animal tails for ornament, and explorers were
+sometimes misled by the custom. The Duir of the northeast attached two
+antelope tails to their girdles. The Wa-Kavorondo, east of the Nyanza,
+go naked or wear only a waist-cloth, and the women attach to it a tail
+of bark. In the same quarter of Africa the Bongo women, with their
+large hips and lubricious gait, have had a share in propagating fable,
+for they, too, ornament themselves with tails; and as they stride along
+they swing these about in conscious emulation of the flocks and herds.
+Schweinfurth likens them to “dancing baboons.”
+
+Other African satyr stories do not yield their secret so easily.
+The Ba-Kwambas of the northwest, report said, had tails which they
+inserted in holes in the ground when they sat down. In his _Travels and
+Adventures_ (1861) Doctor Wolf asserted that in Abyssinia were men and
+women “with tails like dogs and horses,” some of these so large that
+they were able to knock down a horse with them. About the Niam-Niams, a
+cannibal people with filed teeth that live in French Equatorial Africa,
+legends have multiplied, and these Baring Gould has assembled.
+
+Horneman was the first to describe them as tailed anthropophagi. In
+1849 M. Descouret reported that this was the common belief among the
+Arabs. In 1851 M. de Castelnau told of a Houssa expedition in which
+a band of Niam-Niams was slaughtered to a man. All, including the
+women, had hairless tails about fifteen inches long. These people were
+otherwise a handsome race, of a deep black, using clubs and javelins
+in war, and in peace cultivating rice, maize, and other grains. An
+Abyssinian priest, seemingly speaking of the same tribe, told M.
+d’Abbadie in 1852 that only the men had tails, and these were covered
+with hair and the length of a palm. Doctor Hubsch, physician to the
+hospitals of Constantinople, examined in 1852 a tailed negress of the
+Niam-Niams who was offered for sale in the slave market. She was black
+as ebony, with frizzled hair, bloodshot eyes, large white teeth, and a
+smooth, hairless, pointed tail two inches long. Her clothes fidgeted
+her, she ate meat raw, and was an avowed cannibal. The slave dealer
+said all her tribe was as herself.
+
+In Cuba Columbus heard of a province called Mangou, lying farther west,
+and it sounded like Mangi, the rich maritime province of the Grand
+Khan. Its inhabitants had tails, and wore garments to conceal them.
+Columbus recalled the Maundeville story, related above, of the scorn of
+certain naked Asiatics for clothing, and their belief that garments hid
+bodily defects. So he pressed onward in the thought that Mangi and the
+robed peoples of Tartary lay just below the horizon.
+
+Despite witness from Asia, Africa, and the eastern and western
+Indies, there are no tailed races of men. But there have been tailed
+individuals. Hottentot women come nearest meeting the requirements of
+legend. Without a tail, they yet have a development of the posteriors
+that amounts to a natural shelf, on which, as on a pillion, their
+infants may ride. The mandril and certain other monkeys living in the
+same latitudes show a like enlargement.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI. The Pygmies
+
+
+It was left to the pygmy to revenge all of the creatures of fable upon
+incredulous mankind. He was doubted, yet he is. Not until some fifty
+years ago would the learned doubters admit that Homer and Herodotus
+were right, and themselves wrong. Now it is in the books that half a
+hundred groups of pygmies are living on the earth, to say nothing of
+others that have become extinct. Every race has had such groups, and
+every continent has known their tread.
+
+There is palliation for ancient and modern doubts as to these dwarfish
+nations. The pygmies of reality are not so small as the pygmies of
+tradition. Their name is from the Greek word for fist, or the distance
+between the elbow joint and the knuckles of the average man--a little
+more than thirteen inches. The ancient geographers, however, allowed
+the smallest pygmies at least double that stature. There were two
+species of little men--the one averaging three spans, or two feet three
+inches high, the other averaging five spans, or three feet nine inches.
+These measurements recur again and again for fifteen centuries in the
+writings of the east and west.
+
+No race has a mean stature as short even as the pygmies of five spans,
+but among the dwarf tribes there are many women who do not greatly
+exceed it; and there are women, not so small according to the standards
+of their brothers as to be accounted deformed, who do not equal it.
+Stanley saw among the Akkas of the West African Rain Forest a grown
+girl of seventeen who was half an inch short of three feet.
+
+Poetic license of the old time took liberties with the estimates of
+geographers, but these liberties were understood as such. The dwarf
+nation on the Upper Nile that was reputed to war with the cranes used
+the ax, it was said, to cut down ears of wheat. When Hercules passed
+through their country they set up ladders to climb to the rim of his
+goblet for a drink. In his slumber two armies swooped down upon his
+right hand and two on his left; but, awaking, the hero laughingly
+gathered them all in his lion skin.
+
+The myth of their warfare with the cranes became a theme of literature
+and art, but cast doubt over the whole pygmy tradition. It first
+appears in Homer. The _Iliad_ likens the shouts of the onrushing
+Trojans to the cries of cranes as they fly southward “with noise and
+order through the sky,” bringing “wounds and death to pygmy nations.”
+Megasthenes elaborates the theme. It is the three-span pygmies, he
+says, that war upon the cranes, as well as on the partridges, which are
+as large as geese. The small folk collect and destroy the eggs of the
+cranes, which breed in India and nowhere else. Pliny adds that every
+spring the little men go in a body to the seashore, astride of rams and
+goats, and there destroy the eggs and young of the birds; “otherwise,
+it would be impossible for them to withstand the increasing multitude
+of the cranes.” The shore booths which they occupy they build of mud
+mixed with feathers and egg shells.
+
+So the story moves from Africa to India, and towards modern times.
+Maundeville declares that in the Land of Pygmies, which he seems to
+place to the west of, and tributary to, China, the inhabitants “have
+oftentimes war with the Birds of that Country that they take and eat.”
+There is even a reference to this warfare in the writing (1563) of a
+traveler in Greenland. There Dithmar Blefkens of Hamburg met a blind
+monk who said that the pygmies represented the most perfect shape of
+man, but were “hairy to the uttermost Joynts of the Fingers,” had no
+proper speech, and were “unreasonable Creatures that live in Perpetual
+Darkness.”
+
+India appears to be the home of the tradition that the dwarfish peoples
+warred with the cranes. Just a hint of its origin is afforded by
+Ctesias. The “swarthy men called Pygmies,” he said, “hunt hares and
+foxes not with dogs, but with ravens and kites and crows and vultures.”
+Falconry is known to have been practiced in India as early as B.C. 600
+and may be a thousand years older there. From a people’s using birds of
+prey in hunting to themselves fighting against birds of prey is a step
+of inference easy to take.
+
+There is, however, a more direct explanation. According to a tradition
+of the Indians, the Garuda, the bird of Vishnu, was hostile to the
+people of the Kirata, and the name of this people means “dwarfish.”
+While the sacred bird as pictured by the poets does not look like the
+crane, or any other known species, it may be near enough to account for
+the legend.
+
+Herodotus was the first to give the pygmy tradition a historical
+quality. He heard of the little people while he was collecting
+materials for his books in Africa. His informants were natives of
+Cyrene who had been to the shrine of Ammon and talked with Etearchus
+the Ammonian king. The latter tells the story of the adventure of
+the five Nasamonian youths, which he had received from their Libyan
+countrymen and which Herodotus, therefore transcribes at third hand:
+
+“The Nasamonians said there had grown up among them some wild young
+men, the sons of certain chiefs, who, when they came to man’s estate,
+indulged in all manner of extravagances, and among other things drew
+lots for five of their number to go and explore the desert parts of
+Libya, and try if they could not penetrate further than any had done
+previously. The young men, therefore, dispatched on this errand by
+their comrades with a plentiful supply of water and provision, traveled
+at first through the inhabited region, passing which they came to the
+wild beast tract, whence they finally entered upon the desert, which
+they proceeded to cross from east to west. After journeying for many
+days over a wide extent of sand, they came at last to a plain where
+they observed trees growing; approaching them, and seeing fruit on
+them, they proceeded to gather it.
+
+“While they were thus engaged there came upon them some dwarfish men,
+under the middle height, who seized them and carried them off. The
+Nasamonians could not understand a word of their language, nor had they
+any acquaintance with the language of the Nasamonians. They were led
+across extensive marshes, and finally came to a town where all the men
+were of the height of their conductors, and black complexioned. A great
+river flowed by the town, running from west to east, and containing
+crocodiles.
+
+“Here let me dismiss Etearchus, the Ammonian, and his story, only
+adding that he declared that the Nasamonians got safely back to their
+country and that the men whose city they had reached were a nation of
+sorcerers. With respect to the river which ran by their town, Etearchus
+conjectured it to be the Nile, and reason favors that view.”
+
+Thus ends one of the most valuable records which have come down from
+ancient times. The river referred to is now believed to be the Niger,
+or perhaps an affluent of Lake Tchad. Herodotus has another story of
+a dwarfish people found in the west when Sataspes, the Carthaginian,
+undertook to sail around Libya.
+
+Although Strabo doubted the existence of pygmy races, yet his keen mind
+brought him within reach of the truth. He finds in the wretched mode
+of life of the people he called the Ethiopians, an explanation of the
+reports of their dwarfish stature. They were naked and wandered from
+place to place, and their sheep, goats, oxen, and dogs were undersized
+like themselves. “It was perhaps from the diminutive size of these
+people,” he concludes, “that the story of the pygmies originated,
+whom no person worthy of credit has asserted that he himself has
+seen.” The Greek geographer seems to have had reliable information as
+to a fact that on its face is as hard to believe as the legends he
+discredits--that there was dwarfish live stock as well as a dwarfish
+people. Sir Samuel Baker found that the cows and ewes of the Bari,
+a tribe living in the same district with the forest pygmies, “have
+dimensions truly liliputian.”
+
+Aristotle speaks with authority of the pygmies of Africa. “The storks,”
+he said, “pass from the plains of Scythia to the marsh of upper Egypt,
+toward the sources of the Nile. This is the district which the pygmies
+inhabit, whose existence is not a fable. There is really, as men say,
+a species of men of little stature, and their horses are little also.
+They pass their life in caverns.” Pliny speaks of the pygmies as
+dwelling in Thrace near the Black Sea, in the Carian district of Asia
+Minor, in India under the shadow of the Himalayas, and at the sources
+of the Nile. There is a valuable fact behind this apparently confused
+geography: the Roman was right in assuming there were several such
+races.
+
+The pygmy races of Asia and Indonesia are cited in classic, Arabic, and
+Chinese geography, and in mediæval travel. “In the middle of India,”
+Ctesias says, “are found the swarthy men called pygmies, who speak the
+same language as the other Indians. They are very diminutive, the
+tallest but two cubits high, the majority only one and one-half. They
+let their hair grow very long--down to their knees and even lower.
+They have the largest beards anywhere to be seen, and when these have
+grown sufficiently long and copious, they no longer wear clothing, but
+let the hair of the head fall down their backs far below the knee,
+while in front are their beards trailing down to their very feet. When
+their hair has thus thickly enveloped their whole body they bind it
+round them with a zone and so make it serve for a garment. They are
+snub-nosed and otherwise ill-favored. Their sheep are of the size of
+our lambs, and their oxen and asses rather smaller than our rams. Three
+thousand men attend the king of the Indians on account of their great
+skill in archery. They are eminently just and have the same laws as the
+other Indians.”
+
+This may be a description of the Kiratas, whose district is east of
+Bengal in the Himalaya foothills.
+
+There were vague reports in the classic world of other pygmy peoples
+far to the southeast in Asia. The Chinese records make these more
+definite. The _Hill and Sea Classic_ describes the Chiau Yau, a tribe
+of cap-wearing pygmies three cubits (3 feet 3 inches) high whose
+country was east of the country of the Three-headed Men. This is
+perhaps the country now inhabited by the Yau tribes, who are short
+of stature and may be this long-sought-for pygmy race. Individuals
+of the Chiau Yau tribe, “diminutive black slaves,” were sent to the
+Chinese court from the coasts of Indo-China in the reign of Ming Tu
+(A.D. 58-76). There was also a pygmy people whom the Annamese called
+the Phong. They were only two cubits, or twenty-six inches, high,
+and although they were cave dwellers a fragrant perfume emanated
+from their skins. As hunters they paid their dues to the state in
+camphor, rhinoceros horns, and elephant tusks. Both of these races
+Gerini locates in “the mysterious country of the pygmies” in French
+Indo-China, between the Mekong and the Black rivers, under the
+twenty-first parallel of north latitude. North of this district on the
+Red River dwell the dark, dwarfish Pu-lu tribes which seem to be the
+remnants of a once widely spread pygmy race. The Santom aborigines of
+Yun-nan and Laos are also of inferior stature, with flat faces and
+black skins. In China itself ancient writings speak of the black dwarfs
+of Shantung province as early as the twenty-third century B.C.
+
+Perhaps the first record of the Aetas, or Philippine negritos, appears
+in Chao Fu-Kua, a Chinese author of the early thirteenth century, who
+told of a tribe of small black men with frizzly hair, round yellow
+eyes, and teeth that showed through their lips, who lived in remote
+valleys of the archipelago. A Chinese work on novelties, published
+in 1636, has several passages on the black dwarfs of Cochin-China.
+Anywhere from Annam to Siam, it says, “there are pygmies whose stature
+is not over three feet seven inches, who are regarded as of animal
+origin, who sell themselves for longer or shorter periods to dealers in
+aloes. When engaged they are provisioned, supplied with hatchets and
+saws, and sent into the mountains. These dwarfs are very submissive and
+servile.”
+
+Ibn Khordadbeh and Idrisi tell of the Rami, a pygmy race of Sumatra,
+who go naked, find shelter in thickets, avoid intercourse with other
+people, and use a hissing speech. They are swift runners and adept tree
+climbers. They have red frizzly hair and a stature of but three feet.
+Curled hair of this color had been ascribed from the seventh century
+A.D. to the clawed negrito savages on the east coast of the Malay
+Peninsula, and a traveler of the last generation reports hairy dwarfs
+on the southwest coast of Sumatra. Dunashki (about A.D. 1300) has this
+note: “When ships approach Volcano Island at the beginning of a squall,
+tiny black dwarfs, five spans (nearly four feet) or less in stature,
+resembling negroes, appear and climb aboard, without harming anyone.”
+All three of these travel notes may be reflected in the incident in the
+third voyage of Sindbad, when his ship, driven by a storm amid strange
+islands, is boarded by “an innumerable multitude of frightful savages
+about two feet high, covered all over with red hair,” who compel the
+crew to follow them to the palace of a giant cannibal.
+
+Accounts of several other travelers bring the pygmy tradition down
+to the era of modern disbelief. Odoric, the fourteenth-century
+missionary monk, reports that the Yangste Kiang waters the Country of
+the Pygmies, whom he describes as an innumerable folk, three spans
+high, and foremost of all cotton workers. Their city of Chatan is one
+of the fairest of places. Æthicus of Istria declares that he sailed
+northwest from Ceylon and passed, among other islands in the Northern
+Sea, Bridinno, the land of dwarfs. Marco Polo tells how pygmies were
+fabricated from monkeys in Sumatra and sold to curio collectors.
+
+Maundeville makes the pygmies subject to “the great Chan.” “The River
+Dalay,” he says, “goeth through the land of Pygmies, where that the
+Folk be of little Stature, and be but three Span long, and they be
+right fair and gentle. And they marry them when they be half a Year of
+Age and get Children. And they live not but six Year or seven at the
+most; and he that liveth eight Year, Men hold him there right passing
+old. These Men be workers of Gold, Silver, Cotton, Silk and of all such
+Things, the best of any other that be in the World.” Men of larger size
+work their lands and mines for them.
+
+In another passage Sir John populates an isle with “Little Folk,” who
+have no mouths and only an adder speech. Pigafetta, who went with the
+Magellan expedition around the world and wrote its story, reports two
+races of dwarfs in the Philippines, one with gigantic ears. The latter
+were shaven, naked, shrill-voiced troglodytes, whose food was the sago
+tree.
+
+Ludovico Varthema, an Italian Mohammedan, a contemporary of Columbus
+and a wide-ranging traveler, tells an incident of his pilgrimage to
+Mecca, which may or may not shed light on the moot question of the
+Middle Ages and since, as to what became of the lost Ten Tribes. There
+was a mountain in the Hedjaz, he said, inhabited by pygmy Jews, color
+black, who skipped from crag to crag like goats--he watched them from a
+distance--and when they caught a Moslem skinned him alive.
+
+In Madagascar in 1770 the French naturalist Commerson, who accompanied
+Bougainville in his voyage around the world, found evidences of a
+pygmy tribe with an average stature of three and a half feet, all
+traces of which vanished in the following century. His report was
+corroborated by Count de Modave, governor of Fort Dauphin. The men of
+this tribe wore long beards and were workers in iron and steel, of
+which they made lances and assagais. They were brave pacifists. When
+from their mountain homes they saw a formidable force approaching on
+the plains below, they drove down such cattle as they could spare to
+the entrances of their defiles to purchase immunity from invasion. If,
+however, the enemy entered these defiles, the little folk savagely
+attacked them.
+
+Near to the country of the warrior women in South America, said the
+Spaniards, was pygmy land. Peru has traditions of a race not over two
+cubits high. California Indians tell of a witch-like little people in
+the redwood forest. The Arapahoes tell of dark-skinned, pot-bellied,
+cannibal dwarfs who were only three feet high but strongly made, and
+skillful trackers. They could carry buffaloes on their backs, so the
+Crows said of the small folk that once roved Montana. In the Gila
+Canyon in New Mexico there have been exhumed the mummies of a true
+pygmy people, some of them scarcely three feet long, with cerements
+of woven cloth, sandals of yucca fiber and ornaments of hummingbird
+feathers; legend speaks of thievish dwarfs who lived in underground
+houses and sometimes came to the cities for supplies. D’Orbigny
+described, in 1831, the so-called Chiquitos, or Little Folk, who
+inhabit the heights on the divide between the Mamore and Paraguay
+rivers. The men he measured averaged only four feet ten inches, which
+brings them within strict pygmy requirements--not over four feet eleven
+inches. They are a broad-shouldered, robust Indian people, hospitable,
+sociable, musical. D’Orbigny estimated their number at about twenty
+thousand. No recent traces have been found of the Ayamanes whom
+Friedemann met in the northern Andes regions and who, he said, were no
+more than “five empans,” or three feet four inches, high.
+
+There is a Chinese legend that in the remote northern mountains of the
+old empire there has lived for seventeen centuries a race of hairy
+dwarfs. Inscriptions on the Great Wall are said to recite that whenever
+one of the millions of laborers who were building it was found to have
+made a mistake in his work, he was imbedded alive in the wall at the
+place of his error. About A.D. 210, the story continues, a body of
+workmen rebelled at the custom, and with their families fled to distant
+forests where their descendants still live. The hardships of their
+journey and their rude surroundings brought these people down to the
+pygmy level.
+
+It is asserted that there is a race of dwarfs in Morocco in the Atlas
+Mountains whose existence the Moors have kept secret for three thousand
+years because they are regarded as holy men, and great saints who bring
+good luck to towns. “Our Blessed Lord,” the people call a dwarf. “It
+is a sin to speak about them to you,” one Moor said to a traveler. The
+Moorish silence is declared to be the remnant of a superstition older
+than the Mohammedan religion.
+
+These pygmy stories, of perhaps twenty-seven centuries so far as the
+record goes, of at least double that period if unwritten tradition
+be included, have been brought together here in order to assess the
+scientific reaction to them. Some of them on their face are completely
+fabulous, some have an admixture of truth, some are good enough
+history. To all except the very latest of them the scientific reaction
+was unfavorable until a deluge of facts made this attitude impossible.
+
+Strabo among the ancients was in his rights when he complained that
+nobody had seen any pygmies, but his facts were incomplete, for long
+before his day civilized peoples had seen them. Browne summarizes
+in his stiff but elegant English the unbelief of the scholars of
+the Renaissance: “Julius Scaliger, a diligent enquirer, accounts
+thereof, but as a poetical fiction. Ulysses Aldrovandus, a most exact
+geographer, in an express discourse hereon, concludes the story
+fabulous and a poetical account of Homer. Albertus Magnus, a man
+ofttimes too credulous, herein was more than dubious; for he affirmeth
+if any such dwarfs were ever extant, they were surely some kind of
+apes; which is a conceit allowed by Cardan and not esteemed improbable
+by many others.” “There is as much reality,” concludes Browne, “in the
+pygmies of Paracelsus, that is, his non-adamical men, or middle natures
+betwixt men and spirits.”
+
+Two towering names in natural history, Buffon and Cuvier, are ranged
+against the pygmy tradition. Here is Buffon’s conclusion: “Deceived by
+some optical illusion, the ancient historians gravely mention whole
+nations of pygmies as existing in remote quarters of the world. The
+more accurate observation of the moderns, however, convinces us that
+these accounts are entirely fabulous. The existence, therefore, of
+a pygmy race of mankind, being founded in error or in fable, we can
+expect to find men of diminutive stature only by accident, among men
+of the ordinary size.”
+
+Buffon’s explanation of the fable that the pygmies war with the cranes
+is so plausible that men would accept it, as his own generation did,
+if they did not know that these little folk are human and not simian.
+Even so, there may be truth in the theory advanced. “One knows,” says
+Buffon, “that the monkeys, which go in large bands in Africa and India,
+carry on continual warfare against birds; they seek to surprise their
+nests, and without ceasing prepare ambushes for them. The storks defend
+themselves vigorously. But the monkeys, anxious to carry off the eggs
+and the young birds, return constantly, and in bands, to the combat;
+and as by their tricks, their feints and movements they seem to imitate
+human actions, they would appear to ignorant people to be a band of
+little men. Behold the origin and the history of these fables!”
+
+Roulin was equally ingenious in his explanation of the pygmy
+populations and their campaigns against the birds. He noted the squat
+frames of the Lapps and Eskimos who dwell within, or not far from, the
+Arctic Circle. The pygmies, he decided, were a circumpolar population.
+Homer placed their home and their battles at the southern end of the
+crane path; Roulin placed them at the northern terminus, in that
+Scythia of misty boundaries one of which was supposed to be the boreal
+ocean. Pliny had told that every year the pygmies rode down to the
+seashore to destroy the eggs and young of the cranes. Very well, here
+was the story explained, for every year the Lapps and Eskimos come down
+to the sea and return to the interior, and these people partly subsist
+on the eggs of aquatic birds.
+
+Cuvier is reproachful of Pliny. “I am not surprised,” he says, “at
+finding the pygmies in the works of Homer; but to find them in Pliny
+I am surprised indeed.” The great French naturalist has contributed
+more, perhaps, than any other man to find the basis of truth or the
+source of error in classic fables. His explanation of the pygmy legend,
+like that of Buffon, is more convincing almost than truth itself, but
+its teaching is error. He finds the source of a fable in a flattering
+convention of ancient sculpture: “The custom of exhibiting in the same
+sculpture, in bas-relief, men of very different heights--of making
+kings and conquerors gigantic while their subjects and vassals are
+represented as only one-fourth or one-fifth of their size--must have
+given rise to the fable of the pygmies.”
+
+Cuvier died in 1832. Chambers’ _Journal_ in 1844 voiced with less
+reserve the unbelief of that period. In a scoffing article it declares
+that “the world has long been haunted with the idea that somewhere in
+Africa there is a nation of Tom Thumbs”; but “the grand difficulty
+about the African nation of dwarfs is the fact that not a single
+specimen has been seen either in Abyssinia or Egypt.” “The pygmy dream,
+one of the last lingering superstitions of travel, has been puffed
+away,” confidently asserts this periodical. These so-called pygmies
+were monkeys, not men.
+
+In 1863 Paul du Chaillu explored the coast lands of West Africa and
+in 1871 published the results in _The Country of the Dwarfs_. The
+scientific skepticism of the ages delivered its last stroke in the
+attacks that met this book, for already, although the world did not
+know it, Schweinfurth, farther east in the equatorial region, had
+reviewed an entire pygmy army. The _London Graphic_ wonders whether
+or not “Mr. du Chaillu means us to accept the book as a bona-fide
+narrative of what he has himself seen.” Thus cautiously this periodical
+registers its doubts: “The first part of the book reads very much
+like other descriptions of African exploration; but further on Mr. du
+Chaillu represents himself as having arrived at the country of the
+dwarfs, whom he considers to be identical with the supposed fabulous
+pygmies. This strange race, who average only from four feet to four
+feet seven inches high, live a perfectly wild life in the forests of
+equatorial Africa, feeding on snakes, rats, mice, and berries. They go
+entirely naked, and inhabit huts made by bending branches of trees in
+the shape of a bow. The height of the huts is just enough to keep the
+head of a man from touching the roof when he is seated. These dwarfs
+are very shy of being seen and hold no communion with the negro tribes
+about them, by whom they are called Obongos. Truly we have here a
+strange tale.”
+
+Truly, there are not only lost arts, but lost records, forgotten
+histories. Forty-four centuries before du Chaillu was scoffed at for
+a true tale, an authentic pygmy testimony was set down in a letter
+which a king of Egypt wrote to a vassal chief, and which is still in
+existence. The world believed in pygmies then because sometimes it saw
+them; and their descendants still hunt the elephant in the forests of
+equatorial Africa.
+
+[Illustration: “THE SWARTHY MEN CALLED PYGMIES”]
+
+To the Egyptians of that time the country beyond the Second Cataract
+of the Nile was the Land of Ghosts, whence the negroes brought to the
+markets of Assuan strange stories of shadowy folk who dwelt there. Into
+this land a prince of Elephantine named Herkhuf marched with a little
+force. An account of his journey has been written by Arthur E. P.
+Weigall, of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt.
+
+In the country which Herkhuf penetrated he found pygmies dwelling, and
+one he secured. He sent word back to the boy Pharaoh, Pepy II, and had
+from him a letter believed to be the earliest example of a private
+communication. Yet life still throbs through its lines and the colors
+glow in the picture of an excited royal lad awaiting the coming of this
+wonder of the south, directing that his meals shall be ample, that his
+slumbers shall be guarded, and that on taking ship at Memphis there
+shall be men to see he does not fall into the water. The Pharaoh’s
+letter follows:
+
+“You say in your letter that you have brought a dancing pygmy of the
+god from the Land of Ghosts, like the pygmy which the Treasurer Baurded
+brought from the Land of Pount in the time of Asesa. You say to my
+majesty, ‘Never before has one like him been brought by anyone who has
+visited Aam.’ Come northward, therefore, to the court immediately, and
+bring this pygmy with you, which you must bring living, prosperous, and
+healthy, from the Land of Ghosts, to dance for the King and to rejoice
+and gladden the heart of the King. When he goes down with you into the
+vessel, appoint trustworthy people to be beside him at either side of
+the vessel: take care that he does not fall into the water. When he
+sleeps at night, appoint trustworthy people who shall sleep beside him
+in his cabin; and make an inspection ten times each night. My majesty
+desires to see this pygmy more than the gifts of Sinai and of Pount. If
+you arrive at court, the pygmy being with you, alive, prosperous, and
+healthy, my majesty will do for you a greater thing than that which was
+done for the Treasurer Baurded in the time of Asesa, according to the
+heart’s desire of my majesty to see this pygmy. Orders have been sent
+to the chief of the New Towns to arrange that food shall be taken from
+every store-city and every temple (on the road) without stinting.”
+
+A Nubian Highway, so Weigall calls the ancient road down which the
+dancing pygmy came to civilization about B.C. 2500. In A. D. 1878 a
+little farther south, Stanley followed what he calls a Pygmy Highway,
+“along which quite a tribe must have passed. It was lined with amoma
+fruit skins, and shells of nuts, and the crimson rinds of phrynia
+berries. Our elephant and game track had brought us across another
+track leading easterly from Andari, and both joined presently,
+developing to a highway much patronized by the pygmy tribes. We could
+tell where they had stopped to light their pipes, and to crack nuts,
+and trap game, and halted to gossip. The twigs were broken three feet
+from the ground, showing that they were snapped by dwarfs. Where it was
+a little muddy the path showed high, delicate insteps, proving their
+ancient ancestry and aristocratic descent, and small feet not larger
+than those of young English misses of eight years old.” Later Stanley
+met individuals of this tribe.
+
+These were the Akkas, or Mambuti, the same pygmy tribe, it would
+appear, whose sculptured reliefs on monuments of Egypt going back as
+far as B.C. 3366 were dwarfed, so Cuvier had thought, merely to make a
+conqueror seem larger than life and indicate their own inferior estate.
+When a regiment of several hundred of these little warriors marched
+behind Moummeri in 1870 to do homage to Munza, the East African negro
+monarch, the pygmy tradition marched with them out of the mists of
+fable across the border of geographical knowledge. For Schweinfurth, a
+European explorer, was there to behold these “grasshopper warriors,” as
+he called them.
+
+The revolution in scientific opinion since that day appears in the
+statement that the ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_
+prints one paragraph about the pygmies, nearly all of which is an
+exposition of myths and a statement of doubts, while the eleventh
+edition prints two full pages of ascertained facts.
+
+Although science always balked at the name of pygmy and refused as long
+as it could to admit that the African forests concealed a race of tiny
+men, yet the world had long known something of the little peoples.
+The Spaniards rightly reported that pygmy Indians had lived in Peru,
+and they found negritos in the Philippines. Although Arab traders gave
+the Andamans a wide berth because, as they believed, these islands
+contained cannibals and no cocoanuts, yet they knew even before the
+Middle Ages that a dwarfish people dwelt there. The Dutch found the
+Bushmen when they settled South Africa, and hunted them for sport as
+if they were jackals; they found also the still smaller Vaalpens, or
+“dusty-bellies.” The Lapps of Russia and Scandinavia were known to
+mediæval travelers, who were terrified by their diminutive stature
+and witch repute. These mongoloid people, whose mean stature is only
+five feet, and their kinsmen, the Eskimos, who are a little taller,
+are, however, not classified among the true pygmies, a term which an
+arbitrary convention restricts to Little Black Men.
+
+The pygmies of Asia and Oceania are called negritos, the pygmies of
+equatorial Africa negrillos. They vary by tribes in average height from
+four feet eight inches to five feet two inches, with the women smaller
+and many individuals only a little above four feet. A full-grown
+Akka adult, says Stanley, may weigh ninety pounds. Another explorer
+estimated the average weight of six of these adults at seventy-seven
+pounds and found that two of them weighed but fifty-three pounds apiece.
+
+Wherever seen, the tribes of little people have certain things in
+common beside their stature. One of these is their discontinuous
+distribution. They do not adjoin each other in a continuous zone of
+population as the taller races do, but are dotted here and there
+across the earth like islands in a sea of alien populations. Always
+they occupy the less desirable districts. The Spaniards called the
+Philippine pygmies Negritos del Monte, for they had retired before the
+Malays to the mountain gorges. The Lapps rove the tundras of northern
+Europe. The Bushmen dwell in the deserts of South Africa. The Akkas
+inhabit the steaming forests of equatorial Africa, in parallels of
+latitude deadly to the white man. The Batwas live on volcanic uplands
+in the Tanganyika country. In the Malay Peninsula and New Guinea, one
+seeks in vain for littoral-dwelling negritos; they have been driven
+inland and to the mountain recesses.
+
+Almost everywhere the little people somewhat resemble in feature
+the races that surround them. This is due to unions, temporary or
+otherwise, between the pygmy women and the men of the neighbor
+tribes, by which various streams of strange blood have poured into
+the veins of the lesser stock. Among the Lapps of earlier generations
+it almost seemed as if it were conscious tribal policy to promote
+a taller stature by encouraging women and girls to form irregular
+connections with men of other European races. There is Bushman blood
+in the Hottentots, or Hottentot blood in the Bushmen. In the so-called
+Bastards of the Kalahari Desert--a term whereof the wearers are
+proud because it concedes to them a Caucasian strain--the blood of
+the Bushmen meets the blood of the Boers in the halfway house of the
+Hottentot.
+
+Herbert Long, who spent six years in Central Africa with an expedition
+from the American Museum of Natural History, notes in its _Journal_ for
+1919 the fact that the pygmy men he saw were often much taller than
+their mates, and gives a reason, that may explain the same phenomenon
+in related tribes. Comely pygmy girls enter the harems of the chiefs of
+the tall negro tribes. Their half-breed sons are sent back to their own
+people. Since women are valuable chattels, the daughters are retained
+by the father’s tribe. The custom increases pygmy prestige; but the
+little men must not wed the women of their tall friends.
+
+The small black folk of the forest have thus won a right to the marked
+regional resemblance they bear to the larger black folk of the yam and
+breadfruit clearings, whom they serve as scouts against the approach of
+an enemy and as allies in forest warfare. “In western Africa, as in the
+Philippines and in the two Gangetic peninsulas,” asserts Quatrefages,
+“the pygmies have played an ethnological rôle, at times important,
+in crossing with superior races and in giving birth to half-breed
+populations.” The Pandavas, or heroes of the oldest Indian times, set
+the example of these unions with lower races.
+
+The Dravidians of southern India, Quatrefages declares, occupy the
+territory formerly populated by the negritos--and carry their blood.
+He also thinks that the blood of these little blacks shows itself in
+the skin and stature of natives in parts of Japan. Relics of a pygmy
+race are supposed to exist in Sicily and Sardinia, “along the highroad
+between Pleistocene Africa and Europe”; fifteen per cent of the men
+of South Italy and Sardinia are rejected for military service because
+less than sixty-one and one half inches high. South of Salamanca in
+western Spain, the valley called Las Jurdes is peopled by men and women
+said to be little more than three feet high, whose shrunken stature is
+attributed to unwholesome surroundings.
+
+No true pygmy race has developed a pronounced nose bridge, and only
+the lozenge-faced Bushmen have salient chins. Among nearly all of the
+tribes there is a deficiency in the fatty tissues which affect the
+skin, so that, even before old age comes, they present a wrinkled
+appearance as if the skin fitted too loosely. This is true even of the
+Lapps. The countenances of these northern dwarfs are mongoloid, but
+without the slanting eyes of the Chinese and Tartars, and their heads
+are the roundest of any race of men. The negrito and negrillo tribes
+have rounder heads than the tall negroes. The bodies of many of the
+little people in Central Africa and New Guinea are covered with a downy
+growth. Pygmy complexions show olive in the Lapps, light yellow in the
+Bushmen, yellow brown in the Indonesians, dark brown in the negritos of
+the Andamans and Philippines, and among the Akkas, as Schweinfurth puts
+it, the color of coffee slightly roasted.
+
+Small hands and in some cases small feet characterize these tribes, and
+grown girls of the Bushmen show, under measurement, feet but little
+more than four inches long. Their bodies are long in proportion to
+their legs, and the legs are slim. The mid-point of the body is above
+the navel instead of below, as it is in the tall races. The pygmies
+of Africa are pot-bellied; this is due to diet, and is corrected by
+regular and wholesome food.
+
+In other respects the pygmies differ from the rest of mankind chiefly
+in what they lack. Save in the case of the Semangs of the Malay
+Peninsula they may have no separate language; and they use always the
+speech of their taller neighbors. There is no pygmy state, or king,
+and often no tribal organization; even among the Lapps there was a
+nomad tribe called the “twice and thrice tributary Lapps,” because
+its members paid tribute to two, sometimes to three states--Russia,
+Denmark, and Sweden. The Andaman negritos and the Akkas of the West
+African Rain Forest are the only races that never devised a means of
+making fire, though both know its use. The Andamanese are also the only
+people that never made a musical instrument and the only people that
+never domesticated a food animal or cultivated a plant.
+
+One or two things, however, may be said for the culture of the little
+folk. There are no pygmy cannibals. Although the Bushman houses, mere
+mats suspended on stakes, are the most primitive known, yet these are
+the most skilled artists in South Africa, and some of their figures
+suggest that they may have known hieroglyphic writing. All the little
+peoples treat their women kindly, and reverence gray hairs. The
+Andamanese are monogamous and believe in an omniscient deity. On the
+other hand, the highest religious concept among the polygamous Akkas
+is of a pygmy devil. The Bushmen live in a state approaching sexual
+promiscuity; it used to be the custom, when a man wished a temporary
+mate, to kidnap a small child, and the mother would follow the child
+into his home. The Andamanese have the peculiar custom of manifesting
+joy by weeping, and it is said the Veddahs never laugh.
+
+No certain statements may be made as to the aggregate numbers of the
+dwarf nations. There are about 50,000 Bushmen, 27,000 Lapps, 20,000
+Aetas, 2,000 Mincoupies, 2,000 Veddahs. It may be that the equatorial
+pygmies are half as numerous as the Aetas. Everywhere the number of
+these people is diminishing.
+
+As to their origin and the cause of their shrunken stature, there is
+no agreement among ethnologists. The small blacks may have come into
+existence in South India and spread thence east and west, peopling
+Melanesia and Africa. Once they formed a belt of population clear
+across equatorial Africa. On the evidences of crania which he examined,
+Professor Kollman believes that, about b.c. 5000, they dwelt as far
+down the Nile Valley as the Thebaid. The Oriental branch of the race,
+pure or mixed, extends, says Quatrefages, from the extreme southeast
+of New Guinea to the archipelago of the Andamans and from the Sunda
+Islands to Japan, and on the Asiatic continent from Annam and the
+peninsula of Malacca to the western Ghauts, and from Cape Comorin
+to the Himalayas. This grandiose geography is challenged by later
+scholarship.
+
+Yet over all these wide spaces, and over the Dark Continent, pygmies
+may have been the first settlers. Once it was surmised that the tall
+negritoes sprang from them; but this is a moot point. To accept
+it would be to assert that short stature is a primitive trait,
+and that all the tall races are in this respect abnormal. British
+anthropologists hold that the Bushmen are a distinct people, but
+that the Congo pygmies, though of livelier intelligence than the
+tall blacks, are yet special groups of the Nilotic or Bantu negroes,
+arrested or degenerated by the inhospitable forest. Their diminished
+stature, Stanley urges, is the result of “three thousand years of
+isolation, intermarriage, and a precarious diet of fungi, wild fruit,
+lean fibrous meat of animals, and dried insects; in a word, of the
+utter absence of sunshine and the lack of gluten and saccharine bodies
+in their food.”
+
+Handicapping conditions may have produced the Lapps of the Arctic
+Circle, the vanished Indian dwarfs of the Andes, the enigmatic Bushmen,
+and the little black men of Africa, the Malay Peninsula, and various
+isles of the eastern sea. But in old fables pygmyland is hard by the
+country of the giants. It happens that the diminutive Lapp is neighbor
+to the tall Karelian, the Bushman and Akka to the stalwart Bantu.
+There are little people of the frigid zone, the tropics, and the south
+temperate. There were dwarfs of rich ocean littorals as well as of the
+tundra, the mountain glen, the desert, and the equatorial forest.
+
+“I believe mankind was originally a dwarf,” says Leland. Churchward, in
+his _Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man_, holds that paleolithic man
+was a pygmy, “the first little earth man or red man,” and that he was
+evolved near the Nile springs, and thence overspread the earth. Sign
+language and articulate sounds, the Masonic writer thinks, were worked
+out by these little folk. After talking with representatives of their
+race, he concludes that they have a monosyllabic speech, and words
+with the same sounds as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The resemblance of
+living pygmies to the long-armed, short-legged, paunchy dwarf-gods of
+Egypt and Phœnicia, and notably to Bes, has been remarked. These squat
+divinities may have owed their being to ancient fear of small men, the
+elder brothers of historic man. Sir Harry Johnston thinks it possible
+that the little blacks once overspread Europe and, by their prankish
+good nature and curious power of becoming invisible in herbage and
+behind rocks, gave rise to folk-tales of gnomes, kobolds, and fairies.
+Kollman, the Basle anatomist, contends that the pygmies were the child
+race of mankind, and that each tall race was preceded by a small one.
+The common opinion, that healthy dwarf tribes have been produced by
+degeneration from men of larger mold, is not fully satisfying. Yet the
+oldest human skeletons found thus far are of men of normal size.
+
+There are pygmies, but why? The one riddle succeeds the other.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII. The Amazons of Legend
+
+
+Men gave up with regret, and not so long ago, and not until they had
+ransacked all the horizons of geography, the belief that somewhere in
+the world there is a state of warrior women. They are reluctant to
+admit, nor have they quite admitted, that there never was such a state;
+and still they ransack the horizons of history and folk-lore for proof
+that at one time Amazons were.
+
+Myth has mapped the woman’s commonwealth in western Africa, in Armenia
+on the Black Sea, in the Caucasus, in Russia along the lower Don, in
+islands of the Baltic, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean, and upon
+the River of the Amazons. There is report of it in Greek, Turanian,
+Arab, Negro, and American legend. It figures in the poetry of Arctinus,
+the history of Herodotus, the mendacities of Maundeville, the narrative
+of Marco Milioni, the visions of Columbus, the journal of Orellana and
+the Guiana prospectus of Raleigh.
+
+Unlike other ancient tales, the Amazon story, instead of slowly fading,
+has grown in definiteness of outline as it approached to-day. The men
+who discarded utterly the belief that there is a woman state lived not
+long after the men who thought the state had at last been found.
+
+The Amazons--so runs tradition everywhere substantially the same--were
+a tribe of women ruled by a queen and subsisting by the chase and by
+wars of pillage. They fought both on foot and on horseback, using the
+bow, the spear, the javelin, and the double-headed ax. Their garb
+consisted of a short tunic clearing the knee and fastened over the left
+shoulder, leaving the right breast bare. Their outlines were powerful
+and beautiful. There was a dispute, never composed, between art and
+etymology, as to their bosoms. The word Amazon, though of barbarian
+origin, was thought to derive from _alpha_, privative, and _mazos_,
+the Greek for breast. On this derivation the grammarians built up
+the legend that the right breast of the women militant was either
+amputated, or seared, or compressed in youth, so as not to interfere
+with the recoil of the bow string. But the sculptors would not accept
+this deformation, and statues and bas-reliefs represent the women
+with bosoms entirely womanly. There are recent etymologies wherein
+“Amazon” is supposed to mean “full busted,” “moon daughter,” “vestal,”
+“girdle-bearer,” or “game-eater.”
+
+One feature of the myth shows the working of inference. The woman
+state must sustain its numbers. There must be children even if there
+were no men, or the tribe would become extinct. In place of husbands,
+therefore, there were what Sir Walter Raleigh called “Valentines.” Once
+a year the women paid a visit to the men of neighbor tribes, or once
+a year these men called on them. The women retained the girl children
+born of these excursions. As to the boy children, customs differed.
+In some cases the mothers nurtured them until they were weaned, and
+returned them to their fathers when these came back the following year,
+as always they did. In other cases the mothers put the male infants to
+death, or maimed them and raised them as slaves of the state.
+
+The Greek treatment of the myth had a certain other-worldliness. The
+Amazons figured in epic events; their struggles were with demigods.
+They came to the relief of Troy, and their subjugation was one of the
+dozen labors of Hercules. With him they fought, and with Achilles,
+and with Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, and with Bellerophon, rider
+of the winged Pegasus, and with the griffins which guarded Scythia’s
+fabled gold; and they invaded Attica to attempt another _Iliad_ in
+revenge for the capture of a queen. Greek sculptures and decorative
+pottery show the national feeling that these were a people far removed
+in time and space. The figures are beautiful, but something of
+barbarian wildness animates the features. Earlier art had represented
+them as bloodthirsty mænads, raiders of the borders, but the Greek
+humanizing spirit wrought itself upon the legend until the story the
+sculptors tell is of men’s regret that they need smite these beautiful
+savages.
+
+This spirit is in the _Æthiopis_ of Arctinus of Miletus, wherein
+Amazons appear on the side of beleaguered Troy. Their queen,
+Penthesilea, spreads death among the large-limbed Argives and
+overwhelms Achilles with abusive words. The angered hero slays her, but
+when he removes her helmet the charm of her strikes him to the heart
+and he grieves over his victim.
+
+The story, with its fine human touch, recedes into the mists in a tale
+which in effect is its epilogue. After his own death and the ruin of
+Troy, Achilles reigns over the isle of Leuke, an Avalon of the East
+in the Black Sea at the Danube’s mouth. Thither, even to the land of
+shades, the rage of the Amazons for the death of their queen follows
+him. At their capital on the river Thermodon in Pontus they seize on
+ships and compel the sailors to steer them to the enchanted isle. But
+as they approach a temple in the grove their horses take fright and
+bolt over a cliff into the sea. A terrible storm shatters the fleet and
+few of the vengeful women escape.
+
+In classic legend, there were three woman states--the countries of
+the Gorgons and Amazons in the west of Libya, and an Amazon state in
+the northeast of Asia Minor near the modern Trebizond; the capital
+of the latter was the mythical Themiscyra on the banks of the river
+Thermodon, now called the Termeh. The African Amazons subjugated the
+Gorgons, and under their queen, Myrina, marched in triumph through
+Egypt, Arabia, and Asia Minor into Thrace, where they were defeated and
+turned back by Mopsus. Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyme, and Myrina claimed them
+as their founders. This horde was wiped out by Hercules at the time
+when he erected the pillar in Africa, for, says Diodorus Siculus, “it
+was a thing intolerable to him, who made it his business to be renowned
+all the world over, to suffer any nation to be governed any longer by
+women.”
+
+It was the Black Sea Amazons whom the Greeks mainly limned in art
+and legend. These women, whose earlier home had been the Caucasus,
+raided the coasts of Asia Minor and came to the relief of Troy. The
+ninth labor of Hercules was to bring back the girdle of their queen,
+Hippolyte, a task equivalent to the subjugation of the state. Theseus
+carried off another queen, Antiope, and this led to the Amazonian
+invasion of Attica; the fierce women were not halted until they had
+penetrated Athens.
+
+This expedition and that of their African sisters were interpreted by
+the Greeks as allegories of barbarian menace. In the tread of Amazonian
+horse they may have had a presage of the hoofs of Hunnish, Turkish,
+and Tartar cavalry that in after ages was to ride across their world.
+Literally taken, the tales seemed to Strabo incredible. “For who can
+believe,” he asks, “that an army of women, or a city, or a nation,
+could ever subsist without men, and even dispatch an expedition across
+the sea to Attica? This is as much as to say that the men of those days
+were women, and the women men.”
+
+Twice, however, in the field of legend over which Strabo cast an
+unbelieving backward glance, the note of reality, or perhaps of
+realism, had been sounded. When Alexander the Great was in Parthia,
+Thalestris, the Amazon queen, paid him a Sheba-like visit at the head
+of a hundred women carrying double-headed axes and the traditional
+half-moon shield. He was the bravest of men, said the lady, and she the
+bravest of women. They owed a duty to posterity to raise offspring in
+whom the two strains should conjoin. The appeal flattered the vanity
+of the Macedonian, nor was he averse to meeting its conditions. So
+runs a Greek story like unto others with which the Alexander legend
+was embroidered. But Arrian explains that the so-called queen and
+her followers had been sent as a present by the governor of the next
+province--a time-honored Asiatic gift.
+
+There was a battalion of death perhaps three thousand years before
+the young women of Russia took the field in the World War, and those
+of Poland in the war that followed it. The story is told by Herodotus
+in a chapter which begins in myth and seems to pass into history. In
+the opening scene three shiploads of Amazons, captured in the Attic
+campaign already noted, overpower the Greek sailors and slay them all.
+They let the ships drift across the Black Sea and beach on the shores
+of the Palus Mæotis (Sea of Azov), where the women seize a herd of
+horses. Mounting them, they fall to plundering the land of the free
+Scythians. Herodotus continues:
+
+“The Scyths could not tell what to make of the attack upon them--the
+dress, the language, the nation itself were alike unknown; whence
+the enemy had come, even, was a marvel. Imagining, however, that
+they were all men of about the same age, they went out against them
+and fought a battle. Some of the bodies of the slain fell into their
+hands, whereby they discovered the truth. Hereupon they deliberated,
+and made a resolve to kill no more of them, but to send against them a
+detachment of their youngest men, as near as they could guess equal to
+the women in number, with orders to encamp in their neighbourhood and
+do as they saw them do. When the Amazons advanced against them, they
+were to retire and avoid a fight. When they halted, the young men were
+to approach and pitch their camp near the camp of the enemy. All this
+they did on account of their strong desire to obtain children from so
+notable a race.”
+
+The Scythian youths were sent out. The Amazons saw that no harm was
+meditated against them and desisted from further attack; and slowly
+the romance unfolded. Day after day the camps were pitched nearer each
+other, and both parties, having naught but arms and horses, supported
+themselves by the chase. “At last,” says Herodotus, “an incident
+brought two of them together. The man easily gained the good graces
+of the woman, who bade him by signs to bring a friend the next day,
+promising on her part to bring with her another woman. He did so, and
+the woman kept her word. When the rest of the youths heard what had
+taken place they also sought and gained the favor of the other Amazons.
+
+“The two camps were then joined in one, the Amazons living with the
+Scythians as their wives; and the men were unable to learn the tongue
+of the women, but the women soon caught the tongue of the men. Then the
+Scyths said: ‘We have parents and properties; let us therefore give up
+this mode of life, and return to our nation, and live with them; you
+shall be our wives there no less than here, and we promise you to have
+no others.’”
+
+But the young women would not go home with their husbands to live with
+their mothers-in-law. “Of womanly employments we know nothing,” they
+said. “To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin, to bestride the horse,
+these are our arts. Your women stay at home in their wagons engaged in
+womanish tasks and never go out to hunt or to do anything. We should
+never agree.” So they bade the bridegrooms go back to their parents,
+ask for their inheritances, and return. This the youths did, and
+then the Amazons told them they could no more get along with their
+fathers than with their mothers. They had stolen horses and wasted the
+ancestral lands. “As you like us for wives,” they pleaded, “grant the
+request that we leave the country together, and go and dwell beyond the
+Tanais” (the river Don).
+
+Again the Scythian youths consented, and all fared to a region three
+days’ journey east and three north of the Sea of Azov. Thus was founded
+the race of Sarmatians. From that day to this, concludes Herodotus, the
+Sarmatian women ride with their husbands in the chase, and in war take
+the field with them. Nor does a girl marry until she has killed a man
+in battle, so that among them are women of advanced years, celibates
+because they have never struck down a foe. Also, the Sarmatians do not
+speak the tongue of Scythia correctly, because the Amazons learned it
+incorrectly at the first.
+
+At least the topography of the tale has been confirmed. Sarmatia is the
+ancient name of Poland and Niebuhr has traced the westward drift of
+the tribes from the Don steppes to the great Hungarian plain, whence
+they overspread Poland and Russia. One could wish to believe that Maria
+Botchkareva, commander of the Battalion of Death that took the field
+against Germany when the manhood of Soviet Russia faltered and grounded
+arms, is of the high Amazonian strain.
+
+The Indian epic of the _Mahabharata_ has a similar tale, although in
+less realistic vein. There was a religious rite known as the Aswamedha,
+in which a leader would loose a horse, and follow it for a twelvemonth
+into whatever adventures and countries it might go--a quest entailing
+wanderings and warrings. Rajah Arjuna of the Gangetic city of Hatusapur
+took the pledge, and in the fifth stage of his adventure followed the
+ranging horse into the Country of Women. He entered it with heavy
+heart, knowing its danger.
+
+These were not like other women, but rakshasis, or goblin women. Their
+queen, the Rani Paranunta, was a beautiful young creature, and so were
+all her women. But their customs were worse than Circean. When men
+entered the land they were kindly entreated and beguiled into remaining
+for a month or more; and, indeed, there were guards to prevent their
+escape. After thirty days they were killed, and such of the women as
+had entertained them, but were not expectant mothers, took their own
+lives--the suttee. Thus was it assured that the Country of Women should
+always be also the Country of Young Women.
+
+The roving rajah and his train were gloomily pondering these customs
+when they saw a troop of Amazons appear, and lead away the Aswamedha
+horse to the stables of their queen. These were young girls, all
+between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, arrayed in pearls and rich
+stuffs, with bows in their hands and quivers at their waists and proud
+horses under them. Among them rode their queen on an elephant. And she
+bade Arjuna to cease his quest. “Become my slave, drink with me, and
+pass your time in pleasure,” said the young Rani.
+
+Arjuna reminded her that this was an invitation to die thirty days
+later. To which the Rani replied that really it should make little
+difference to him: “If you resist me you fall by my arrows; if you
+remain you have to face the light of my eyes.” Already her beauty had
+overcome his heart, but his mind made a last appeal. Let her permit him
+to fulfill his vow and he would come back to wed her and would find
+noble husbands for all her women. The young queen liked the speech and
+sped him on his way to other adventures, and the tale itself to its
+ultimate happy ending.
+
+In a fortified palace in an iron city of Ceylon--Hiouen Thsang tells
+the story--dwelt other goblin women to the number of five hundred.
+On their towers flags flew to attract passing ships. When merchants
+were sighted, the rakshasis took the form of beautiful maidens holding
+flowers and strewing scents, and with music welcomed them to the iron
+city. There was a prelude of wanton pleasure and then the strangers
+were shut up in an iron prison and devoured at leisure.
+
+Hither came Simhala, prince of the merchants, and five hundred of the
+trader-folk, while the lucky signals waved on the towers of the siren
+host. Simhala mated with their queen, and each of the men found a
+companion, and of each union a son was born. But an evil dream came to
+the prince, and he went in the night to the iron stronghold, whence a
+captive’s voice told him who the women were and what he might expect.
+If he would escape, there was a divine horse on the seaboard that would
+carry him away.
+
+The next scene shows the goblin women, each with her child, questing
+the air in search of their fugitive husbands and by blandishments
+persuading them to return. Simhala alone stands out. But his deserted
+queen, hastening before him to his father’s house, wins the elder man
+for her husband, and then brings on the demon women for a carnival of
+death. In the morning the royal ministers find in the palace hall no
+living thing, but only gnawed bones. The remainder of the story tells
+of the vengeance of the son in a second expedition to the Isle of Gems.
+
+“Then,” says the narrative, “the rakshasis were driven back, and fled
+precipitately to rocky isles of the sea.” There for a while we must
+seek the warrior women.
+
+Marco Polo found them “about five hundred miles toward the south in the
+ocean” from Sind. Here were two islands thirty miles apart, supposed
+by modern geographers to be the Two Sisters lying near Socotra. One,
+inhabited solely by men, was called the Island of Males; the other,
+inhabited solely by women, was called the Island of Females. In March,
+April, and May the men lived with the women, and at the same time sowed
+grain in the fields. The rest of the year, because of the climate, the
+men lived in their own island, knowing that if they stayed with the
+women it would be “at the risk of falling a sacrifice.”
+
+In Siamese folk-lore the Amazon island is farther to the east, in
+the Mergui archipelago, where lies the Country of Widows, or See-Saw
+Country of Widows--a vanishing city where are women only, and nothing
+can float on water. Still farther east, legend--Arabic, mediæval,
+and modern--tells of women commonwealths in Engano; in the “Sea of
+Malatu,” identified as a bay of North Borneo; and in an island not far
+from Samar in the eastern Philippines. Even in the Ladrones and the
+Carolines the Jesuits heard of female islands. Pigafetta was told by a
+pilot of an island called Acoloro, which lies below Java Major, where
+are found no persons but women, and these become pregnant from the
+wind. They kill their male offspring and any men who visit their island.
+
+The name of California, borne by an American state, was given by
+mediæval legend to an Amazon island “on the right hand of the Indies
+very near to the terrestrial paradise.” Although troglodytes, the
+pirate women who inhabited it lived luxuriously. Their arms and armor
+were of gold and their caves were richly tapestried and adorned with
+gems and feather-work, won by plunder of passing ships.
+
+In the _Arabian Nights_ the Amazon legend becomes entangled in other
+myths. Hassan el Bassorah loves and weds a strange and beautiful woman,
+but she flies away to the farthest of an archipelago of seven islands
+ruled by her father. He has an army of twenty-five thousand women,
+“smiters with swords and lungers with lances.” The daughter queens it
+over the island of Wak-wak. Here there is a forest the trees of which
+bear fruit with the faces of the sons of Adam. When the sun arises,
+these exclaim, “Wak-wak, Glory to the Creating King,” and when it sets,
+“Wak-wak, Glory to God.”
+
+Lane, translator of the _Thousand and One Nights_, adds a note that
+the island of Wak-wak, familiar to Arab legend, lay near Borneo. A
+queen swayed it and her warriors were beautiful women. Even the trees
+bore women who hung by their hair from the branches and syllabled,
+“Wak-wak”; if their hair was severed, they died. Another editor,
+Burton, holds that there were two Wak-waks. One was the peninsula of
+Guardafui where the pagan Gallas cried “Wak” as the Moslems cried
+“Allah”; the vocal fruit tree was the calabash tree, “a vegetable
+elephant,” the gourds of which hang by slender filaments. The other
+Wak-wak was an island identified as Madagascar, as Malacca, and as
+Sumatra. Sometimes the Cantonese speak of Japan as Wo-kwok, and in
+New Guinea birds of paradise, settling on trees, are supposed to cry
+out “Wak-wak.” This is also the name of the Falcon-man among the
+First People of American myth, and of Philippine sorcerers who could
+disconnect their legs and fly about like bats.
+
+The narrative of Maundeville brings legend west again. Beside the Land
+of Chaldea is the Land of Amazonia. The woman state emerged when the
+king and all his nobles were slain in war. The high-born relicts slew
+all the men left, “for they would that all the Women were Widows as
+they were.” Thereafter, “they never would suffer Man to dwell amongst
+them longer than seven Days and seven Nights,” and when they met their
+lovers in neighboring realms they lived with them only “an eight Days
+or ten.” These “wise noble and worthy Women” fought valiantly as
+mercenary soldiers for neighbor states.
+
+There was an island of women in the Baltic, according to Adam of
+Bremen, but he perhaps confused Gwenland, or Fenland, with the land of
+gwens--that is to say, the land of women.
+
+That there was an Amazon nation in America the Chinese were first to
+report. Buddhist travelers of the sixth century told of a Land of
+Women beyond the Pacific in what may have been Mexico. Of this report
+the Spaniards knew nothing when they gave the legend a home in the
+Caribbean Sea, in islands that were halfway houses in time and space to
+its wild but splendid domicile on the mainland of South America.
+
+The maps which Columbus knew had drawn into their contours of the
+Orient the outlines of various islands of women. In the Catalan map of
+1375 the _regio feminarum_ was placed in Ceylon. The fifteenth-century
+Catalan map placed the _insula de bene faminill_ in the west of the
+Indian Ocean and off the African coast. A map of 1489 now in the
+British Museum had the _insula mulierum_ and the _insula virorum_
+not far from Zanzibar. These were islands of the east, and Columbus
+thought he was sailing into the east, and he had with him the _Travels_
+of Marco Polo with their account of the isles of men and women. It
+was confirmation of his hopes that shortly after his landfall in the
+Bahamas the natives spoke, or seemed to speak, of the island of women.
+
+Through January and February of 1493 the journal of Columbus has much
+to say of the _Isla de Mugeres_, of which many Indians had told him.
+Its name was Madanino, the modern island of Montserrat. There was a
+companion island of men called Carib, a dozen leagues away. Columbus
+wanted to visit both, although the men were cannibals, and to carry
+away a few of the Amazons as a present to his sovereigns. But somehow
+he never made this expedition.
+
+On the second voyage Columbus unwittingly touched at another island of
+women. It was Guadeloupe, where “abundance of women [his son Ferdinand
+is the narrator] came out of a wood, with bows and arrows and feathers,
+as if they would defend their island.” They were naked, with long hair
+falling over their shoulders. The admiral sent two Haytian women
+swimming ashore to barter for food. The armed women bade them go to the
+north side of the island “where their husbands were.” But a landing
+party of Spaniards brought back ten women and three boys--and report of
+an adventure. One of the captives, wife of a cacique, had been pursued
+by a swift-footed Canaryman, and him she threw down and had nearly
+throttled before his companions pulled her off. Although nimble, the
+women were excessively fat, “and there were some thicker than a man
+could grasp.”
+
+The cacique’s wife told the Spaniards that the island was inhabited
+only by women, and that four men they had seen were there by chance
+from another island; “for at a certain time in the year they come to
+sport with them.” There was another Amazon island called “Matrimonio.”
+Having seen the prowess of these women, the admiral readily believed
+their stories. He dismissed them with presents, but the Amazonian
+wrestler had conceived a passion for a Haytian prince whom he held
+captive, and remained with the Spaniards.
+
+Other explorers after Columbus mistook for Amazons various island women
+who fought them when their husbands were away. The conquistadors even
+imagined that the convents of Mexican virgins, who followed the austere
+rule of Quetzalcoatl, were Amazon barracks in which, at seasons, men
+were made welcome. Thus by a succession of reports the stage was
+prepared for the revelation made by Orellana, when in 1542 he slipped
+away with a party of men from the spice-hunter, Gonzalo Pizarro, who
+was encamped near the headwaters of the great river--from that time
+forth called the River of the Amazons--and descended its broadening
+bosom to the sea.
+
+At the mouth of its affluent, the Rio Negro, Orellana had a spirited
+fight with a band led by a number of women. An Indian captured farther
+downstream told him that this was a district of women. Their five
+Houses of the Sun were plated with gold, their dwellings were of
+gold, and strong walls encompassed their cities; and their country
+was neighbor to El Dorado. This story, brought back to Europe with
+much corroborative detail, inflamed it, and Spain gave its author a
+commission to conquer and colonize the lands he had skirted afloat. But
+he died on his outward passage, and these lands, falling within the
+territories of Portugal, Spain had no profit of them.
+
+Thenceforth the legend of the American Amazons followed its curious
+course for three centuries, while the credulity and cupidity of men
+wove for it a background bizarre in its colors and stiff with fabled
+gold.
+
+Raleigh’s is the best account--such a recital as must interest his
+sovereign, the Virgin Queen. The nations of these warlike women, he
+said, were on the south side of a northern affluent of the Amazon in
+the province of Topago, “and their chiefest strengths and retracts are
+in the Islands situated on the South side of the entrance some sixty
+leagues within the mouth of the sayd river. They accompany with men
+but once in a yere, and for the time of one moneth, which I gather by
+their relation to be in April; and that time all kings of the borders
+assemble, and queenes of the Amazones; and after the queenes have
+chosen, the rest cast lots for their Valentines. This one moneth, they
+feed, dance, and drinke of their wines in abundance; and the Moone
+being done, they all depart to their owne provinces.
+
+“It was farther tolde me, that if in the warres they took any
+prisoners, that they used to accompany with those also at what time
+soever, but in the end for certeine they put them to death; for they
+are sayd to be very cruell and bloodthirsty, especially to such as
+offer to invade their territories. These Amazones have likewise great
+store of these plates of golde, which they recover by exchange chiefly
+for a kinde of greene stones which the Spaniards call Piedras hijades,
+and we use for spleene stones.”
+
+Even without the imported wealth of Old World legend--the tales of
+pygmies and vampires and headless folk with which adventurers decorated
+their narrative--it was a singular backdrop of tradition before which
+the female warriors of America were paraded. Through its colors ran the
+primitive lusts of men--for gold and women. The English sought gold,
+the Indians sought women, and the Spaniards, so Raleigh said, sought
+both gold and women. The natives were fighting over women a succession
+of Trojan wars, in which copper-hued Helens passed back and forth as
+the booty of the victors. Indian nobles with a dozen wives envied the
+polity of other tribes where the caciques had half a hundred apiece.
+When Raleigh asked Topiawara’s people what he should wrest from the
+Epuremi, they replied “their women for us, and their gold for you.”
+
+Of such a world anything might be true, and Amazon proof kept coming.
+The soldiers of de Agira, as Lopez Vaz records, “did finde that to be
+true which Orellana had reported, that there were Amazons, but these
+women fight to aide their husbands.” Father de Acunha, who went with
+Teixera on his great journey of exploration, asserted (1698) that
+the large ladies of fable had “treasures enough to enrich the entire
+world.” Their realm was the summits of the Cordilleras of Guiana. The
+males of the neighboring Guacaris were “the happy tribe which enjoys
+the favor of the valiant Amazons,” and these dwelt well up the sides
+of the mountains where the women throned it. When the men made their
+yearly call, their hostesses met them on the frontier with arms in
+their hands, which, however, they soon put aside. Each Amazon chose a
+hammock at random from the canoes of the men, and its owner followed
+her to her lodge.
+
+Brazilian folk-lore fitted into the legend. The devil-mask of the
+Jurupary is supposed to represent the mythical hero who came from the
+Antilles and overthrew the Amazons. All along their great river bands
+of women attacked him, but, like another Hercules, he destroyed them
+utterly. The cuirass of the conqueror became a sacred mask, and it was
+said that Indian women would hide in the forests rather than look upon
+it, so poignant was its reminder of their overthrow.
+
+In another story, found upon the middle Amazon, the Indian women
+abandoned their lords and retired to the hills, taking one old man with
+them. The oldster became the father of all children born to them, and
+only girl babies were reared. One mother, however, had a crippled son,
+and in pity she secreted and reared him, and cured his deformity. When
+his retreat was discovered there began, says Rothery, a long and tender
+persecution from the women, though the boy remained unmoved. To escape
+this he agreed that his mother should throw him into a lake, where he
+became a fish. Whenever the mother called him he swam ashore, changed
+to his beautiful human form and took food from her hands. This secret,
+also, was discovered, and the other women would imitate the call and
+inveigle the deceived youth into their arms. The old man, sole tribal
+husband of record, noted the neglect of the women, divined the reason,
+and went fishing. Other nets failed to hold his prey, but a net of
+woman’s hair caught the boy-fish, and youth was no longer served; the
+old man killed him.
+
+Navaho myth tells a related story of the secession of the women, their
+cohabitation with a water-monster, and their return to their natural
+mates. Fragmentary tales of the woman state come also from Colombia,
+Nicaragua, Sinaloa, and the two Californias.
+
+The Amazon exodus is related in a third story of Brazil, told by
+Barboza Rodriguez. When the women abandoned their husbands, flood and
+fell barred the way of the pursuers and the very monkeys pelted them
+from the trees. After a while the female republic relented so far as
+to admit the men once a year. At length it disappeared into the land
+of shadows, the women going down into a hole in the earth, led by an
+armadillo.
+
+La Condamine, the French geographer and mathematician, went to Peru
+in 1735 to determine the length of a degree of the meridian at the
+equator, and on his homeward journey made the first scientific
+exploration of the river Amazon. He returned with one certainty and
+two doubts. He was sure there had been a woman state, but he did not
+know whether there still was, nor where it could then be found, for the
+Amazons were nomads who shifted their camps.
+
+The distinguished scientist arrays his evidence: testimony of an Indian
+whose grandfather had seen an Amazon band pass by at the entrance of
+the Cuchura River and spoken with four of them; like testimony from
+other natives; statement of the Topayos that the green stones called
+Amazon stones which they wore were inherited from forefathers who had
+them from a tribe of women; statement of an old soldier that he had
+seen necklaces of Amazon stones among a tribe of long-eared Indians
+and learned they had procured them from the women without husbands,
+whose territories were seven marches west; native name of these women,
+Cougnantainsecouima, meaning “the independent women who receive men
+into their society only in the month of April”; offer of a native of
+Mortigua to guide La Condamine up the river Irijo which flows hard by
+the woman state; passages in the Jesuit _Relations_ of 1726 and reports
+of two Spanish governors of Venezuela, Don Diego Portales and Don
+Francisco Torralva.
+
+Where are the Amazons now? asks La Condamine. He notes that while
+different accounts designate the point of their retreat, some toward
+the east, others the north, and others again the west, these several
+routes converge in one common center, the mountains in the midst of
+Guiana. But without further proof he will not credit the existence of
+the woman state there in his time. The tribe may have moved again. “Or,
+what to me appears a more probable event than any other, it will have
+forsaken its ancient habits, either in consequence of being overpowered
+by some other nation, or of the maidens’ having at length lost the
+aversion of their mothers to the company of men. Thus, though no
+remaining vestige should be found of this feminine republic, this would
+not yet prove that none such had ever existed.”
+
+The majority of the natives of South America, La Condamine declares,
+are liars, credulous, and prone to the marvelous. But none of them, he
+urges, could have heard of the Amazons of Diodorus Siculus, and Justin
+previous to the arrival of the Spaniards; yet even then Amazons were
+spoken of as existing in the center of the country, and later reports
+come from tribes that never had held commerce with Europeans.
+
+If ever there was such a nation, concludes La Condamine, it must have
+been in America. The Indians were constantly wandering. Their wives
+often went with them to war. They had plenty of chances to get away
+from the men, and provocation enough in the hard estate of slavery in
+which they were held. Why could not these aboriginal women do what
+even imported slaves had done? Negroes in Latin America had fled from
+their taskmasters into the tropical forests, and there had reared a
+dozen Cimarron republics. Thus, weighing evidence, common report and
+probabilities, La Condamine casts the weight of his name in favor of
+the Amazons.
+
+Two generations later the woman state received the allegiance of
+Alexander von Humboldt, founder of the science of physical geography
+and largest name among the savants of the nineteenth century. He had
+spent five years in tropical America at the opening of the century,
+and in his _Personal Narrative_ of travel there he records affirmative
+answer to the question: Did he accept the conclusions of La Condamine?
+There was exaggeration, he thinks, in the stories of Raleigh and
+Oviedo; but nevertheless he cannot entirely reject “a tradition which
+is spread among various nations having no communication with each
+other.”
+
+Ribeiro, the Portuguese astronomer who had traversed the Amazon basin,
+entering it a disbeliever of the story, had found the same traditions
+of the woman state among the Indians, and confirmed all that La
+Condamine reported a generation before, Humboldt notes. He is impressed
+with the contemporary testimony of Father Gili. The friar had asked a
+Quaqua Indian what tribes inhabited the Rio Cuchiviro and the Indian
+named three, one of them the Aikeambenanos. The missionary knew the
+Tamanac tongue, and in that tongue the word signified “women living
+alone.” The Indian confirmed his translation, and explained that these
+were a community of women who made blow-tubes and other weapons of war.
+After the familiar Amazon custom they had seasonal amatory relations
+with the neighboring nation of Vokearos and sent their men visitors
+back with presents, but killed their male offspring. This tale, says
+Humboldt, seems framed on the traditions which are rife among the
+Indians of the Maranon and among the Caribs; yet the Quaqua who told it
+knew no Castilian, had never before talked to a white man and certainly
+did not know that below the Orinoco was the river of the Amazons.
+
+“What must we conclude?” asks Humboldt. “Not that there are Amazons
+on the banks of the Cuchivero, but that women in different parts of
+America, wearied of the state of slavery in which they were held by the
+men, united themselves together; that the desire of preserving their
+independence rendered them warriors; and that they received visits
+from a neighboring and friendly horde. This society of women may have
+acquired some power in one part of Guiana. The Caribs of the continent
+held intercourse with those of the islands; and no doubt in this way
+the traditions of the Maranon and the Orinoco were propagated toward
+the north,” so that Columbus and other navigators who followed him
+heard of them repeatedly before reaching the mainland of America.
+
+A generation later the woman state is spoken of by Schomburgk, who
+traversed Guiana in 1835-43. Everywhere the Caribs told him of the
+Woruisamocos, a tribe of warlike women who lived near the sources of
+the Corentyne in a district where no white man had been. They shot
+with the bow and arrow and used the blow-pipe. Their own fields they
+cultivated, and men came thither only as their lovers, and but once a
+year. Schomburgk pushed on to the district where the women should have
+been; they were not there.
+
+In the remote regions of the River Amazon’s northern affluents, says a
+recent geographer, the women warriors are still vainly sought.
+
+Thus this world-wide, world-old story has been followed through perhaps
+thirty centuries of tradition on four continents and in five seas; and
+the end is a doubt. Men have fought with parties of armed women, but
+none has found the City of Women. Stories of male and female islands
+may have arisen from the custom of naming companion islets “brother”
+isles and “sister” isles, like North Brother and South Brother islands
+in New York’s East River. It is contended that Orellana concocted his
+tale to divert attention from his desertion of Pizarro; that Spaniards
+mistook young Indian braves, with topknots and berry-bracelets on their
+arms, for women; and that the prose behind the poetry of the American
+Amazons is the tribe of Naupes, which still wears green stones for
+amulets. It is even suggested that the New World legend grew out of the
+coast Indian word, _Amazuni_, to denote a tidal bore upon the great
+waterway of Brazil.
+
+It has happened that the vivid imagination of the conquistadors
+projected stories among the Indians which came back later with such
+a wealth of detail as to seem native stuff. Is the New World Amazon
+tradition merely Book III, Chapter XXXIV of the _Travels of Marco
+Polo_, writ large upon the wax-like minds of savages by the curiosity
+of Columbus and his great companions?
+
+Before answering, it will be well to turn from stories of a woman state
+to authentic records of women who were less than the Amazons of fable,
+but more, or rather other, than women of the hearth. Perhaps the answer
+is there.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII. The Amazons of History
+
+
+Whether there have been Amazon states or no, there have been Amazon
+queens--warrior women who knew how to lead and whom men were willing to
+follow. The portrait gallery of history has set aside its more spacious
+halls for women of another kind, for Helen, Cleopatra, Messalina,
+Theodora, and their sisters of blandishment. But women militant have
+also a place. Tomyris, queen of the Massagetæ, defeated and slew
+Cyrus the Great. Semiramis, legendary queen of Assyria, matched her
+adulteries with her victories in arms, won all her campaigns except the
+Indian, and, in the words of Strabo, left her monuments in “earthworks,
+walls, and strongholds, aqueducts, bridges, and stair-like roads over
+mountains.” Boadicea led the Britons in momentarily successful revolt
+against Nero. Zenobia, Arab queen, established the Palmyrene power over
+the trade routes of the east and swayed Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and
+part of Asia Minor, until the arms and gold of Aurelian encompassed
+her downfall. Under the poetess Telesilla the women of Argos repelled
+a Spartan attack. Joan of Arc led the armies of France as a girl of
+nineteen.
+
+Women have gone to war as single soldiers or in troops, in disguise,
+or with husbands, brothers, and lovers. When the Goths crossed the
+Roman frontiers their families came with them in ponderous wagons,
+and their yellow-haired wives figured in the Roman triumphs. American
+Indian women, as the Spaniards found, were able to use the bow, and
+defended their homes when their husbands were away, and sometimes went
+with them in battle. The aftermath of a victory among various tribes
+of North American Indians--the scalping of the dead, the torture of
+the living--was intrusted to the women. They bear their part in the
+Mexican revolutions. Thus Ibanez puts it: “The army is composed of men
+and women. No one has ever decided which of the sexes makes the better
+soldier.”
+
+To count the women, the Spanish author says, is to count the Mexican
+soldiers, for every one has a wife along, and more often than not
+a string of children. The woman is called a “soldierette” or a
+“hard-tack,” and if her man is tiring of her, “the Indian”; and
+generals have their “generalettes.” Women constitute the commissary
+of the army. Each carries bedding for herself and man, a basket, and
+perhaps a parrot. With her sisters she forms an advance guard several
+miles ahead of the main force when the troops are on the march. When
+the latter reach camp they find the fires burning and a stew in the
+pot. The stew comes out of the basket and the basket is filled by
+foraging along the way. The Mexican hard-tack does this thoroughly,
+Ibanez thinks: “She passes over the country like a scourge of God.
+Along her path not a tree remains with a piece of fruit, not a garden
+with a turnip, not a coop with a chicken, not a barnyard with a pig.”
+When a soldier dies his companion passes to another through the swift
+courtship of circumstance; and sometimes she seizes the rifle of her
+fallen mate and uses it in his stead.
+
+Among nomad peoples women have always shared the activities of the
+men; the seclusion of the harem is for settled folk. The chronicles
+and legends of High Asia have their instances of feminine prowess in
+arms. Marco Polo devotes a chapter to Aigiarm, daughter of Kaidu,
+king of Great Turkey and nephew to the Grand Khan. She would marry no
+man, she said, who could not overcome her by force. Suitors came from
+other lands and wrestled with her before the court. Her hand was the
+prize of success and a hundred horses were the forfeit of failure. “In
+this manner,” says Marco, “the damsel gained more than ten thousand
+horses, which was no wonder, for she was so well made in all her limbs,
+and so tall and strongly built, that she might almost be taken for a
+giantess.” In war she fought beside her father.
+
+From Usbeck ambassadors at Delhi François Bernier heard vaunts of the
+Amazonian ferocity of the Tartar women. One of their stories was of
+the campaign of Aurungzebe against the Khan of Samarcand. A score of
+Mogul horsemen had plundered a village and were binding its people to
+sell them as slaves, when an old woman said: “My children, be not so
+cruel. My daughter, who is not greatly addicted to mercy, will be here
+presently. Should she meet with you, you are undone.” With a laugh the
+horsemen tied her up also, and started with their captives across the
+plain. The old woman kept looking behind her, and at last uttered a
+scream of joy.
+
+The raiders turned and beheld a cloud of dust, and in the midst of
+it a young woman furiously riding. Raising her great voice, like the
+heroines of Russian epic, she bade them loose their captives and she
+would spare them. The horsemen heeding not, her bowstring twanged and
+twanged again. Four men tumbled from the saddle, shot at a range beyond
+their own arrows. The young Amazon galloped in among the others, slew
+the greater part with her unerring bow, and with her saber cut down the
+rest.
+
+There may be an element of romantic exaggeration in each of these
+stories. But they make the point that the women of the Asiatic
+highlands knew the bow as well as the distaff, and they bring the
+tradition of female warriors into the region where Greek fable placed
+the Amazons. There are continued references to women bearing arms
+in Armenia, in Kurdistan, and in the early wars of Islam in Arabia.
+Women in armor fought with Miltiades of Pontus against the Romans. The
+seventeenth-century traveler, Sir John Chardin, had adventure with a
+ragamuffin and lewd-tongued queen of the Mingrelians. The Prince of
+Georgia said the women of the Caucasus rode as well as the men, and
+he accepted the Amazon legend. When Father Angelo Lamberti was in
+Mingrelia in 1654, word came that among the dead in a raiding force
+from the Caucasus were a large number of women. They wore complete
+coats of armor over bright-red woolen skirts. Their half-boots were
+adorned with brass disks and their gilded arrow-shafts bore heads
+shaped like the new moon.
+
+As late as the Crimean war “the Black Virgin,” a Kurdish woman, paraded
+at the head of a thousand horsemen before the palace of the Sultan in
+Constantinople, and led them away to the campaign on the Danube.
+
+The outlines of a veritable woman’s state almost take shape in Bohemian
+chronicle and legend of the eighth century. There was a Slavic queen
+named Libussa who is supposed to have founded Prague and built its
+imperial palace. She exercised her sovereign will by marrying a
+peasant, instituting a Council of Virgins, and giving women preference
+in the posts of state. When she died in 838 and affairs returned to the
+old footing, Valasca, her chief woman counselor, undertook to found a
+female commonwealth. Thus far more or less authentic history; legend
+adds that for a while the commonwealth really was, and that under it
+girls were trained to arms, while boys lost their right eyes and thumbs.
+
+St. Bernard organized the Female Crusade in 1147, in which bodies of
+armed women marched. The tradition of fighting women was kept alive
+in western Europe in the Middle Ages by girls who accompanied their
+knightly lovers as pages, and with them entered the chants of balladry.
+It was nurtured by the romances of chivalry, in which disguised female
+warriors like Bradamante, “in prowess equal to the best of knights,”
+figured. But when, for the first time in the modern era, the Amazonian
+impulse seized upon masses of women, there was needed, not the
+modulated voice of the _trouvères_, but the Gothic accent of a Carlyle
+to tell of it. The phenomenon is known as the Insurrection of Women,
+the march on Versailles of October, 1789.
+
+This was the sudden inspiration of perhaps ten thousand women drawn
+from the Central Markets and other rallying places--“robust dames of
+the Halle, slim mantua-makers, ancient virginity tripping to matins,
+the housemaid with early broom.” The mob, continues Carlyle, storms
+tumultuous, wild-shrilling, toward the Hôtel de Ville. There Theroigne
+de Mericourt leaps astride a cannon, her chariot on to Versailles.
+Mænads clamor behind. It is the cause of all Eve’s daughters, mothers
+that are or that ought to be. “Paris is marching on us,” exclaims
+Mirabeau in the National Assembly as the sinister murmurs come from
+afar. Soon the esplanade is covered with “groups of squalid, dripping
+women, of lank-haired male rascality.” They break into the assembly,
+they compel the king and queen to show themselves, and they bring them
+back to Paris, leaving the monarchy in ruins behind them. The return,
+says Carlyle, is “one boundless, inarticulate ha-ha--transcendent
+world-laughter, comparable to the saturnalia of the ancients.”
+
+[Illustration: THUSNELDA AT THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY OF GERMANICUS INTO ROME
+
+_By_ C. T. von Piloty]
+
+Not as idealized figures of the Greek friezes, but as turbulent,
+blood-hungry corybantes of earlier Greek story the Amazons of France
+emerged, almost on the threshold of the nineteenth century--vanguard of
+the Revolution. Later the market women were enrolled in a brigade which
+wore the Phrygian cap, the tricolor, a baldric, a short skirt of red,
+white, and blue, and sabots. With pike and cutlass, it was their task
+to escort the carts which bore condemned royalists to the guillotine.
+There were also armed battalions of women and girls in the provinces.
+In the external wars of the Revolution about half a hundred women are
+known to have fought, young girls in the infantry, middle-aged women in
+the cavalry.
+
+French Amazonism was partly portrayed, partly parodied in the person of
+Theroigne de Mericourt. She was a popular actress, in Carlyle’s phrase
+“brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted,” who had “only the limited
+earnings of her profession of unfortunate female.” At Versailles she
+cajoled the guard, “crushing down musketoons with soft arms.” This
+woman rose high, and fell far. Suspected of being a Girondist, “the
+extreme she-patriots” seized, stripped, and chastised her on the
+terrace of the Tuileries, with Paris looking on agrin. Theroigne lost
+her wits from brooding over it, and passed out of the Revolution into a
+mad-house.
+
+Olympe de Gonges, widow at sixteen, blue stocking, pretended natural
+daughter of Louis XV, entered the Revolution at middle age and
+countervailed the declaration of the Rights of Man with a declaration
+of the Rights of Woman. She tried the patience of Robespierre and he
+sent her to the guillotine, after a jury of matrons had found against
+her plea that she was “about to give the Republic a citizen.”
+
+Younger women aped men’s attire and men’s ways. _Les Merveilleuses_
+indecently imitated Roman costumes, going about in sandals with rings
+on their bare toes. When a man clad only in a loin-cloth paraded
+between two stark-naked women, the lurking sense of propriety, or
+of humor, was affronted, and the group was mobbed. La Maillard, the
+opera-singer, who was Goddess of Liberty at the Feast of Reason, wore
+trousers, fought duels, and with her female followers went about the
+streets to compel other women to dress as she did. This provoked
+reaction and the Committee of Safety decreed that women’s political
+clubs should disband and no woman henceforth have part in government.
+Thus disappear the Amazons of France.
+
+In domestic insurrections and in the defense of besieged cities, women,
+as might be expected, figure more largely than in field operations.
+Plutarch had told of the women of Argos who defended their city with
+such courage that a public decree gave to them the right to dedicate
+a statue to Mars, and to their daughters henceforth the singular
+privilege of wearing false beards on their wedding day. The Feast
+of the Valiant Women is celebrated in Majorca to commemorate the
+part taken by two women in repelling a pirate attack upon an island
+town. Spanish women manned the walls of Barcelona during the War of
+Succession and provided most of the soldiers that held Saragossa
+against the lieutenants of Napoleon. On the maid Agostina was conferred
+the honor of bearing the name and arms of Saragossa.
+
+The most remarkable woman in the Amazon story and, save Joan of Arc,
+perhaps the most dramatic figure in the whole story of her sex, was
+born in July, 1889, in the Russian province of Novgorod. The attempt
+of Maria Botchkareva to prevent the suicide of her country in 1917,
+by taking the field with a force of women soldiers--the Battalion of
+Death--who were pledged to obey and not to debate, to shoot the foe and
+not to embrace him, has the romance of a lost cause and more. It is
+related in _Yashka_, her utterly frank autobiography, transcribed for
+her by Isaac Don Levine.
+
+Out of her old life as misused peasant girl and misused wife this
+daughter of Russia marched away into another world where she could
+strike as well as be stricken. In the Tsar’s uniform she seemed just
+a tall, powerfully built, round-cheeked young soldier. But under the
+hoyden of the surface there were commanding qualities; and it would
+almost seem that Yashka, as the soldiers nicknamed her, could see
+straighter than any man in the empire.
+
+Her early experiences as a woman soldier in a men’s regiment were such
+as perhaps might have been anticipated. She describes her first night’s
+slumber in barracks and the blows and kicks she had to administer to
+the men on either side. “All night long,” she says, “my nerves were
+taut and my fists busy.” Soon, however, she won the respect and then
+the affection of her comrades, and a corner of the regimental bathhouse
+was reserved for her ablutions. She joined in trench raids, herself
+bayoneted a German, killed several more with handgrenades, was captured
+and escaped, was wounded and shell-shocked, repeatedly was commended
+for acts of bravery or mercy; and kisses greeted her when she returned
+from hospital.
+
+Then came the revolution, committee rule in the army, incessant
+soldiers’ meetings, refusal to attack. With Russia dying before her
+eyes, Yashka proposed to Rodzianko, president of the Duma, a desperate
+expedient--the formation of the Battalion of Death. Let the women
+organize a small command free from committees and subject to full
+military discipline. The men would neither fight nor take orders, but
+perhaps if their women attacked the enemy, the men might be shamed into
+moving forward behind them.
+
+Rodzianko saw a gleam of hope in the project; Brusilov,
+commander-in-chief, approved; Kerensky set his seal on it; and Maria
+Botchkareva found herself at the head of two thousand women of all
+classes from princesses to peasant girls and domestic servants. “Who
+will guarantee,” asked a delegate at the meeting that authorized this
+step, “that the presence of women soldiers at the front will not yield
+little soldiers there?” “I will hold myself responsible for every
+member of the command,” was Yashka’s spirited reply. “Only discipline
+can save the Russian army. In my battalion I shall have it.” And she
+did, although the securing it reduced the command she led to the front
+to three hundred girls.
+
+“I had a vision,” she said. “I saw millions of Russian soldiers rise in
+an invincible advance, after I and my women had disappeared in No Man’s
+Land on the way to the German trenches.”
+
+There was a day in July, 1917, when it looked as if the vision was
+to become fact. Artillery had prepared the way for a general attack.
+Then the committees began to debate, precious hours passed, the day
+declined. Into the Battalion of Death came nearly a hundred men
+officers, followed by soldiers who would rather fight behind a woman
+than not at all.
+
+Rifles were placed in the officers’ hands, and, a thousand strong,
+the detachment formed its battle line, every girl flanked by two men.
+Coarse jests rose around them, but the laughter died in men’s throats
+when the little command leaped the trenches and went swiftly forward,
+alone, as it seemed. “Suddenly,” says Yashka, “we caught the sound of
+a great commotion in the rear. In a few moments the front to the right
+and left of us became a swaying mass of soldiers. First our regiment
+poured out, and then, on both sides, the contagion spread, so that
+almost the entire corps was on the move.”
+
+The German first line was overwhelmed and the second, and the third,
+Yashka’s regiment alone taking two thousand prisoners. Then word came
+that the Ninth Corps, which was to relieve the attacking troops and
+continue pursuit, was debating instead of advancing!
+
+They must needs run for it, for the German counter-attack was forming.
+Back over all the trenches they had won at such cost fled the Russians,
+the enemy reoccupying them without a fight. Yashka, shell-shocked, was
+carried in on the shoulders of her adjutant.
+
+Thus the great moment of the Battalion of Death came--and went. Russian
+manhood was still capable of a heroic thing. But the chaos which it had
+made its world could not resolve into order even at the poignant drama
+of Russian women marching alone.
+
+What went before and was to come after was all in keeping. The tread of
+the little battalion resounds through scene after scene of delirium.
+Behind the lines one hears agitators haranguing the women. One beholds
+Kerensky banging his table and, forgetful he has just abolished
+capital punishment, threatening to have Yashka shot because she will
+not tolerate committee rule in her command. One glimpses snipers in
+Petrograd firing on her women as they leave for the front. Her own
+angry scorn flashes out in a violent scene when she reviews the Moscow
+Woman’s Battalion--committee ruled--and notes the rouge, the slippers,
+the fancy stockings, the evidences of a dubious familiarity with the
+men.
+
+There was worse at the front--the men killing their officers and
+embracing the enemy; No Man’s Land “a boulevard for promenading
+agitators and drunkards.” Resolved that there should be some real
+fighting, Yashka shot a German in the leg as nonchalantly he approached
+the lines. Real fighting did follow; the Russian soldiers turned their
+machine guns on their own women. The latter were sent to another
+sector, and when the men heard that Lenin and Trotzky had seized
+control they celebrated; they tried to lynch the little command. Twenty
+girls were killed, the rest fled into the woods.
+
+It was the end. The Battalion of Death disbanded and Yashka was seized
+and brought before the duumvirs. They bade her join them in “bringing
+happiness to Russia,” and laughed at her fierce scorn. But they let her
+go, and she follows her command out of these pages. One salutes with
+pride and pain.
+
+About four hundred other Russian women, most of them Siberians,
+served in men’s regiments, and the colonel of the Sixth Ural Cossack
+Regiment was a woman. There was a smaller number of female fighters in
+the Austrian armies, a few in the German. Women figured also in the
+conflicts that followed the World War. The Vilna unit of girl soldiers,
+about a thousand strong, suffered heavy losses in the defense of Poland
+against Soviet Russia. “Their heads thrown back, they seemed the very
+spirit of Poland,” said one who saw them in action.
+
+These were Amazon volunteers. Until yesterday there were professional
+Amazons at many of the courts of Asia. The Celestial King of the
+Tae-Pings had a regiment of fighting women. For centuries Indian
+princes, notably of Hyderabad and the Deccan, had female guards called
+Urdu-begani, or “camp-followers,” on whose loyalty they could rely
+utterly. A body-guard of one hundred and fifty girl archers, the
+loveliest that could be found in Cashmere, Persia, and the Punjab, rode
+milk-white steeds in the service of Ranjeet Singh of Lahore. There were
+female sepoys in the palace at Lucknow, female guards at Bangkok and
+in Bantam. With their slender bodies incased in tunics and trousers of
+rich Eastern colors, with plumed caps on their small dark heads, and
+with their erect and slightly swaggering carriage, these palace troops
+gave an added effect of theatricalism to the lesser courts of the
+Orient. The Amazon march of the modern stage mimics a reality of Ind.
+
+The _Chronicle of the Cid_ may provide a prologue for the motley
+spectacle of Africa’s warrior women which follows here. Six-and-thirty
+kings of the Moors and one Moorish queen attacked Valencia. The queen
+was a negress, and two hundred mounted negresses rode behind her, all
+with hair shorn save a tuft on the top. They wore coats of mail and
+wielded Turkish bows, and their queen drew hers so skillfully that
+they called her the Star of the Archers. The Christians centered their
+attack on this female cavalry, slew the leader, and dispersed her force.
+
+Through legend and doubtful chronicle of enterprises Amazonian, one
+moves in Africa to a basis of fact as completely documented as the
+recent deeds of warrior women in Russia and Poland. Father Alvares, who
+went with the Portuguese ambassador to the Abyssinian court (1520-27),
+gives it on hearsay that to the south of the kingdom is a country where
+the women have husbands but dispense them from fighting. Their queen
+has “no special husband, but withal does not omit having sons and
+daughters.” “They say,” says this traveler, “that they are women of
+a very warlike disposition and they fight riding on certain animals,
+light, strong, and agile, like cows, and are great archers.”
+
+In his history of Ethiopia, Father Giovanni Cavazzi has two stories
+of negro Amazons in the Congo country of the seventeenth century. One
+is of the Princess Lliuga, who refused to submit to the Portuguese
+and fought until she won a favorable peace. Her garb was skins; her
+weapons were the bow, the ax, and the sword; her battle custom was to
+sacrifice a man--cutting off his head and drinking his blood--before
+attacking the enemy. The other story is of Tembandumba, a royal negress
+who must have known the Amazonian tradition and who sought to establish
+the Amazon state. Like Semiramis, she had a procession of lovers, and
+slew them as she tired of them. She ruled her state through women. All
+male infants, all twins, and all village-born babies were killed by
+her orders, and a magic ointment was made from their macerated bodies
+mingled with herbs. The queen set the example by destroying her own
+boy baby. She told the young girls that their temporary matrimonial
+alliances should be marriages by capture, they to do the capturing in
+war. The turbulent career of this one-eyed queen of a cannibal tribe
+was ended by a husband who poisoned her before she had quite reached
+the point of doing for him.
+
+Until, in some instances, less than a generation ago, the courts of
+Negroland maintained palace troops and other fighting forces of women.
+Burton and Rothery have collected their stories. In the Congo empire
+of Monomotapa, Lopez found in 1680 battalions of women, armed members
+of the royal harem. A generation before, Jinga, queen of Angola,
+maintained a harem of half a hundred young men. The monarch of Yoruba
+boasted that if the members of his female bodyguard clasped hands,
+they could span his kingdom. In the time of the traveler Bosman the
+king of Whydah on the Slave Coast had four thousand armed wives. On
+the Gle’ lagoon of the Ivory Coast rumor placed a community of fetish
+women ruled by a queen who was able with herbs to develop artificial
+elephantiasis. These women put their male infants to death. Dahomey,
+which lies back of Whydah, and which became a French protectorate in
+1894, was the best known of African kingdoms--and known for two related
+things, its annual Customs of blood sacrifice and its army of Amazons.
+
+Sir Richard Burton, who went on mission to King Gélélé in 1863, bearing
+Queen Victoria’s urgent request that he abolish the slave trade and
+human sacrifice in his dominions, has written the account of this
+nearest modern approach to the Amazon state. It is a veracious report
+and it reads like an evil dream. The _Thousand and One Nights_ has been
+called a blend of blood, musk, and hasheesh. The Dahomey story is an
+African _Arabian Nights_, with native beer and trader’s rum in place of
+hasheesh, with blood flowing in more turbid torrents than at Bagdad,
+and with a ranker musk--and under the musk the overpowering reek of the
+body odors of Negroland.
+
+In this nightmare state, half hid behind the swamps and forests of
+the coast, one senses the controlling and corrupting presence of some
+primitive and abominable religion. Africans, says Burton, worship
+everything except their Creator. Those of Dahomey worshiped, among
+other things, their ancestors. The Dahoman sovereign must enter
+Deadland in royal state, with a ghostly retinue of leopard wives, head
+wives, birthday wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, bards, soldiers.
+The retinue was swollen yearly at Customs time when criminals and
+prisoners of war, publicly sacrificed under the king’s eye, went
+drunken and giggling to their doom, while at the same hour the palace
+Amazons dispatched female victims to the land of shades. Throughout the
+year, whenever the king would send a message to his deceased father,
+he killed a subject and forwarded his soul with it. If he had invented
+a new drum, or received a visit from a white man, or even removed from
+one palace to another, the soul of some man or woman, slain for the
+purpose, must carry the news to the paternal ghost.
+
+It was impossible, says Lady Burton, to venture from one’s hut without
+seeing something appalling--skulls on posts, living victims impaled,
+evidences of cannibal feasts, animals tied in every agonizing position
+and left to die. Burton himself figured that there was an annual
+slaughter of at least five hundred persons, and during the year of
+the Grand Customs perhaps a thousand. The institution was strenuously
+upheld by a powerful and interested priesthood; “to abolish human
+sacrifice was to abolish Dahomey.”
+
+This was the woman’s state, somewhat as early Greek legend pictured the
+Amazon commonwealth of the Black Sea, before art and song refined the
+fable. Women in Dahomey took precedence over men and the warrior women
+called themselves men. When one of the king’s Amazons walked abroad, a
+slave girl with a bell went ahead, and men had to get out of the way.
+It seemed to Burton, when he went up from the coast to the capital
+city of Abomey, that the older and uglier the slave girl the louder
+she rang the bell, and the more she enjoyed the ignoble scamper of his
+interpreters and hammock men. The popular name of these women was Our
+Mothers. Their official name was The King’s Wives, a title of courtesy
+only, for the monarch had his own harem and these other women were
+supposed to be a kind of fighting nuns.
+
+The Amazon army consisted of the Fanto company of the king’s bodyguard,
+and the right and left wings, comprising five arms. The former were
+distinguished by a headdress in the form of a narrow white fillet on
+which was the figure of a crocodile in blue, and their hair was cropped
+instead of shaven. The body of the force was composed of blunderbus
+women, elephant hunters, razor women carrying eighteen-inch blades
+attached to a two-foot handle, archers with poisoned arrows, and
+infantry with tower muskets. The archers were little more than heavily
+tattooed, lightly clad camp followers with knives lashed to their
+wrists. The elephant hunters were the élite. They wore knickers under
+short skirts, their breasts were bound with linen strips, and antlers
+were attached to their caps. Other Amazons had the same uniform, but
+wore on their shaven heads small caps on which were blue tortoise
+figures.
+
+Travelers of two centuries ago computed the female army as about ten
+thousand strong. The court may have deceived them by having the women
+march like a stage army across the parade ground, slip around, and come
+back again; or the kingdom may have been depopulated by its incessant
+wars, its blood sacrifices, the slave trade, and the dedication of a
+fourth of the females to the celibacy of arms. When Burton was there
+in 1863 he figured the total number of Amazons at about twenty-five
+hundred, of whom one-third were unarmed.
+
+The nature of this force seems to have varied from generation to
+generation. Travelers report in turn that the Amazons are cadets of
+the leading families; that they are slaves made in war; that they
+are criminals, common scolds, and women taken in adultery; that they
+are loose in morals and that they are celibates; and that the custom
+of permitting those no longer young enough to bear arms to marry was
+a thrifty substitute for a state pension. Burton recites the common
+belief that two-thirds of them are maidens, the remainder unfaithful
+wives condemned to soldiering. He thinks pretty well of their morals,
+which were protected by tabu, although while he was in Dahomey the
+king had to judge the cases of more than a hundred Amazons about to
+become mothers. The crime was lèse majesté, for in theory these were
+royal brides, but the punishment was moderate--a few beheadings, and
+imprisonment, banishment, or pardon for the rest.
+
+Dahomans themselves supposed that their peculiar institution was of
+their own time, had forgotten, what Europe knew, that women guarded
+their court two centuries before, did not dream that back to an
+unfathomed antiquity, it may be, theirs had been a woman state.
+
+Burton was present at the annual saturnalia of the Customs, and to his
+sometimes sardonic vision all was invested in African grotesqueness.
+He noted the immense thighs of the women officers and found it hard to
+reconcile celibacy and corpulency. He described their dances, for also
+they danced before the king, “clapping palms on thighs, or on something
+fleshier.” The women stamped, wriggled, kicked the dust, and ended with
+a violent movement of the shoulders, hips, and loins--an anticipation
+of the most modern of popular terpsichorean contortions. One captain
+is pictured in terms that approach admiration--a fine, tall woman with
+glittering teeth and a gait that was partly a military swagger and
+partly a sensuous dance. But the costumes of all had a phantasmagoric
+quality--Amazons with beards of monkey skin, with men’s nightcaps, with
+red liberty caps, with fools’ caps, with human skulls, or the lower jaw
+of a skull, dangling at the waist.
+
+These women paraded past the king while Burton looked on. It may be he
+tried to take notes and tired at the task. His narrative reads as if
+his own head whirled with the dancers, until he could no longer frame
+complete sentences. He concludes that it was something like a pawnshop,
+for the King’s Valuables went by with his women.
+
+About in his own words and manner, but condensed, this is the picture:
+
+“Sixteen brilliant banners held horizontally, preceding a wheelbarrow
+with a fancy red-and-blue flag. Five huge fans, followed by razor
+women. Eight images, of which three were apparently ships’ figureheads
+whitewashed, and the rest very hideous efforts of native art.
+Sixty-seven women with brown faces and bead mittens. Twenty-one girls
+carrying cylinders of red and white beads. Seventeen women with
+silver plates fastened to the sides of their skulls, habited in red
+clothes and handling bead cat-ó-nine tails. Twelve women, also in red.
+Seventeen fetish pots, three jars, one silver plated urn, attended
+by singing women. Twenty casque women with red tunics and plumes and
+black horse tails. Eight helmet girls with red plumes, dark coats, and
+white loin cloths. Six pieces of plate, a tree, a crane, a monkey.
+After singers and dancers, a huge drum carried by a woman porter. Three
+large chairs, preceding about fifty heavily armed elephant huntresses,
+clad in chocolate and dark blue, with bustles of talismans behind
+and strings of cowries before. Four pots. A bullock trunk. Fourteen
+fetish women in white caps and tunics and bright yellow grass cloth.
+Five black girls dressed in blue. A line of 703 women and girls with
+country pots of native beer and bottles of trade rum and gin. A motley
+group surrounding two women in big felt hats. A band and a troop
+of bardesses. Two girls with serpent flags. Seven troubadour women
+dancing. Two warming pans. An escort of bayonet women. Royal equipages
+hauled by men harnessed with ropes. A body of armed women preceding
+seven umbrellas and drinking rum. A troop of girls with jugs, ewers,
+and jars. Twenty blunderbus women in red caps. Six kettledrum girls in
+scarlet caps and bodices and blue skirts. A calabash with a pyramid of
+four skulls. Two dancing women with long switching tails. Fifty captive
+female dancers. An old cut-glass chandelier. Living representatives of
+the mothers of the Dahoman dynasty. A company of singers commanded by
+an old woman in a broad-brimmed hat. A stunning salute of blunderbuses.
+Good night after seven mortal hours.”
+
+Yet there was no doubt that these fantastic women could fight.
+Their frames were as powerful as those of the men, whose military
+organization their own paralleled; and their hearts were higher. They
+were the king’s own troops with his favor to vindicate and a tradition
+to sustain. They had greater ferocity as well as greater courage than
+the men--“savage as wounded gorillas,” Burton called them, and he laid
+this to their enforced chastity. With them, two centuries ago, Dahomey
+conquered the joint forces of Whydah and Popos, and the women fought
+bravely against the French. Travelers who saw them in maneuver at the
+annual Customs tell how they charged barefoot and half naked through
+barriers of thorny acacia, and emerging, torn and bleeding, but with
+impassive faces, passed in review before their sovereign.
+
+Out of one passage in the history of Dahomey a ray of light streams.
+When a king died at Abomey a wild orgy began among the Amazons of the
+palace. They took their own lives and they slew one another. When
+Sinmenkpen passed to his fathers, five hundred and ninety-five Amazons
+died with him; only by extorting a solemn fetish oath did Gezo end
+this custom. There were similar practices elsewhere. Among the Behrs
+of the White Nile, Rawlinson reports, a woman’s guard prevented any
+man from approaching the king, except the ministers who came to
+strangle him when his end was near. Megasthenes, Greek ambassador to
+the court of Sandrokotos at about B.C. 300, says that the Indian king
+was surrounded by armed women who guarded his chamber and attended his
+hunts in chariots or upon horses and elephants. Sometimes it was their
+right to kill their lord, and the slayer married his successor. In
+Bantam half a century ago the king was escorted by a girlish cavalry
+that rode astride and carried muskets and lances; it was said that if
+he died without issue the custom was for them to meet and elect a new
+sovereign.
+
+When kings died, their women guards functioned. It was the function of
+priestesses of death. This is the secret of the Amazon legend and the
+key to practises of human sacrifice and periodic and indiscriminate
+sexual intercourse with which, alike in Asia, Africa and America, the
+legend is associated.
+
+Before fitting the key into the lock of legend it will be well to
+let the rule of reason say its word. That large bodies of women
+should withdraw themselves from the state, abjure the society of men
+altogether or except at stated intervals, live their own lives and
+develop their own social tradition, has seemed to skeptical opinion in
+all ages a thing not to be believed because against nature. Yet in all
+ages women have done before the eyes of men something very like this.
+Thousands of them have gathered in great convents, or as temple harlots
+have served at the vast shrines of the Farther East, or as armed
+priestesses of the Nearer East have loosed the leash of fable. Their
+periodic withdrawals from society for the performance of the Eleusinian
+and other mysteries were a routine of the classic civilizations.
+
+There have been times when the woman state was a fact of a season,
+or of a year, or more--as when the men of an island were fishing
+elsewhere, or the able-bodied members of a tribe were away on the
+annual hunt, or the warriors were on a long campaign; and the traveler,
+seeing none but women, might misread what he saw. Doubtless there have
+been instances where the men of a tribe were exterminated in war, and
+their women, retiring to inaccessible retreats, maintained their
+independence for a while. Time was when everywhere the women commanded
+and the men obeyed. It is not beyond imagination that, sometimes and
+in some places, with the memory of the matriarchate to inspire them,
+women have revolted against the cruel lot which was theirs in primitive
+society, and set up for themselves; for they were the daughters as well
+as the wives of the hard-headed men of the caves. This is perhaps as
+plausible as the conjecture that savage man merely concocted the story
+to dramatize the natural antipathy of the sexes, to account for the
+deep groove of division which this sentiment had run through primitive
+society and to justify the fact that society gave men so much the
+better of it.
+
+The roots of the Amazon tradition, however, lie deeper than what may be
+called the politics of sex. The truth underlying the several legends
+is to be found where, according to report, the fighting women had
+their commonwealth. The descendants of the Cappadocian Amazons who
+came to the aid of Troy are to be found in the Armenian highlands. The
+descendants of the West African Amazons, on whom, as Diodorus fables,
+the vengeance of Hercules fell, are to be found in Dahomey and near-by
+negro states. The secret of the Brazilian Amazons is to be sought,
+among other places, in Mexico.
+
+With a single word out of the Old Testament the door of legend opens.
+Of the Hittites the Hebrew writers seemed to know only that they
+occupied mountainous districts in the land flowing with milk and honey;
+that for a space the Jews dwelt with them and “served Baalim and the
+groves”; and that Solomon put a tribute upon them. From the rock
+carvings of Asia Minor and from Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions the
+present age has learned more. The discovery by Sayce and other modern
+scholars of the important place once held by the Hittites has been
+called the romance of ancient history.
+
+That place may be likened to the place held by the Ottoman Empire in
+its strength. Like the Turks, the Hittites were a Turanian people who
+planted themselves across the great roads of Asia Minor and absorbed
+and crudely reproduced the culture of more civilized neighbor peoples.
+Their capitals were at Carchemish, where they commanded the fords of
+the Euphrates, and at Kadesh on the Orontes, whence they ruled Syria
+and the cities of the Ægean. They were mountaineers from the Taurus,
+with olive skins, mongoloid features, and the Chinese cue. Their
+double-headed eagle passed through the Turkomans and the Crusaders into
+the imperial arms of Russia, Austria, and Germany; the Phrygian cap of
+their successors has become the headgear of revolutionary woman, and
+the Turks still wear their peaked shoes.
+
+The Hittite Empire flourished in the Bronze Age, when it met Egypt,
+Babylon and afterward Assyria on equal terms. It began to loom in the
+sixteenth century B.C. and it was a power to be reckoned with until
+well into the first millennium before Christ. On its ruins arose
+Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lydia, and later Pontus. The rock carvings that
+proclaimed its sway, and that Herodotus described but misread, still
+look down on the Pass of Karabel along an old road of empire.
+
+The Amazons of Greek legend, according to the convincing scholarship of
+Sayce, were the armed priestesses of the Hittites. Their fabled capital
+of Themiscyra is the ruined city of Boghaz Keui in Asiatic Turkey not
+far from the Black Sea. The authentic likenesses of the warrior women
+are to be found, not in the temple friezes of Attica, but in the rock
+carvings on the hills that overlook this ancient ruin. Yet Greek art
+reflects correct observation or trustworthy report, for its warrior
+maidens wear the kilt of the mountain-dwelling Hittites and carry the
+same double-headed ax that is seen in their crude sculptures.
+
+In the service of the Asiatic goddess, known variously as Astarte,
+Derceto, Cybele, the Great Mother, and Diana of the Ephesians, was a
+multitude of armed priestesses so numerous that to the Greeks they
+seemed not a cult but a nation. Whole cities were in effect mere temple
+precincts populated by these women and by eunuch priests; the high
+priestess of the temple ruled the city and the surrounding country,
+and had some claim, therefore, to the title of Amazon queen. At Komana
+were six thousand of these armed maidens of the shrine. At Ephesus vast
+throngs of them served a high priestess who called herself the Queen
+Bee.
+
+These Hittite women worshiped the Asiatic goddess with orgiastic
+frenzies that simulated, or literally repeated, the primal processes
+of dissolution and reproduction. It was easy for the Greek mariners
+who saw them dancing to the goddess and flourishing their weapons on
+the shores of the Black Sea to infer that a woman’s capital lay a
+short distance inland. It was natural, also, to attribute to them the
+actual feats of the Hittite armies, and fable that the cities founded
+or subjugated by that empire on the Ægean--Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyme,
+Myrina--were colonies of Amazonian origin.
+
+The Amazon legends of Africa and South America and the customs of the
+female palace troops of Africa and Asia are made clear if one goes
+behind the cult of the Asiatic goddess to the domain of primitive
+magic whence it arose. There one finds beliefs that belt the earth and
+are reflected not only in ancient tradition, but in modern practises
+associated with May day and Midsummer Eve, with sowing and harvest,
+with the summer and winter solstices. Frazer’s examination of these in
+the _Golden Bough_ is deeply illuminating.
+
+Following the laws of sympathetic magic, men believed that in order
+to make the grain flourish and the grass renew itself in the annual
+death and resurrection of nature, it was necessary by some drama of
+their own to repeat the phenomena of decay and of new life. There must
+be a noteworthy human death and a resurrection. Sometimes men killed
+a scapegoat, sometimes a divine animal, sometimes a divine man--a
+god-king, as he was called--such an impersonation of divinity, for
+example, as the Grand Lama of Tibet. The killing of the god-king was
+preferred as a magic more constraining than any other upon the forces
+of nature.
+
+There were several means of simulating the phenomena of resurrection.
+This might be done by having two couples appear in the annual
+drama--two sets of divine and royal mates. Frazer suggests that the
+book of _Esther_, names and all, is based on a Babylonian religious
+festival of this kind--that the gentle Esther is none other than the
+lustful Astarte, that Mordecai is the god Merodach, that Haman is
+Hannum the Aramite god, and Vashti a goddess unidentified. The triumph
+of one set of characters and the humiliation and death of the other are
+supposed to represent the bourgeoning of spring after the long death of
+winter.
+
+The common means of symbolizing and constraining the reproduction
+of new life in nature was through a period of promiscuous sexual
+intercourse in which designated persons or whole populations took part.
+It was deemed necessary to set an example to the woods and fields, and
+in the woods and fields it was set. The saturnalia, the carnivals,
+the May Days and St. John’s Eves of old time were not, in intent,
+excursions into debauchery; they were exercises in sympathetic magic.
+So it befell that in savage vision the withered leaf and the green
+shoot, winter and spring, death and resurrection, came to mean two
+things--periodic murder and lust.
+
+After a while the priest-kings sought escape from the custom that
+gave them only a year of life upon their throne of grace. They chose
+substitutes--a son, a slave, a malefactor--who for a few days reigned
+in their stead, and as a sign of kingship were made free of their
+harems, as Absalom went in unto King David’s concubines in the sight
+of Israel. The king, or the mock-king, devoted to death but attended
+by beautiful women, crowned with flowers and worshiped as a god--this
+spectacle, as profoundly ironical as life itself, was staged in Mexico
+when Cortez came; and when Huc visited Lhasa in 1846 he found the
+Tibetans electing a monarch of misrule to carouse and suffer in place
+of the pope of Buddhism, God’s vicar for Asia.
+
+The bacchic procession of the doomed king and his women, this dance of
+death that went around the world, was the real Amazon march. It was the
+part of the warrior women to kill the man-god whose last days they had
+beguiled. It was their part, also, to co-operate with a multitude of
+men in a lustful drama, so that every acorn and grass root and grain of
+corn might heed the command to bring forth and multiply; back of the
+myth of annual Amazon matings with neighbor tribes was this reality of
+the saturnalia. In places the legend has suffered confusing changes, as
+in the Dahoman Customs, where the king kills instead of being killed.
+But the same meaning underlies the Phrygian worship of the Great
+Mother, the lethal privileges of the female palace guards in Hindostan,
+the self-slaughter of the warrior women when a king died at Abomey, the
+going of women into the hills of Brazil with one old man as companion,
+and the recurrent tragedy of the god-man of Mexico, who dismissed the
+fair partners of his revelry, snapped the strings of his harp, flung
+away his chaplet of flowers, and ascended the altar where an Aztec with
+a knife awaited him.
+
+The meaning is death and life in nature, and the Amazon as priestess of
+both.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV. The Folk of Tradition
+
+
+Among the peoples of prodigy there were races without deformity and yet
+set apart from other men by their peculiar habits or habitat, or, as
+in the case of the giants of geography, by their unusual stature. Men
+who dwelt in caves or whose diet was too much unlike their fellows’
+were themes of marvel. Under fables told about them the outlines of
+historical peoples may often be discerned.
+
+While the tall men merge on the one side into the colossal creatures
+of mythology, on the other they approach mortal size and the human
+quality. Their tradition has been shaped by nature myths growing out of
+volcanic eruptions, the phenomena of frost and darkness, and storms in
+the desert. But popular beliefs rest mainly on more tangible things--on
+the argument that since there are giant individuals there may well be
+giant races; on the actual existence of tall races; on the presumption
+that men of old time were taller than those of to-day; on dim memories
+of tall vanished races such as the Cromagnous, and on an ancient notion
+that the fossil remains of extinct animals were the bones of giants.
+Travelers have done much to build the legend. Almost always they
+underestimate the mean stature of a people with many small individuals
+and overestimate that of a people with many tall individuals, the usual
+margin of error running from two to four inches.
+
+Above all, there has been the witness of geological strata uncovered to
+eyes that misread their record. On the basis of a five-pound tooth and
+an eleven-foot thigh bone, found in New England in 1712 and supposed to
+have been a mastodon’s, Increase Mather reported to the Royal Society
+of London that men of prodigious stature had inhabited the New World.
+Other fossil bones found in Switzerland in 1577 became the basis of a
+legend, which is commemorated in the colossal statues of Basle and in
+the figures supporting the arms of Lucerne, that a race of giants from
+sixteen to nineteen feet high lived in the Alps.
+
+Ctesias reported that the Seres, whom he located in upper India,
+reached a stature of fourteen feet and an age of two hundred years.
+Onesicritus declared that in those parts of India where the sun cast no
+shadow the men were eight feet high. But ancient writers were neither
+so specific nor so insistent upon the existence of a colossal race as
+later writers have been. Near the Vale Perilous, says Maundeville, are
+two islands occupied by giants. The tenants of the first of these are
+of comparatively modest stature, from twenty-eight to thirty feet.
+Those of the farther isle are from forty-five to fifty feet.
+
+“I saw none of these,” admits Sir John, “for I had no Lust to go to
+those Parts. But men have seen many times those Giants take Men in the
+Sea out of their Ships, and bring them to Land, two in one Hand and two
+in another, eating them going, all raw and all alive.”
+
+Amerigo Vespucci found a prodigious people in the island of Curaçoa
+off the coast of Venezuela, “every woman appearing as a Penthesilea,
+and every man an Antæus.” Pigafetta, writing of Magellan’s cruise,
+is responsible for the belief, long held in Europe, that the tall
+Patagonians were true Titans. One of them he pictures as advancing to
+greet the white men, dancing and singing and putting dust on his head,
+as if in token of peace. The savage towered above the Spaniards, who
+came only to his waist. Dismissed with gifts, he returned at length
+with other men of a like stature, and two of these the mariners decoyed
+on shipboard. Leg irons were placed on them on the pretext that they
+were ornaments, but when the Spanish purpose was disclosed they broke
+in pieces as easily as if they were the baubles they were represented
+to be.
+
+Herrera, Van Noort, Le Maire and other travelers confirmed the account
+of the size of the antipodal Indians. Lopez Vaz described them as “very
+mightie men of bodie of ten or eleven foot high, and good bow-men, but
+no man-eaters.” It remained for Drake to correct report when he made
+his own circumnavigation of the globe. This was one of the “notorious
+lies” which the Spaniards disseminated; the Patagonians were “but of
+the height of Englishmen”; they are, however, somewhat above it. Five
+feet eleven inches is the average among them and individuals reach the
+height of six feet seven.
+
+At the other extremity of South America the natives of the northern
+Andes have a legend of a monstrous race that arrived in huge boats
+at Cape Santa Elena about the beginning of the Christian era. Their
+knees stood as high as the heads of other men and their eyes were like
+small plates. They abused the Indians, their habits were abominable,
+and fire from heaven destroyed them. This is perhaps a reminiscence of
+an extinct civilization, the grotesque art of which has been brought
+to light by recent excavations. There is an Oregon tradition of an
+underground village of gigantic Indians on Coos Bay. They bashed each
+other over the head with heavy bone knives without being hurt. When the
+smaller Indians attacked them they fled down the river and out to sea
+on two rafts and never came back.
+
+Buffon, who would not credit the pygmies, believed there had been
+giants of from ten to perhaps fifteen feet in height. The Bible
+narrative giving Goliath, the Philistine bravo, the stature of six
+cubits and a span, or three inches above seven feet, is conservatively
+phrased. Buffon to the contrary notwithstanding, it is generally
+thought that no man ever lived who reached the stature of ten feet, and
+no race that reached the mean stature of seven. A very few individuals
+have exceeded the height of eight feet and there is record of one or
+two who have passed nine feet. According to the principles governing
+the distribution of the overlarge individuals of a race, as worked out
+by Quetelet, the appearance of a twenty-foot giant would imply the
+existence of a race with a mean stature of from twelve to fourteen feet.
+
+If there was once a race a foot or so above the stature of modern man,
+it may be that the tall individuals who appear in each generation are
+not the product of a favorable environment and fortunate combination of
+elemental forces, but represent remote ancestors of unusual size. Zell
+in his _Polyphem ein Gorilla_ argues that if races of average height
+are the normal, and if there are dwarf races, then there must have been
+giant ones to strike the balance. At any rate, tales of such races are
+world-wide and a tang as of reality is in some of them. The Celt, for
+example, said that giants had a strong body odor. “Giants,” says Grimm
+in his summary of their tradition, “consider themselves the old masters
+of the land, live up in the castle, and look down upon the peasant;”
+the picture might be of something fabled, or of something vanished.
+
+
+_The Macrobians_
+
+As report gave certain races a great stature, so it gave others a great
+age. These were known as the Macrobians. Herodotus mentions such a
+people in Ethiopia; “the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia,” Walt
+Whitman calls them. Such also were the Hyperboreans, on the other side
+of the north wind. The tall Seres lived to be two hundred years old. In
+tropical India another tall race lived to the age of one hundred and
+thirty years, and died just as if they were in the middle period of
+life. Some writers called the elderly Indians Gymnetæ, or Naked Folk.
+Another Indian people, the Cyrni, were reported to attain four hundred
+years. Holding that the Indians were exceedingly just, and that the
+just are long lived, the ancients credited the general statement of
+Ctesias that the nations of the Indus live to one hundred twenty, one
+hundred thirty, and one hundred fifty years, and the very old to two
+hundred years. Pliny adds that they never expectorate and are subject
+to no pains in the head, teeth, or eyes. There were Macrobians in
+Brazil. A German woodcut of 1505 pictures them at a cannibal feast, and
+the accompanying legend says, “They become a hundred and fifty years
+old, and have no government.”
+
+There was a reason, named by Isogonus, for the longevity of the
+inhabitants of Mount Athos in the Balkans. They used the flesh of
+vipers for food, and hence were “free from all noxious animals both in
+their hair and their garments.”
+
+
+_Albinos_
+
+The Albania of the ancients was a country of Asia in the eastern part
+of the Caucasus. Somehow the early writers confused its inhabitants,
+the Alani, with Albinos. Beeton says that there is in Albania “a
+certain race of men whose eyes are of a sea-green color, who have white
+hair from childhood, and who see better by night than by day.” In the
+kingdom that men call Mancy in “Ind the More,” says Maundeville, “they
+be full fair Folk, but they be all pale. And the Men have thin Beards
+and few Hairs, but they be long. In that Land be many fairer Women than
+in any other Country beyond the Sea, and therefore Men call that Land
+Albany.” Also, the hens are white.
+
+
+_Sun-hating Folk_
+
+There were sun-haters as well as sun-worshipers in the sun-smitten
+lands of the older day. Carpini tells of the troglodytes of the
+Caucasus who “lived in terror of the mysterious and fatal sound which
+accompanied the rising of the sun.” Herodotus and Pliny describe the
+Moroccan peoples called the Atlantes. When they look upon the rising
+and the setting sun they “utter direful imprecations against it as
+being fatal to themselves and their lands.” If one believes what is
+said of these tribes beside the western sea, says Pliny, they have lost
+all characteristics of humanity. They do not distinguish one another by
+names, “nor are they visited with dreams, like the rest of mortals.”
+
+
+_A Poisonous Nation_
+
+The Psylli were a nation dwelling near the Great Syrtis on the North
+African coast. Pliny, who sponsors them and says they were exterminated
+by the Nasamonians, tells a story which reveals the two great
+obsessions of the ancients--a curious credulity as to poisons, and an
+incredulous curiosity as to the continence of women. In the bodies of
+the Psylli, there was by nature a certain kind of poison that was fatal
+to serpents and the odor of which rendered them instantly torpid. It
+was the custom to expose newly born infants to the fiercest serpents
+“and in this manner to make proof of the fidelity of their wives, the
+serpents not being repelled by such children as were the offspring of
+adultery.”
+
+
+_The Troglodytes_
+
+What the moderns call cave-men the ancients called troglodytes. In
+the phrase of Æschylus they knew not how to build a house against the
+sun, but “lived like silly ants, beneath the ground, in hollow caves
+unsunned.” Because they shared the habitations of bats and snakes,
+their voices were bat-like in their shrillness, and with hissing
+tones; and they ate reptiles and crickets. They were fleet-footed
+like the creatures of the rocks, the troglodyte Ethiopians being, says
+Herodotus, the swiftest of men. The inhabitants of the country of the
+Robbers (Lestai) in Farther Asia, says Ptolemy, were savages, living
+in caves, and “having skins like the hide of the hippopotamus which
+darts cannot pierce.” Artemidorus speaks of naked night-traveling
+troglodytes of Arabia who put away their dead amid laughter. There are
+cave-dwellers to this day in southern Cambodia, and a Chinese account
+of the thirteenth century tells of the skin breastplates which they
+wore.
+
+The ancients knew of various races of troglodytes, notably those along
+both shores of the Red Sea. Others were in Syria, and upon the Nile,
+and in Fezzan, and in the Caucasus. The voiceless troglodytes of Pliny
+are supposed to be the Rock Tibboos on whose whistling speech their
+neighbors still comment. The best account of the elder cave-dwellers
+happens to be authentic history. When Xenophon was retreating with the
+Ten Thousand to the Black Sea he found upon the Armenian frontier a
+people who lived in underground burrows with vertical entrances like
+wells, up and down which they passed on ladders. Their beasts used a
+sloping path and lived with them underground, cattle, goats, and sheep
+thriving there on green fodder gathered above. These subterranean
+habitations were also granaries and wine-cellars.
+
+With all their lively interest in the ways of troglodytes, the ancients
+knew less than the moderns about them, and were perhaps farther in
+spirit from the cave-man. In the caverns of western Europe men of
+to-day have studied his household economy, his art, and the animals he
+tamed or hunted. Travelers in various lands have come upon underground
+chambers, many of them still occupied. In the Berber rock-towns these
+subterranean dwellings number thousands, and the ravines which furrow
+the plateaus serve as their streets. On the Cappadocian plain deserted
+subterranean villages, called _kataphugia_, or places of refuge,
+underlie occupied villages of the surface, and thither the cattle
+descend in severe weather, as in Xenophon’s time twenty-three centuries
+ago. The peoples of the surface are supposed to be descendants of true
+troglodytes.
+
+
+_The Anthropophagi_
+
+It never occurred to the early writers to classify men according to the
+color of their skins, or the breadth of their skulls, or fundamental
+differences in their languages; and the Greeks and Romans were
+ignorant of the Noachian genealogy and heedless of the apportionment
+of the earth among the sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth. But they had a
+rough-and-ready method of cataloguing savage races according to what
+they ate, in the thought that whatsoever a man ate, that in some degree
+he became. After naming the races of fable from the size of their feet
+or ears or other bodily peculiarity, they grouped and named, according
+to their supposed diet, various races of reality that dwelt at a
+distance.
+
+Classic writers took passing note of the Anthropophagi, or tribes that
+ate human flesh. There were such peoples in Africa and in Asia. The
+best known account is the description in Herodotus of the Issedones.
+These Scythians of Central Asia ate the flesh of their deceased
+relatives prepared with other meat, and made gold-rimmed drinking cups
+of their skulls--a rite of honor to the dead. A tribe in northern Tibet
+is supposed to be descended from them.
+
+
+_The Ichthyophagi_
+
+The races that subsisted on fish, the Ichthyophagi, were described
+by the ancients with unusual detail. One of the first accounts is
+by Herodotus, who tells of the folk that lived on platforms above
+Lake Prasias. They drew their fish through trap-doors from the water
+beneath, and the custom was that for every woman a man took to wife he
+drove three piles into the lake.
+
+All along the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea there were tribes of
+Ichthyophagi. Their very cattle ate dried fish and the beef had a fishy
+flavor; Ibn Batuta remarked this in Yemen, and it is still true of the
+Coromandel Coast. Arrian’s account of the voyage of Nearchus describes
+the Ichthyophagi as occupying for four hundred miles the barren shores
+of the Mekran; they had few boats and were indifferent fishermen, but
+by intercepting the ebb tide with palm-bark nets they obtained their
+food.
+
+Arrian repeats a legend of the origin of these tribes in whose lines
+one hears faintly the wild music of the Sirens. The island of Nosala,
+off the Mekran coast, was the residence of a Nereid “whose practice
+was to seduce such mariners as landed there to her embraces, and then,
+after transforming them into fish, to throw them into the sea.” But the
+sun ordered the nymph to quit the island and himself changed the fish
+back into men. These were the first Ichthyophagi.
+
+Farther west, in Ariana, were fish-eating tribes who made their
+dwellings, Strabo says, of shells and of the bones of large whales, the
+ribs furnishing the beams and supports, and the jawbones the doorways.
+Sections of the backbones of whales were used as mortars wherein
+sun-dried fish were pounded.
+
+Diodorus Siculus has a spirited account of the Ichthyophagi along the
+Red Sea. This people, he says, do not use nets, but so wall the caverns
+and gullies of their rocky shore that the receding tide leaves the fish
+imprisoned there. Whereupon, with a shout, the tribe assembles on the
+beach. Women and children gather the little fish next the shore; with
+sharp goats’ horns the men dispatch the larger ones, throwing all upon
+the land. The booty is put into stone pots tilted toward the south and
+the fish are fried by the sun until the flesh drops off. The bones are
+cast into a pile and the meat boiled with fruit seeds. Then everybody
+falls to and gorges. The heap of bones is a dietary reserve which the
+tribe pulverizes and devours when storms shut off the shore.
+
+The life of these Ichthyophagi is thrown into a sort of rhythm by the
+need, every fifth day, of going inland on an extended journey for fresh
+water. For four days they fish continually and make merry in great
+throngs, “congratulating one another with harsh and discordant songs;
+then they fall promiscuously, as every man’s lot chances, to company
+with their women for procreation sake.” On the fifth day the tribe goes
+in a body to a district lying under the foot of the mountains where
+there are springs of sweet water. Hither, also, the shepherds drive the
+flocks. Nor do the shore folk differ much from the herds, for “they go
+making a horrid noise and without articulate voice.” Arrived at the
+springs, they throw themselves on their faces and “drink as beasts
+until their stomachs are distended like a drum.” Slowly they wend
+their way back to salt water, and for a day recline without tasting
+food. The following day they begin anew their fishing and feeding. Such
+is the round of their lives.
+
+Diodorus remarks, apparently to commend, that these fish-eaters “far
+exceed all other men in freedom from boisterous passions.” They give no
+heed to a stranger, nor even look at one when he addresses them: “Nay,
+if they be assaulted with drawn swords they will not stir; and though
+they are hurt and wounded, yet they are not in the least provoked. Even
+though their wives and children be killed before their eyes, they show
+no sign of anger.”
+
+These accounts are not fables. But there is fabulous admixture, most
+of it arising from the primitive belief that a fish diet makes men as
+cool-blooded as the creatures upon which they live.
+
+
+_Other Dietary Nations_
+
+Akin to these nations were the Chelonophagi, or turtle-eaters,
+concerning whom Strabo recites facts entirely in keeping. This tribe
+lives under the cover of turtle shells, which also it uses as boats.
+Some of its members, however, collect seaweed in heaps, hollow the
+heaps, and dwell under them. Their dead are cast into the sea, and
+carried away by the tide to become food in turn for the fish and
+turtles.
+
+The Acridophagi were grasshopper-eaters--insectivorous, ornithologists
+would call them. The locust was, and is, a favorite diet of desert
+peoples, a staple food of the Arab, as well as of the pygmy folk and
+other singular breeds. Niebuhr likens its taste to that of “a small
+sardine of the Baltic, which is dried in some towns of Holstein.” What
+Dampier has to say of customs he found in two Pacific islands in 1687
+may stand without essential change for the ways of earlier acridophagi:
+“They had another dish made of a sort of locusts, whose bodies are
+about one and one-half inches long, and as thick as the top of one’s
+little finger; with large thin wings, and long and small legs. These
+came in great swarms to devour their potato leaves and other herbs; and
+the natives would go out with small nets and take a quart at one sweep.
+When they had enough they would parch them in an earthen pan; and then
+their wings and legs would fall off, and their heads and backs would
+turn red like boiled shrimp. Their bodies, being full, would eat very
+moist, their heads would crackle in one’s teeth. I did once eat of this
+dish, and like it well enough.”
+
+Certain other races living in Africa the ancients knew chiefly as
+specialists in diet. Pomponius places the Ophiophagi, or snake-eaters,
+on the Red Sea. Homer gives the Lotophagi, or lotus-eaters, a habitat
+on the Mediterranean coast. Agatharcides names the Rhizophagi or
+root-eaters who dwell on the banks of the Atbara and subsist on reed
+roots; and the Elephantophagi, farther inland, who hunt and eat the
+elephant. Also in the interior Diodorus places the ostrich-eating
+Struthophagi, and there Pliny places the Agriophagi “who live
+principally on the flesh of panthers and lions,” and the Pamphagi “who
+will eat anything.”
+
+
+_Geographical Glimpses_
+
+The citations below, from classical, mediæval and modern writers, are
+reproduced because of their flavor and for whatever they are worth:
+
+The Gamphasantes, who go naked, are unacquainted with war and hold no
+intercourse with strangers.
+
+In the African deserts “men are frequently seen to all appearance and
+then vanish in an instant,” says Pliny--perhaps the mirage.
+
+“On the one side of the Senegal,” says John Lok, “the inhabitants are
+of high stature and black, and on the other side of browne or tawnie
+colour.” The latter are the “tawny Moors” of Prince Henry’s ship
+captains.
+
+The Annamese of pure stock have a peculiar formation of the great toe
+whereby they are able to pick up small objects with their prehensile
+feet, says Keane. Their ancient Chinese name was Giao-chi, which
+signifies “with the big toe.”
+
+“Many of Canton and Quansi Provinces,” says a Jesuit missionary in
+Purchas, “on their little toes have two nailes, as they have generally
+in Cochin-China.”
+
+On the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, says the seventh-century
+_History of the T’ang Dynasty_, is a naked swarthy race with red
+frizzled hair, bestial teeth, and hawk claws who hold their markets at
+night with veiled faces.
+
+The Korwars of India, according to a local legend, “derive from
+scarecrows animated by a prowling demon.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Because they are recognizable peoples with representatives who may
+still be studied, the folk of tradition are useful exhibits in the
+museum of history.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV. The Horizon Lands
+
+
+Not until yesterday did men encompass the earth. But their minds were
+always more adventurous than their feet, and from the beginning,
+almost, the sense of remote horizons was in them. Fantastic though
+its form might be, there was a divine breadth in their speculation as
+to the earth and its peoples. The peasant of antiquity, who knew only
+his township in Europe or his mountain canton in high Asia, had yet a
+vision of continents and distant seas. His imagination explored the
+waste places, ascended the high places, descended into the earth. Its
+product was the geography of legend, which gave ground but slowly to
+the geography of reality.
+
+
+_Beyond the North Wind_
+
+One of the earliest countries to find a place in the geography of
+legend was that of the Hyperboreans. It lay on the other side of the
+north wind. These people lived so far toward the pole that they were
+beyond the icy blasts, and beyond all contacts of war or commerce with
+the peoples of the south. Only the priests and the poets knew of them.
+
+The priests knew of them because of the yearly offerings sent in to the
+temples of Tempe, Delphi, and Delos. These were gifts of amber, and
+virgins bore them from nation to nation across the whole of Europe.
+For many years the holy maidens had honor and hospitality from all the
+countries along their path. When violence was done them the journeys
+ceased. Not, however, the offerings. The Hyperboreans deposited these
+upon the boundary of the people who adjoined them. The latter carried
+them to their neighbors; and so by successive stages the tribute came
+to the shrines of Apollo, whom the distant nation held in especial
+honor. At last the custom fell into disuse.
+
+No return visits were made from the south, for the way was hard. Yet
+the poets had, as always, their own means of information. Homer has
+nothing to say of the Hyperboreans, but Hesiod speaks of them, and
+Pindar, and Æschylus, and a host of later and lesser voices. From
+these authorities it appeared that the Riphæan Rocks, an imaginary
+prolongation of the Ural group westward across Europe, shut the
+Hyperboreans off from the south. Out of the rocks the north wind came
+sweeping down over the lower latitudes, but on the farther side of the
+range was summer. It was a favored land, and this a favored people.
+“The muse is no stranger to their manners,” says Pindar. “The dances of
+girls and the sweet melody of the lyre and pipe resound on every side,
+and twining their hair with the glittering bay, they dance joyously.
+There is no doom of sickness or disease for this sacred race; but they
+live apart from toil and battles, undisturbed by exacting Nemesis.”
+Isidore adds that when the cithara players smite their instruments the
+swans fly up and sing very harmoniously.
+
+Rightly discerning that this was no region of the earth, Herodotus
+assigns its inhabitants to the realms of fable. But Hecatæus, Damastes,
+Diodorus, Pliny and others credit the legend, though sometimes with a
+note of doubt, as when Pliny begins, “Beyond the region of the northern
+winds, there dwells, if we choose to believe it, a happy race known as
+the Hyperboreans.” From their country Hercules brought the olive. They
+were a pious folk, loving justice, dwelling in woods and fields, living
+on the fruits of the earth and abstaining from taking even animal life.
+No rude winds agitated this delicious land. Here were “the hinges upon
+which the world revolves, and the extreme limits of the revolutions of
+the stars.” There was but one rising of the sun for the year, and that
+at the summer solstice, and but one setting, and that at the winter
+solstice; and the day and night each lasted six months. In the morning
+of the long day the people sowed, at midday they reaped, at sunset they
+gathered the fruits of their trees; and the long night they spent in
+caverns; and so their lives were passed.
+
+They lived to be very old in the country beyond the north wind,
+sometimes as much as one thousand years. But a fateful note runs
+through all accounts of them. The happy Hyperboreans were wont to tire
+at last of their felicity. They ended a career of feasting and an old
+age sated with every luxury by leaping from a rock into the sea. At
+the close of each life lay the rock and the sea.
+
+Just where was this worshipful nation? The answers are vague and
+conflicting. On the left bank of the Danube, it was first thought; on
+the very verge of Asia, others said. Later its home was fixed “midway
+between the two suns, at the spot where it sets to the antipodes and
+rises toward us.” There were Greek writers who confused the Riphæan
+Rocks with the Alps and Pyrenees, and confounded the Hyperboreans
+with the Etruscans and the Gauls. Hecatæus gives them an island home
+as large as Sicily, lying under the arctic pole, over against Gaul.
+Here Apollo has a stately grove and a renowned temple in a city where
+all the residents are harpers. This is the Britain of the bards and
+druids, of whose people it was said in later time that they take their
+pleasures sadly.
+
+
+_At the Cardinal Points_
+
+While the ancients peopled the rim of the earth with deformed races
+and monstrous animals, their pictures of the nations that dwelt at
+the cardinal points show mainly the ideal treatment. In the far east,
+in the far west, in the far south, there were men like unto the
+Hyperboreans of the far north. Of the Indians, the Ethiopians, and
+the Iberians of early story the same report was had. They were “just”
+and “blameless”--these words recur again and again--and they were
+long-lived and fortunate. Thus real races took on some quality of myth.
+The classic sense of equilibrium demanded this equal reverence to the
+four quarters of heaven, just as it was fancied that, to balance the
+Pillars of Hercules in the west, Bacchus had set up two columns “by the
+farthest shore of the Ocean stream, on the remotest mountains of India,
+where the Ganges pours down its white waters to the Nysæan shore.”
+
+This cast of thought did not die with the ancients. The epithets,
+“just” and “blameless,” reappear in the writings of eighteenth-century
+philosophers when they speak of the Chinese. A little later the
+beautiful and artless natives of the South Seas laid upon the thought
+of more sophisticated lands a spell that endures. Now, as always, the
+four points of the compass are points of fable, and the primitive
+worship that was paid them lurks in the magic with which the number
+four is invested. The rising and setting of the sun fixed two of these
+points and the course of the Nile northward through Egypt may have
+fixed the other two.
+
+“All evil comes from the northeast,” say the Japanese. Thoreau usually
+walked southwest. “Eastward,” he said, “I go only by force; but
+westward I go free.” Tartar tent doors, as Marco Polo notes, face
+south. The mythical Irish voyages were toward the west. In the thought
+of many races witchcraft is of the north. In Norse mythology hell-way
+is always downward and northward. When cutting black hellebore the
+hedge doctors of Greece faced eastward and cursed. “Altars should
+regard the east,” said Vitruvius. Thither the Mohammedan turns in
+prayer. The manifestations of God are in the west, says the Talmud. The
+Babylonian temples lay due east and west so that the rising sun would
+illumine their altars at the equinoxes. Some of the Egyptian temples
+were so planned that this would happen only on Midsummer Day. The
+older Christian churches lie east and west, although some of them are
+oriented to permit the rising sun to gild their altars on the day of
+the saint whose name they bear. The west was the seat of darkness and
+hence the rose-window was placed high in the cathedral’s western wall
+to illumine the benighted, with the bell-towers flanking it to summon
+them to Christ. The eastern side with its altar and the southern with
+walls and windows consecrated to saints and martyrs were both sacred.
+But the northern, or Black Side, was Satan’s, and effigies of unclean
+beasts and sculptured allegories of lascivious deeds proclaimed it.
+
+The cities of ancient Yucatan had gates toward each of the cardinal
+points. With the Aztecs all the world directions were significant--the
+north standing for emptiness, the east for sterility, the west for
+fertility, the south for good fortune. In the symbolism of the Navahos,
+white, the dawn color, stands for the east; blue, the sky color, for
+the south; yellow, the sunset color, for the west; and black, the
+curtain of night, for the north. The Pueblo Indians assigned the north
+to the air, the west to water, the south to fire, and the east to earth
+and the seeds of life. In old Chinese writings the men of the north
+are called brave, the men of the south wise, the men of the east kind
+and friendly, the men of the west upright and honest. Over the four
+cardinal points the old Brahman gods presided.
+
+Thus by a primitive law of the mind illusion lurks in every corner of
+the heaven. It lies deepest in the track of the sun. From east to west
+go the great wanderers--Hercules, Ulysses, and the rest--and solar
+myths thicken along their path through legendary lands. The east and
+west dominate the thoughts of men with their eternal spectacles of
+sunrise and sunset. Whatever commerce, geography, or political history
+may teach them, the east is still the region of the morning sunlight
+and the west of the evening shadow. Though their steps turn westward,
+men’s thoughts drift eastward. Though the east be hunger-bitten and
+poverty-stricken and its subjugated millions seem to count but little,
+it is still the gorgeous east, “the dancing-place of the dawn.”
+
+Beyond the curtains of the west lie the realms of repose: “If sunrise,”
+says Max Müller, “inspired the first prayers, called forth the first
+sacrificial flames, sunset was the other time when again the whole
+frame of man would tremble. The shadows of night approach, the
+irresistible power of sleep grasps man in the midst of his pleasures,
+his friends depart, and in his loneliness his thoughts turn again to
+higher powers. When the day departs the poet bewails the untimely death
+of his bright friend; nay, he sees in its short career the likeness of
+his own life. Perhaps, when he has fallen asleep, his sun may never
+rise again, and thus the place to which the setting sun withdraws in
+the far west rises before his mind as the abode where he himself would
+go after death.”
+
+Though the westward journeys of the sun are but a seeming, their trail
+lies broad across the spiritual life of mankind.
+
+
+_On the Mountains_
+
+Half of history has been written in the passes of the mountains. What
+lies above these deep saddles of the ranges belongs in the main to
+legend. Not much, even now, is known of the mountain tops, for men do
+not dwell there. Antiquity seldom went up to see. The high places of
+old sacrifice were hilltops, not mountain peaks.
+
+Men have been content to travel the valleys and, where necessity
+impelled, to cross the passes. The steeps overhead seemed fit abode for
+the elder gods, for giants and dwarfs and griffins, for dragons whose
+breath was the avalanche, for ghosts whose voice was the echo, for the
+carnal revels of Satan and his witches; sometimes, also--since legend
+is its own law--for cities of enchantment, invisible and beautiful.
+
+Most famous mountain of classic story was the Atlas; the most fabulous
+locality, even in Africa, is the superlative of Pliny. Its summit
+reached beyond the clouds and well nigh approached the very orb of the
+moon. Rugged and precipitous on the side of the ocean to which it gave
+a name, it fell by a gentler slope on the side toward Africa, and dense
+groves covered its flanks where streams flashed and fruits abounded.
+But in the daytime men were never seen there. All was silent like the
+dreadful stillness of the desert. A religious horror stole over those
+who drew near. At night, fires innumerable gleamed upon its sides. “It
+is then,” says Pliny, “the scene of the gambols of the Ægipans and the
+Satyr crew, while it re-echoes with the notes of the flute and the
+pipe, and the clash of drums and cymbals.”
+
+The legend of a mountain of nightly tumult and illumination recurs
+in Arab and Christian chronicle. Solinus repeats it. The mountain is
+Felfel in the Sahara, says an Arab author of the twelfth century,
+and genii hold court in towns on its slopes whence the people have
+fled. Ibn Khordadbeh places the realm of nocturnal revel in the
+Southern Ocean. Argensola, writing of the Moluccas in the sixteenth
+century, reports that for ages “cries, whistles, and roarings” had
+been heard from a mountain in Banda. The spot is inhabited by devils,
+he concludes. Sindbad tells of an island, called Kasil, where nightly
+resounds the drumbeat of rebellious djinns. So was Prospero’s isle full
+of noises, but these were “sound, and sweet airs that give delight and
+hurt not.”
+
+[Illustration: _The Steeps Overhead Seemed Fit Abode for Giants and
+Dwarfs and Griffins--for Cities of Enchantment_]
+
+It may be that the Atlas story grew out of the habits of the Kabyles
+who tenant the mountain’s recesses. During the heat of the day they
+would retire to their dwellings, coming out at night to dance about the
+village fires to the music of drums. Similar legends among the Indians
+of South America of strange lights seen upon the mountains appear to
+have a basis of fact. Sir Martin Conway tells of a village where the
+bells were rung and the people flocked to church in dreadful fear
+because, after sunset, the peak of Illampu glowed red like fire and
+the end of the world seemed at hand. In Venezuela Im Thurn beheld a
+mountain strangely luminous at night. Humboldt saw a similar spectacle
+in Venezuela and guessed it might be the burning of hydrogen gases. In
+Colombia, Zahm saw brilliant lights along the crest of the Cordilleras,
+and judged it was an electric phenomenon, the summits acting as a vast
+condenser from which electricity escaped by a silent glow or brush
+discharge--St. Elmo’s fire. Here, perhaps, is the key to the Old World
+story.
+
+The Mountains of the Moon, which lift their snowy peaks on the line of
+the equator in East Africa not far from the springs of the Nile, bear
+a myth-engendering name. It was given them by Ptolemy, who perhaps
+translated it from native words of the same meaning. Lying within the
+sphere of Arabic mediæval geography, Eastern fable enveloped them.
+One story was that whoever looked upon them was drawn to them as by a
+magnetic influence and only death would release him. According to an
+Arab compiler, “a certain king sent an expedition to discover the Nile
+sources, and they reached the copper mountains, and when the sun rose,
+the rays reflected were so strong that they were burnt.”
+
+To the early Greeks the Caucasus was the end of the world; beyond
+it was naught but the Ocean Stream. Æschylus describes it in his
+_Prometheus Bound_ as the loftiest of mountains and speaks of its
+“star-neighboring summits.” Here he pictures the fire-stealing Titan as
+chained to a rock with a vulture at his vitals. Herodotus repeats that
+these peaks are higher than any other. No Roman general ever passed
+them. And they stood for things dreaded and unknown--the sanguinary
+Amazons, fugitive and barbaric tribes of Israel, and the sinister
+nations of Gog and Magog. These are perhaps the mountains of Aaf of
+Malay tradition, which run their ramparts of green chrysolite clear
+about the earth and the encompassing sea.
+
+The high places of American Indian tradition lay in the west. The
+plains savages and some of the forest tribes looked upon the Rocky
+Mountains as the boundary of the known world. These peaks held up the
+sky; the spirits of the storm haunted them, and stone giants, and
+huge-bellied anthropophagi. Into this west ran the underground trail
+to the land of the dead. In South Dakota was the Hill of Little Devils,
+malignant pygmies with unduly large heads, of whose arrows the prairie
+tribes stood in awe.
+
+There were seven sacred mountains in the land of the Navahos--four at
+the cardinal points, and three at the center; and legend gave each its
+own color, jewels, birds, and plants. One mountain was fastened to the
+earth with a lightning flash, another with a stone knife, another with
+a sunbeam, a fourth with a rainbow. Almost in the Greek spirit the
+Indians of Guiana chanted the glories of “Roraima of the red rocks,
+wrapped in clouds, ever-fertile source of streams.” White jaguars and
+white eagles were upon it, a magic circle surrounded it, and demons
+guarded its sanctuary.
+
+Whenever the Kirghiz pass by Mustaghata, loftiest of the Pamirs, they
+fall upon their knees in prayer, for threescore and ten saints live
+there. Sven Hedin, who made four attempts to ascend it, repeats its
+legends. One story tells of a holy man who, climbing it, found on its
+slopes a garden with plum trees where old men in white garments were
+walking. He plucked and ate the fruit. One of the graybeards told him
+it was well he had done so, for had he despised the fruit, as they had
+done, it would have been his fate to stay, as they must, walking up and
+down the garden till time was no more. Then a rider on a white horse
+dashed into the garden, and seizing the holy man, galloped with him
+down the mountain side, leaving him in the valley, dazed and with only
+a confused memory of what he had seen. Another story tells of forty
+giant horsemen who swept down the mountain and routed a Chinese army.
+
+On the summit of Mustaghata, to which neither Sven Hedin, nor the holy
+man, nor the graybeards could climb, the Kirghiz say is the ancient
+city of Janaidar, built in a golden age when everyone was happy and men
+were at peace. Its inhabitants had no intercourse afterward with the
+peoples below, and all the ills and woes of life are stranger to them.
+Their groves bear fruit the year around, their flowers are unfading,
+their women never grow old. Cold, darkness, and death are alike unknown
+to them. The ramparts of Mustaghata are one of the seats of the realm
+of eternal youth.
+
+Though its name is but the Latin word for “bald,” a grim Swiss legend
+has it that Mount Pilatus is the burial place of the Roman viceroy who
+surrendered Jesus to the mob. When he took his own life, neither the
+Tiber nor the Rhone, into which in succession his body was flung, would
+contain it. Evil and sordid spirits raised such storms that it was
+carried farther. An uncanonical book of the thirteenth century recites
+that it was dropped at last “into a well surrounded by mountains,
+where, according to some accounts, certain diabolic machinations and
+ebullitions are still seen.” This spot was identified with a marshy
+pool near the summit of Pilatus.
+
+Throughout the Middle Ages it was believed that if anyone threw a stone
+in this little lake, a tempest would follow. Once a year Pilate left
+it and sat on a rock arrayed in scarlet. Whoever beheld him died in a
+twelvemonth. The fearful burghers of Lucerne made an ordinance that no
+one should approach the pool unless one of their number went with him
+to see that he cast no stone. At length, in 1585, Johann Mueller, state
+pastor of Lucerne, climbed the mountain with a party of friends, flung
+stones into the water, and derisively challenged the evil spirit to
+come forth. Nothing happened, and the legend lapsed.
+
+
+_In the Desert_
+
+The desert holds the green surprise of the oases, the promise of
+mysteries beyond its veil, and, as men have thought, the memory of
+wonderful things that were. Tradition broods over it, legends of
+caravans that never came back, of armies swallowed up in its silences,
+of vast cities buried in the sand. Where there is so little for the eye
+to see, the most haunting things are those the ear has heard--music
+that steals from the under edges of the dunes; voices, mocking or
+beguiling, which call to caravan stragglers; the crash of ghostly drums
+and the clash of arms heard afar.
+
+Any survey of the deserts of history reveals the stuff of wonder. There
+each man’s hand is turned against his brother, and yet in every tent
+all are safe; masked tribesmen roam the waste; stealthy slave columns
+cross it by abandoned routes; hereditary clans of dancing girls supply
+the streets of women in the environing lands; hermits wither in rocky
+cells and militant fanatics range the plateaus; the bustard and the
+wild camel show along the uncertain skyline, and remnants of forgotten
+peoples rove below it. These are momentous details; legend has done
+much with less to work upon. It needs only that thirsty wayfarers
+shall have, as sometimes they do, the sudden vision of lakes of water
+shimmering in the distance, with palms fringing them and temples
+mirrored in them. Realities of an instant only, their passing leaves a
+sense of wonder that expects, and invents.
+
+Much of the tradition of the waste places has been set down by Marco
+the Venetian in his account of the passage of the desert of Lop. It
+is asserted as a well-known fact, he recites, that here is the abode
+of evil spirits “which amuse travelers to their destruction with most
+extraordinary illusions.” During the daytime, if men fall behind the
+caravan, or are overtaken by sleep so that the column has passed a hill
+and is out of sight, they hear voices calling their names in tones to
+which they are accustomed. Following these, they are lured from the
+direct road and perish alone. At night men seem to hear the march of
+a large cavalcade on one side or the other of the road. Again they
+follow, in the belief that the camel bells are of their own party; the
+daybreak finds them pursuing strange paths alone. Day or night, evil
+spirits take the shape of their companions and seek to decoy them from
+the proper route. Ghostly bodies of armed men seem to rush upon them,
+and in the terror of flight they lose the way.
+
+“Marvelous indeed,” concludes Marco, “and almost passing belief are the
+stories related of these spirits of the desert, which are said at times
+to fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments,
+and also of drums and the clash of arms, obliging the travelers to
+close their line of march and to proceed in more compact order.”
+
+This is such a recital as one would rather have expected concerning
+the desert of ancient Egypt. There were the graves of the dead, and
+report had it that their spirits, doomed to a miserable existence in an
+inhospitable land, developed into predatory demons who meant no good to
+the traveler.
+
+Stories still current in Asia, however, have the flavor of Marco’s
+report of seven centuries ago. Doughty tells of the fantasy they have
+at Teyma of a neighboring spectral oasis, often beheld by the Bedouins.
+Slaves and horses issue from the enchanted appearance of palms; “but
+all fadeth soon if a man approach them.”
+
+In the little desert of Reig Rawan at the foot of the heights of
+Kohistan the wind-blown sands sweep through the rocky fissures with
+a sound that is like the music of an æolian harp accompanied by the
+distant beating of drums. These wild harmonies of the wind in open
+spaces are the source of many strange tales. In Reig Rawan they are
+fabled to be the martial strains of armies which have been swallowed up
+in the sands, but march on to unknown destinies.
+
+The kingdom of Prester John has been mapped in Asia, in Africa, and in
+the imagination of men. In the latter domain lies the Gravelly Sea, a
+desert phenomenon which Maundeville describes: “It is all Gravel and
+Sand, without any Drop of Water, and it ebbeth and floweth in great
+waves as other Seas do, and it is never still nor at Peace, in any
+Manner of Season. And no Man may pass that Sea by Ship, nor by any
+Manner of Craft, and therefore may no Man know what Land is beyond that
+Sea. And albeit that it have no Water, yet Men find therein and on the
+Banks full good Fishes of other Manner of Nature and Shape, than Men
+find in any other Sea, and they be of right good Taste and delicious
+for Man’s Meat.”
+
+What lies beyond it? Mezzoramia, it may be, if it is accepted that
+Prester John was an Abyssinian. This is an earthly paradise, situated
+somewhere in Africa. Only one road leads to it, and the road is hard to
+find and easy to lose again. No man ever found this secret highway save
+Gaudentio di Lucca. He traveled it to its end, and for twenty years
+lived behind the desert’s curtains in a country of every felicity.
+
+Fables of the waste tell of cities on which some sudden curse has
+fallen and turned their people into stone. The sand has not covered
+them with the decent pity of its mantle. They lie open to the air. The
+sunshine falls on their silent market places and only the wind wanders
+in their streets. The stony figures of the men and women that once
+lived there stand where the curse had found them, disquieting things in
+their semblance to statuary and their ancient caricature of humanity.
+
+The map on which Anthony Jenkinson recorded his travels in Tartary
+makes note of a petrified city in the plains of Central Asia.
+Garcilasso de la Vega, Inca historian, tells a like tale of
+petrification based on a numerous group of stone images. The Museum
+Metallicum of Aldrovandi pictures an assemblage of men, sheep, and
+camels converted into stone. The Arabs have a story of a petrified camp
+at Hamam Meskouteen in Numidia, where they assert that stony tents
+are pitched and stony sheep dot the plain. Most circumstantial of all
+such legends is that of Ras Sem, an extensive petrified village in the
+Cyrenaica. It was surmised that this might be the region of the Gorgons
+of classic story, whose frightful glance turned everything into stone.
+
+This village figures in old travel books, one of them dating as far
+back as 1594, and Sir Kenelm Digby may have had access to these when
+he printed in the _Mercurius Politicus_ his travel tale of a petrified
+city in northern Africa. The Tripolitan ambassador in London asserted
+that a thousand persons had seen the wonders of Ras Sem. It was a large
+town of circular outline, with streets and shops and a central palace.
+
+The olive and the palm stood in the courtyards, but the trees had been
+turned into a cinder-colored stone. There were men also in different
+postures. Some were plying their trade and occupations in the bazaars
+or holding fabrics and breadstuffs in their hands, as if to attract
+the passer-by. There were women suckling their children or kneeling at
+the kneading trough. In the palace a man was lying on a bed of state,
+and guards armed with pike and spear stood at the door. The tenants of
+the palace, and the men and women without--they, too, were of the same
+bluish stone. The heads of some were wanting and others of the Silent
+People had lost a leg or an arm.
+
+There were camels, oxen, asses, horses, and sheep in the market place,
+there were large birds perched on the walls, and in the houses there
+were dogs, cats, and even mice--and all these, like their masters and
+hosts, were petrified. The pieces of money which had been brought
+thence were “of the bigness of an English shilling, charged with a
+horse’s head on one side and with some unknown characters on the other.”
+
+The quotation is from Shaw’s _Travels in Barbary_. The writer tells of
+an inquiry into these stories by order of the French court made some
+time before by M. Le Maire, consul at Tripoli. The Turkish janizaries
+who gathered the tribute would not bring him the body of an adult
+person from Ras Sem, alleging it would be cumbersome to carry. But for
+a thousand dollars they did bring the body of a little child. They
+declared they had run the risk of being strangled by their companions
+for having delivered to an infidel the mortal remains of one of their
+unfortunate Mohammedan brethren, as they deemed these people to be.
+What they brought was the statue of a small Cupid taken from the ruins
+of Leptus.
+
+The consul sent other persons, but none could find a trace of walls,
+buildings, animals, or utensils where Ras Sem was said to be. They
+did find one thing he could not explain. This was what seemed to be
+tiny loaves of petrified bread; but Shaw declares these were fossil
+echinites of the discoid kind. Little pools of “heavy and ponderous
+water” were also come upon, which the wind had uncovered. This,
+continues Shaw, “may be the petrifying fluid which has contributed to
+the conversion of the palm trees into stone.” He thinks the country of
+the Gorgons was farther west.
+
+From any one of several causes the fable of stony cities might arise.
+While sand does not petrify, it does preserve; and sometimes, with
+the winds for its artisans, it has wrought its own architecture and
+sculpture in the living rock, repeating in the infinite chances of its
+labors the outlines of minarets and templed columns, and other contours
+in which fantasy may find the forms of bygone worshipers. There seem
+to have been cases where peoples of a higher culture have built their
+cities in the desert, and have passed; and a ruder race, coming later
+upon the scene, mistook their statuary for the breathing handiwork of
+nature stricken into stillness and stone.
+
+The typical desert legends are of splendid cities that the sands have
+covered. There is truth under them, as there are ruins under the sand;
+how much truth and how many ruins is a secret the desert yields but
+grudgingly. In a series of striking passages the Jewish Scriptures have
+sketched these dead capitals of the waste with their jackal tenants.
+The Arab deems them the home of evil spirits and hastens by. The nomads
+of Central Asia speak of opulent cities which sandstorms have blotted
+out in a night and of treasure to be found in them if one digs for it
+under a fortunate star. But there are unearthly chances to be faced,
+and treasure-seekers will not invite them by venturing many days’
+march from the desert’s rim. One legend tells of the vanished city of
+Ho-lao-lo-kia and the princes who came from many lands to excavate the
+site. “But every time they try to dig the sand away a violent wind
+arises, setting up whirlwinds of smoke and a thick mist, which sweeps
+away the path and leads the workmen astray into the desert.”
+
+A passage from an antique Indian script, describing a city which
+perished two thousand years ago, may stand for a silhouette of the
+buried cities of Iran and of Turkestan, as legend has pictured them:
+“The temples and the palaces of Anuradhapura are numberless, and their
+golden cupolas and pavilions shimmer in the sun. In the streets are
+crowds of soldiers armed with bows and arrows. Elephants, horses,
+chariots, and countless multitudes pass in a continual turmoil. There
+are jugglers, dancers, and musicians from many lands, whose timbals
+gleam with golden ornaments.”
+
+It is more than conjecture that in these ancient lands not only cities
+but states have disappeared under the sand. Gradually they have yielded
+to their fate, as the desert has moved upon them through periodic
+cycles of deficient rainfall. It may be that sometimes destruction came
+with almost its fabled swiftness. MacGregor saw the sands in the very
+act of billowing over the walls and rolling through the streets of
+the Persian town of Yazd. Much may have happened, must have happened,
+in forgotten times in the great space of fifteen hundred miles of
+longitude and four hundred miles of latitude comprised in the Lop
+basin; and many and circumstantial are the legends thereof.
+
+In the Gobi Desert Sven Hedin discovered one of these buried
+cities--God-accursed he calls it--over which the wind had flung the
+sands, only to sweep them away and leave the site bare to the sun
+after uncounted centuries had passed. Its walls had once been washed
+by a powerful stream along which millstones turned under the shade of
+luxuriant groves. There were apricot trees in the gardens, and mulberry
+trees where the silkworm fed and spun its cocoon. There were bazaars
+loud with the tumult of craftsmen. This was the city of Takla-makan.
+
+What the explorer found was a dead forest, and ruins several miles
+across. The timbers of hundreds of houses were still standing,
+chalk-white poplar wood brittle as glass. Among them were fragments of
+images in gypsum, showing the Buddha and praying women with faces of
+the Aryan type, all executed with refinement of taste; and there were
+even figures of boats rocking on the waves of vanished seas.
+
+“At what period,” asks its discoverer, “was this mysterious city
+inhabited? When did its last crop of russet apricots ripen in the sun?
+When did the sour green leaves of its poplars yellow for their last
+fall? When was the trickling hum of its millwheels silenced forever?
+When did its despairing people finally abandon their dwellings to the
+ravenous maw of the desert king? Who were the people who lived here?
+What was the tongue they spoke? Whence came the unknown inhabitants of
+this Tadmor in the wilderness? How long did their city flourish, and
+whither did they go when they saw that within its walls they could no
+longer have a safe abiding place?”
+
+Passing the ruins of other cities, the nomad has asked himself these
+and stranger questions. And out of the answers which his superstition
+and fancy have suggested has been woven the myth of the desert.
+
+
+_In the Forest_
+
+Men can lose their way in the deep forest, easily become confused
+there, and make it a proverb that friends are not to be met in a wood.
+There races that have passed out of the primitive culture do not feel
+at home. Through successive stages of their history the forest was held
+to be sacred, then enchanted, then ill-omened and haunted.
+
+In the beginning men worshiped trees and groves. Pan, with his
+attendant fauns and satyrs, presided in the forest. The hamadryads
+lived in trees, and died with them; and they might contract marriages
+with mortal youths. Sometimes the tree had its own soul, sometimes
+it was possessed by a spirit which had entered it, sometimes it was
+the symbol, sometimes the sanctuary, of a god. Deity dwelt in the
+oak of Dodona. Diana in Autun was a midday demon of the forests
+and crossroads. In the tabooed grove near Marseilles the trees were
+stained with sacrificial blood, the flames burned without consuming the
+boscage, and even the priests dared not venture there at midnight or
+midday. The sacred bo tree is still worshiped in India. The mistletoe
+is magical above all other objects. Savages hang offerings upon trees,
+and in the same spirit the gypsy spits when he passes under them.
+
+The wood spirits of the primitive mythologies became at length the
+stuff of folklore and travel tale--degenerate Pans and dryads that
+wanderers saw sometimes in the shadows of trees. The Old Man of the
+Woods, lame, hairy, green-eyed, ranges many countries and is most
+clearly pictured in the tales of the Brazilian Indians and the eastern
+Slavs. A mocker, misleader, and seducer, he cast a spell of terror
+upon the forest. In the wild women of Russian story it had still other
+perturbing tenants. These were good-looking creatures with shaggy
+bodies, square heads, and long hair. Sometimes they came into the
+villages to borrow kneading troughs, but it was dangerous to meet them
+in their own domain, for they turned the solitary intruder round and
+round until he lost his way. They were fond of music and might invite
+lads and lasses to dance with them; whistling, however, they could not
+endure. Polish tales picture them as tall, thin-faced, sensual females,
+with disheveled hair and garments in constant disarray. When groups of
+them encountered human beings they tickled the adults to death and took
+the youths with them for their lovers; wherefore young people never
+went singly to the woods. In Swedish tradition this was the terrible
+Skogfrau, or Woman of the Thicket.
+
+These beings personified the mystery of forest shadows and what
+Ruskin called the mediæval dread of thick foliage. “Forest in every
+semicivilized land,” says Belloc, “is ever a word of fear.” There
+the knights of old tale had adventure with giants and dwarfs and
+spell-weaving witches, and there the younger sons of folklore followed
+lonely paths with beasts and birds to counsel them. As the enchanted
+woods of romance with their goblin glooms and talking trees faded from
+the minds of men, in their place appeared the real terrors of thickets
+where robbers, banished men, and fugitive peoples beset the ways with
+danger. The conception of forests as sanctuaries of peace is modern.
+
+[Illustration: _The Enchanted Woods of Romance with Their Goblin Glooms
+and Talking Trees Faded from the Minds of Men_]
+
+
+_Under the Ground_
+
+The cellar strain that is in human nature betrays itself in the
+satisfaction men take in roaring songs and drinking bitter liquors
+in rat-haunted sunken spaces. If groves were God’s first temples,
+grottoes were men’s first dwellings. They came out of caves, and in
+flight sometimes they return to them. For their extremity mother earth
+has provided a rocky roof, a bedchamber, a storeroom, and a fireplace.
+Wherefore they deem no habitation complete until they have dug a cave
+under it.
+
+“Men,” said the Caribs, “should avoid places which are enlightened
+neither by the sun nor by the moon.” Yet there are races whose legends
+have dug a cellar under the entire earth; if its surface is the floor
+of one world, it is the roof of another. Beneath it are the happy
+hunting grounds of the Indian. According to Cherokee myth the living
+can descend thereto if, after fasting, they follow back the streams to
+their springs and have one of the underground folk to guide them, for
+the springs are doorways to the world below. There one finds people,
+animals, and plants about as they are above, but the seasons are
+different, for are not the springs warmer than the air in winter, and
+cooler in summer? Navaho legend makes the surface of the earth the top
+story of a structure five stories high. Beginning as ants, beetles,
+dragonflies, locusts, and bats, mankind climbed from one story to
+another, or rather was expelled from each, usually for sexual sin.
+
+The gods’ land, or Elysium, of the Celts was commonly placed upon far
+islands of the west, but sometimes in the hollow hills called Sid. Here
+were fair meadows and stately palaces and musical trees and a beautiful
+people whose berry diet kept them ever young; in the song of the magic
+birds of this underworld there were seven years of joy and oblivion.
+These people were the Tuatha Dé Danann. Giraldus Cambrensis describes
+a like people, but of fairy stature, dwelling underground, swearing
+no oaths, forswearing human ambition and inconstancy, and subsisting
+on milk and saffron. Yet the Nagas of Hindoo story and the gnomes of
+European folk-tale may be true historical races.
+
+With his keen sense of an earthly origin primitive man was deeply
+interested in burrowing creatures--in the scarab with his little round
+ball that symbolized the sun in Egypt; in the beetle of the South
+American pampas, which symbolized the Creator; in the rats and mice
+which various tribes worshiped; in the runway of the armadillo which
+in Brazil was an entrance to the land of shades; in the tunnel of the
+mole, and the cities of the marmot. This underground world of tiny
+animals figures large in the folklore of early peoples, shaping their
+genealogies, influencing their councils, intervening in their affairs
+for good and ill, at times deciding their destinies.
+
+There was sorcery underground. Life came from it with each recurring
+spring. The dead were laid there, and far beneath were the abodes of
+their spirits. In the caverns were witches who had some command over
+life and death. There also were the haunts of necromancers, and though
+their dens were squalid, all the riches of the world were around them.
+Legend became sumptuous and prodigal when it left the surface of the
+earth and plunged into the darkness under it.
+
+The story of Aladdin’s descent into this realm carries nearly all the
+elements of subterranean myth. His false uncle, the African magician,
+conducted him to a valley between mountains near a large Chinese town.
+When he muttered a spell the earth opened, and the lad went down a
+stone staircase into a palace where were brazen cisterns brimming with
+gold and silver. Beyond in a terraced garden was a magic lamp. Securing
+the latter and starting back, the youth paused to look at the fruits
+that hung from trees in the garden. These were of various hues, and
+though he did not know it, they were precious stones. Aladdin would
+have wished they were figs or grapes or pomegranates; but he filled his
+purse with them and crammed them in his bosom.
+
+Because the youth was slow in passing up the lamp, the magician who
+was waiting without lowered the stone over the staircase, and Aladdin
+was left in darkness. But a genie of frightful aspect appeared when he
+chanced to rub a ring his false uncle had given him. The apparition was
+a slave of the ring, and with it began the cycle of deeds and gifts
+that won the Chinese gamin a princess and a throne.
+
+One element is missing in this descent, type otherwise of a thousand
+others. That is women. There were beautiful enchantresses as well as
+foul witches under the ground. They figure in a characteristic story of
+India told by Hiouen Thsiang. A good-natured fellow, versed in magic
+formulas, entered a cavern with thirteen companions. They came to a
+walled city with towers and lookouts of gold, silver, and lapis-lazuli.
+Young, laughing maidens greeted them at the outer gates, and at the
+inner gates were two slave girls each holding a golden vessel full
+of flowers and scents. Before the men went farther, these told them
+they must bathe in the tank that stood there, anoint themselves with
+perfumes, and crown themselves with flowers. But they must wait awhile
+before they bathed; only the master of magic could immerse at once.
+Of course the thirteen ignored the warning, and when they entered the
+tank they became confused. They were found afterward, says the Chinese
+author, “sitting in the middle of a rice-field distant from this
+due north, over a level country, about thirty or forty li,” with no
+recollection of how they got there.
+
+The sorceress and enchantress motives are developed into drama in
+the great myth of Tannhäuser. This minnesinger of the Middle Ages
+was riding through the dusk toward Wartburg, where minstrels were to
+compete for a prize, when he saw a glimmering figure on the slopes of
+the mountain called the Hörselberg. White arms were stretched to him
+in the gesture that is always more eloquent than words, and, leaving
+his charger, he followed the woman. Flowers bloomed in her footsteps,
+nymphs attended her, and a rosy light lay on the path as she led the
+knight to a cavern’s mouth and thence to her palace in the heart of the
+mountain. There for seven years he was the willing slave of the pagan
+Goddess of Love, and partner in the revels of her court.
+
+Satiety and an awakened conscience came together. The minstrel longed
+for a breath of pure mountain air, for the tinkle of sheep bells,
+for the sky of night and its stars. When Venus would not release her
+thrall, he spoke the Virgin’s name--and the mountain-side opened. He
+found himself again aboveground and heard the chime of church bells.
+
+To one priest after another Tannhäuser made confession of his great
+sin, but the shocked clerics dared not give him absolution, and at
+length he stood before the Pope.
+
+“Sooner shall this staff in my hand grow green and blossom,” said
+the stern vicar of Heaven, “than that God should pardon thee.” With
+darkness in his soul, Tannhäuser turned away. Three days afterward
+the papal staff put forth buds and blossoms, and messengers were sent
+in haste from Rome. They reached the Hörselberg only to learn that a
+haggard wayfarer had just entered the mountain. The minstrel was never
+seen again.
+
+The golden age will issue from underground, according to a noble legend
+of the mediæval time which concerns Frederick Barbarossa, head of the
+Holy Roman Empire. He was not drowned in Cilicia while on crusade, as
+report had it. He is sleeping in a cavernous chamber in the Kyffhäuser
+Berg which rises from the emerald meadows of Thuringia. His long red
+beard has grown quite through the stone table where he sits in slumber.
+The good knights surround him, and once in a hundred years he rouses
+himself and asks if the ravens still fly around the mountain. When the
+birds of omen no longer call about the steeps he shall awake and sally
+forth with his horsemen, and the peace of all men shall follow.
+
+Thus at times has legend walked the earth, as men might cross the flat
+housetops of an Eastern city, with the thought that what counted most
+was just beneath its immense roof.
+
+
+_Darkness_
+
+The dark has other creatures besides the bat and owl, other spectacles
+than those that pass in dreams. Sometimes in Celtic legend a mist
+descended on a man, and until it lifted the towers and orchards of
+elysium were all about him. There is a class of Eastern legends which
+tell of men around whom a sudden shadow fell, so that they were seen no
+more, or next were seen in another place. Maundeville has a tale of a
+cloud which settled down upon a land and did not lift again. This was
+a province called Hanyson in the kingdom of Abchaz which is next to
+the kingdom of Georgia. One must travel three days to ride around the
+province, and one dare not ride through it, for thick twilight covers
+it. Out of the gloom the people of neighboring lands hear voices of
+folk, and horses neighing, and cocks crowing.
+
+The story is that a cursed emperor of Persia that was hight Saures
+overtook a Christian host in the plain that was hight Megon and would
+have destroyed it. “But anon a thick Cloud came and covered the Emperor
+and all his Host. And so they endure in that Manner that they must not
+go out on any Side; and so shall they evermore abide in Darkness till
+the Day of Doom, by the Miracle of God. And then the Christian Men went
+where liked them best. Also ye shall understand that out of that Land
+of Darkness goeth out a great River that sheweth well that there be
+Folk dwelling there by many Tokens; but no Man dare enter into it.”
+
+Some report of the long Arctic night reached the Asiatic countries of
+lower latitudes, and Marco Polo when he traversed them. He gives a
+hearsay account of what he calls the Region of Darkness. It is distant
+fourteen journeys by dog-sled across the tundras from the country of
+the Tartars. The atmosphere in this twilight land is “as we find it
+just about the dawn of day, when we may be said to see and not to see.”
+Its people are tall and well made, but pale, stupid, and brutish, and
+without prince or other governance. They have great stores of furs of
+ermines, martins, and foxes. Under cover of the prevailing darkness the
+Tartars raid them, plundering them of their furs and driving off their
+cattle. That they may not become lost forever in the gloom, the raiders
+ride mares that have young foals, and these are left on the frontiers.
+When the Tartars would return, they lay the bridles on the necks of the
+dams, and maternal instinct finds the homeward track.
+
+Fable and fact ride abreast through this narrative, as horsemen through
+the chill obscurity of dawn, and a great thing has come of it. Marco’s
+account of the peltry of the north had more to do than aught else,
+tradition says, with the founding of the Hudson Bay Company and the
+opening of the northern half of the American continent.
+
+
+_Distance_
+
+The haze on all these horizon lands is the haze of distance. There are
+two phrases which come to the ear with the sound of unlocking doors.
+One is Once upon a Time, which children hear; it is distance measured
+in years. The other is Beyond the Mountains, which plainsmen use; it
+is distance measured in miles and difficulties. For either distance,
+fetters fall.
+
+Three tales may declare this as well as a thousand, and a thousand
+might be told. Russian peasants speak of a land which they call
+Bielovodye, and which lies, as they think, somewhere on the borders of
+Mongolia in the distant east. It is a country of peace and plenty, and
+nobody lives there.
+
+Rubruquis gives just a glimpse, as of something seen afar through a
+narrow window. “A Chinese priest,” he says, “told me also for truth
+(which neverthelesse, I doe not believe) that there is a province
+beyond Cataia, into the which, at whatsoever age a man enters, he
+continueth in the same age wherein he entred.”
+
+The widest horizons of time and space are reached in a single artless
+sentence in a gypsy folk tale: “They went then further than I can
+remember, till they reached the knoll of the country at the back of the
+wind and the face of the sun, that was in the realm of Big Women.” The
+men who made this journey skirted all the coasts of illusion.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI. Lands of Legend
+
+
+There are countries whose boundaries have not been fixed by armies or
+treaties, nor their ways marked out by trade. The dreams of men have
+made them. Their substance is reality, yet their effect is vision. By a
+sort of conspiracy of wish, to which men of imaginative mind have been
+parties and all others have yielded assent, these countries have been
+supposed to be different from what any was or could be. It has been
+easy enough to create the illusion, for one’s view of another land is
+always more or less a symbolic drawing.
+
+
+_Ophir_
+
+The geographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis tells a straight
+tale which men debated for something more than two thousand years and
+only in the present century have accepted at its face value. In one
+phrase the Scriptures link Ophir and Havilah, and then add that “their
+dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar, a mount of the
+East.” Where was Ophir? Perhaps the learned men of Alexandria were the
+first to ask the question. What was Ophir? This question nobody thought
+of putting, and it was vital.
+
+Ophir was a magic word which let no man rest once he had heard it. The
+spell of gold was in it. Even as they wrote, it seemed to intoxicate
+the Jewish prophets, poets, and chroniclers. Isaiah speaks of the
+“golden wedge of Ophir.” It is said of wisdom in the Book of Job that
+it cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx or
+the sapphire. “Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of
+Ophir as the stones of the brooks,” says another passage Oriental in
+its opulence of suggestion.
+
+From Ophir came the fleet of Solomon and Hiram of Tyre, fetching gold,
+four hundred and twenty talents, and sandalwood. The arrival of the
+treasure fleet is associated in the narrative, for some reason one may
+only guess, with the coming to Jerusalem of the Queen of Sheba. The two
+incidents constitute the most gorgeous episode in Jewish history.
+
+Sheba’s queen comes to visit Solomon with a very great train, with
+camels that bear spices, and very much gold and precious stones. She
+sees the meat of his table, the sitting of his servants, and the
+attendance of his ministers. She proves him with hard questions, and
+pride dies in her. The report she has heard in her own land of his
+wealth and wisdom was a true report, she declares, but the half had not
+been told. Then she goes back, and her camels take across the deserts
+gifts richer than they had brought. Gold of Ophir travels north, and
+south again, and legend follows it.
+
+Two other place-names appear on this piece of Hebrew brocade. One is
+Ezion-geber, Solomon’s port on the Red Sea in the land of Edom. The
+other is Tharshish, where the king had ships. Once in three years
+came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes
+and peacocks. There was nothing in these imports that one might eat
+or drink or use for shelter or raiment. The commodities were typical
+of ancient commerce in their magnificence, their vain show, and their
+uselessness--and the cargo has freighted the imagination of men ever
+since. There was contraband in the ships of Tharshish. Among the
+elephants’ teeth and peacocks was stowed away the spirit of the East.
+
+Where was Tharshish? Where was Ophir? Where was Havilah, mentioned
+rarely, but in a significant context?
+
+It was long thought that Tharshish was the Carthaginian port of
+Tartessus beyond the Pillars, where now is the Spanish port of Cadiz.
+But Spain had few apes, little gold, and no ivory. The text of Genesis
+seemed to point to the Arabian coast as the seat of Ophir. But Araby
+had no elephants and its gold came from elsewhere. Ophir was sought
+also in the African spiceland of Punt, in the Midian country of
+northern Arabia, and at the mouth of the Indus in Hindostan. Once in
+every three years came the fleet, so said the text; and into this was
+read the meaning, not of periodic sailings, but of voyages that covered
+three years. Ophir, therefore, must lie in the far East, and men sought
+it in the Malay Peninsula, in that Golden Chersonese where were ivory
+and apes and peacocks, as well as precious metals.
+
+For one splendid century it was Portugese instinct to advance steadily,
+to see clearly, and to do great things easily--the legacy, perhaps,
+of that incomparable spirit, Prince Henry the Navigator. Within the
+century after his death, his countrymen had gone around Africa, opened
+a sea route to the Indies, and made the coveted Spice Islands their
+own. Also, they had discovered Ophir, or rather almost discovered it.
+What they found was the missing port of Tharshish, and Havilah, the
+land which scriptural writers linked with Ophir, and dismissed.
+
+A Portugese squadron, outbound for the Indies in 1505, put in at the
+little African port of Sofala on the Mozambique Channel, looking east
+toward Madagascar. Learning that the Arabs, or Moors, as they called
+them, were trafficking here for gold brought down to the coast from the
+interior, its captains said that this must be Ophir. It has taken four
+centuries to show how near this casual judgment was to the truth. The
+gold of Ophir reached the Indian Ocean through the African port once
+named Tharshish and now called Sofala, and came from the Mashona and
+Matabele region between the lower Zambesi and the Limpopo rivers in
+what is now Rhodesia. It was Hottentot gold, not gold of Araby.
+
+What was Ophir? When at length this question was asked, the Scripture
+texts, which pointed eastward toward Arabian regions where gold was
+not, slowly yielded their paradox. Ophir was not a country at all.
+It was a port, perhaps the greatest of the ancient world. Here the
+products of India, of Africa, and of the Eastern Mediterranean were
+interchanged. The gold of ancient Rhodesia (Havilah) became gold of
+Ophir, just as figs of the Levant become Smyrna figs and the white
+grapes of Spain become Malaga grapes, when freighted on ships outbound
+from those ports.
+
+In the days of its decline Ophir was known to Ptolemy, the Alexandrian
+geographer, as the Sapphar Metropolis; to Arrian, the Greek geographer,
+as Portus Nobilis, and to the Romans as Moscha. It lay where Genesis
+places it: “and their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto
+Sephar a mount of the east.” There, under the shadow of Mount Sephar,
+nearly opposite the island of Socotra and about midway along the
+southern coast of Arabia, its ruins lie around a silted inlet of the
+sea. Mesha, or Moscha, signifies a wharf or landing place, and was
+at the inlet’s mouth. Ophir stood at the head of the inlet. The name
+signifies simply The City, The Metropolis, as the Roman used the single
+word _urbs_ to designate his capital.
+
+This was the great mart of Himyaritic civilization. The Himyarites were
+the settled folk of southern Arabia--the Minæans and their successors,
+the Sabæans. It may be that their civilization was the earliest in the
+world, still older than the Egyptian and Chaldean. There is reason to
+believe that the carrying trade of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean
+was in their hands for a greater part of the period during which it
+has been assumed that the Phœnicians controlled it. The merchants of
+Tyre and Sidon were brief interlopers in a sea-borne commerce which
+for thousands of years had been the monopoly of the Sabæan Arabs.
+That the latter worked the mines of ancient Rhodesia in the land they
+called Havilah is the simple and unavoidable inference from facts which
+nevertheless required about a generation of archæological research to
+establish, and which the geographer, A. H. Keane, has summarized in
+his striking monograph. The Himyaritic inscriptions in southern Arabia
+and the inscriptions on the extensive ruins of ancient gold workings
+between the Zambesi and the Limpopo were made by the same people.
+
+The going of Solomon’s ships and the ships of his Tyrian ally to Ophir
+and on to Tharshish, and the coming of Sabæa’s queen to Jerusalem, were
+what they are represented to be, brilliant and exotic incidents in the
+troubled march of Jewish history. This traffic covered only about a
+century, and millenniums of Arab commerce between Ophir and Tharshish
+envelop it. After that century Israel and Phœnicia disappear from the
+Indian Ocean, and the South Arab takes up the gold trade anew. At this
+task the Portuguese found him.
+
+The Jew was the prosperous visitor of an hour at the port of the
+Sabæans. Perhaps their queen made a return call to learn why he had
+come and whence the gold in his wallet. The answer was not in Solomon
+himself; truly, indeed, the half was never told her. It was David whose
+conquest of Edom had given Israel temporary control of important trade
+routes. The wealth of Solomon was in part a transportation charge, and
+in part a police tax upon “the traffick of the spice merchants and all
+the kings of Arabia.” They paid it rather than have their caravans
+plundered on the roads the Jew controlled. The gold that Israel and
+Phœnicia brought from Tharshish direct, like the gold which Spain
+brought from Peru, was not obtained in trade exchanges. It was wrung
+from slave labor, Hottentots and Bushmen--whose present physiognomy and
+complexion show an Asiatic strain--toiling for taskmasters, as since
+they have toiled, under the sjambok.
+
+Ezion-geber, the Jewish port, lay at the head of the Red Sea. Tharshish
+lay nearly six thousand miles to the south as coasting vessels made
+it, and voyages were probably by way of some port in the west of
+Madagascar, where Semitic influences have been discovered. Midway
+between Tharshish and Ezion-geber, and midway between the east and west
+of antiquity, lay Ophir. The age-long vision of a golden land lifts
+from its name. In its stead loom the shadowy outlines of a mighty port,
+with strange ships at anchor, and clinking bags and odorous bales upon
+the wharves, and hawk-faced merchants at their traffic, where now are
+ruins and the oblivious sea.
+
+
+_Lotus-land_
+
+The country of the lotus-eaters was a promontory jutting out into the
+Mediterranean Sea from the land of the Gindanes. Whoso tastes the fruit
+of the lotus, Homer said, forgets his native shore, his family, and his
+friends. In an age that avows a world-weariness to which the wandering
+Greeks were strangers, this brief glimpse of a land released from
+remembrance has been an arresting thing.
+
+Later poets expanded the Odyssey legend, wrote new significances into
+it, and sometimes provided it with a different ending, as in the fine
+poem of Tennyson. The Victorian gives no hint that the companions of
+Ulysses fled from Lotus-land. It seemed to them better to stay there.
+They had traveled unto fatigue, and their island homes were still
+far beyond the wave. Dear as were the last embraces of their wives,
+it was likely that themselves were now all but forgotten, that their
+sons had inherited them, and that their deeds before Troy were sung
+by minstrels as things of long ago. Why return like ghosts to trouble
+joy? So the mariners burst into choric song declaring the delights of
+long rest and dreamful ease and mild-minded melancholy upon a slumbrous
+shore. Then the rhythm changes to carry their resolve:
+
+  We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
+  Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, when the surge was seething
+  free,
+  Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
+  Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
+  In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
+  On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
+
+In the Homeric story the lotus strand was a halting place for Ulysses
+and his men on the way from the Ciconian coast to their adventure with
+the giant Polyphemus. Their momentary pause in the enchanted Libyan
+land is the slightest episode in the Odyssey. After nine days of stormy
+faring they anchor by a fragrant beach and go ashore for water and a
+feast. Three of their number wander farther and hospitable natives bid
+them eat the fruit of their trees. Having eaten, a spell of oblivion
+falls on them and they would travel no more; but their comrades bind
+them and carry them aboard the ships, and hastily the company sails
+away.
+
+Herodotus locates the land of the lotus-eaters in the Syrtic district
+of the North African coast, whence a caravan route leads to Egypt.
+This people, he says, live entirely on the fruit of the lotus tree.
+The fruit is about the size of the lentisk berry, and in sweetness
+resembles the date. The lotophagi even succeed in obtaining from it a
+sort of wine. Rawlinson, who identifies the lotus with the rhamnus,
+asserts, however, that it looks and tastes “rather like a bad crab
+apple.”
+
+There has been controversy as to what the ancients meant by the lotus.
+Some writers said it was a kind of clover, the poa of Strabo. The lotus
+of Egypt and India is a water lily whose roots and seeds are eaten by
+the poor. Pliny says that the lotus of Homer was a tree “the size of a
+pear tree, though Cornelius Nepos calls it low.” The latter describes
+its fruit as yellow, the size of a bean, and sweet and pleasant to
+the taste. It was pounded into a paste and stored for food, and a wine
+like mead was made from it. In the district where Ulysses anchored,
+and which has been identified with the modern Jerba, the tree still
+flourishes; Arabs eat its fruit and make a wine of it. Its commercial
+name is jujube, and in the Mediterranean countries it is prized as a
+winter dessert fruit.
+
+If there were poppy dreams in the orchards of Africa, the secret of
+them passed with the wine the ancients brewed there. The longing for
+forgetfulness remains. Those who have come by it honestly through toil
+have found, as Ulysses did, that lotus-land is a port of call upon
+struggling seas.
+
+
+_The Incense Country_
+
+The world commerce of ancient times was in four commodities--gold,
+amber, precious stones, and incense. With transportation by pack,
+caravan, and small coasting craft, nothing of greater bulk or less
+intrinsic worth could be carried far at a profit. The first three of
+these commodities were come upon more or less by accident. Incense was
+the root, bark, gum, seeds, dried leaves, or flowers of various trees,
+shrubs, and plants, and was gathered at stated seasons of the year.
+The business had the element of certainty, so far as anything could be
+certain in ages when land and water travel were pursuits of hazard,
+when there was little law upon the desert and none upon the sea. The
+incense trade was therefore the great trade of antiquity. By it the
+nations of the east, west and south first came to know one another.
+
+How important was this traffic Pliny bears witness in his _Natural
+History_. Page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book are
+devoted to the incense, perfumes, and unguents of the East. It is an
+impatient, although a faithful, testimony. The Latin writer groans over
+the enormous prices the precious gums command, recites how they are
+sophisticated in the Alexandrian warehouses with resin, turpentine,
+and Cyprian wax, lists the nine substances with which Indian nard
+is imitated, and rails at the superstition which uses scents for
+sacrifice, the sinful luxury which drenches the body with them, and
+even mingles them in the wines of the table. Consider, he says, the
+vast number of funerals celebrated every year throughout the world,
+the heaps of incense piled up in honor of the dead, the quantities
+offered to the gods. Is anybody the better off? It seems to Pliny
+that the immortal ones were kinder to men when a salted cake was the
+best they could hope to find on their altars. At the very lowest the
+Indians, Seres, and Arabians took from the empire one hundred million
+sesterces every year--“so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our
+women.”
+
+Not content with the prodigality of nature, Pliny continues, luxury has
+seen fit to combine all pleasant odors into a single whole, and hence
+have come unguents. The Persians quite soak themselves in these blended
+perfumes, to conceal from themselves that they live in dirt. There are
+Romans who go still further, for they plaster themselves with unguents.
+Some of them, and Nero of the number, even sprinkle therewith the soles
+of their feet. On festival days the very eagles on battle standards,
+thick with the dust of the camps, are anointed. Pearls and jewels have
+a value that lasts, but scents die as soon as they are born. To what
+good is this all, Pliny asks again.
+
+Few others put this question. For the living, for the dead, and for
+the very gods, there must be a savor of satisfaction. Gums were burned
+to purify the air of dwellings, to mask the odors of burnt sacrifice,
+to disguise the intimations of mortality when the bodies of the dead
+smoked on funeral pyres. Their use to these ends was the primitive
+sanitary science of the East. In the rites of embalming, their fumes
+reanimated mummy and mortuary statue and nourished the souls of the
+departed on the journey to the spirit-land. The gods above were fed by
+the smoke of sacrifice and their favor was flattered for the projects
+of men. So it befell in Egypt, and the pages of Herodotus are in
+evidence that the whole country had become a vast drug shop.
+
+Musk came from the highlands of China, and from India, gum benzoin
+from Java, sandalwood from the Golden Chersonese, cloves from Eastern
+islands unknown. Balm of Gilead, the most precious of odoriferous
+substances, came from Judea, and according to Pliny battles had been
+fought over it between Jews and Romans. There were other spicy roots,
+leaves, and petals that grew in desert gardens or mountain parks of
+the East; the geography of scents was wide and vague and little known.
+But the true incense land of the ancients had definite bounds. It
+lay on both sides of the promontory known variously as the Aromatic
+Cape and as the Cape of Spices and now as Cape Guardafui, where the
+continent of Africa juts farthest into the Indian Ocean. This land had
+two provinces--Punt, which is the modern Somaliland, and Sabæa, which
+is southern Arabia.
+
+Cinnamon and cassia were taken from Punt, and some frankincense, the
+“true incense,” as the name signifies and as the Christian altars
+of Europe afterward came to know it. From Sabæa were taken large
+quantities of frankincense, as well as myrrh and ladanum. The latter
+country had credit also in the ancient world for a long list of balms
+that came from elsewhere. The secret, never more than half known, was
+that Sabæa imported odorous things as well as grew them. It brought
+them in from more eastern countries and sent them forth on its ships,
+or on the camels that traveled the incense route northward to Petra,
+whence they were dispensed to the Mediterranean peoples. The incense
+land was the center of world commerce, which was above all a traffic
+in sweet savors, and the countries commanding the southern approach to
+the Red Sea had the same significant relation to it that now belongs to
+Suez, the northern approach to that sea.
+
+The air of incense-land was as heavy with traditions as it was reported
+to be with odors. The desert hemmed in both Punt and Sabæa, and its
+mysteries stole in with the sands. The rites of a dim religion were
+wrapped around the harvest of the precious gums. Merchant subtleties
+spread afar the stories of more than mortal perils to be met by those
+who entered the places of fragrance. The effect of these fables was to
+enhance prices and confirm the Arab monopoly. To the ancient world the
+land of incense was an enchanting, and yet a forbidding and a forbidden
+land.
+
+Its enchantments were felt even at a distance. The whole country of
+Arabia, says Herodotus, is scented with spices, and exhales an odor
+marvelously sweet. Diodorus declares that even before the mariner
+sights this coast its delights come out to meet him upon the sea. The
+breezes of spring waft to him the fragrant breath of trees and shrubs,
+and keener satisfactions than he may have elsewhere, for these are
+no old and stored aromatics, but fresh from new-blown flowers. Pliny
+is skeptical, yet repeats the story with further detail. Under the
+rays of the noonday sun, he says, the entire peninsula gives forth an
+indescribable perfume, the blend of many beguiling odors. Thus it was,
+while still far out, the fleet of Alexander knew it was nearing Araby
+the Happy.
+
+The languors of incense floated through the towns and villages of Sabæa
+and enveloped its lofty capital. Timbers and floors of the houses
+were of sweet-scented woods, and fagots of frankincense and sticks of
+myrrh, burning in the fireplaces, gave them a perpetual fragrance of
+sacrifice. To counteract these bland but debilitating suavities the
+Arabians of the south brought the gum of storax down from Syria. This
+they burned in goat skins and found its pungent smell a reviving thing.
+
+Saba, the country’s capital, was a dream-city of spices and gold. From
+a steep which commanded the surrounding lands its temples and palaces
+reared their roofs amid delightful groves. The trade of countless
+centuries had drawn vast riches to the incense metropolis. The houses
+of the merchants were resplendent with precious metals and precious
+stones. Reclining upon couches inlaid with silver, they drank from
+gem-studded goblets of gold. The camels padding northward, and the
+ships faring north, east, and south, brought back the wherewithal to
+sustain a life of sensual magnificence. Chief among the voluptuaries
+was the Sabæan king. From his seat of judgment in a gorgeous palace he
+determined all disputes with the authority of an absolute sovereign.
+Yet his own freedom of movement was restrained by the priestly class.
+He was a prisoner of the palace, and, should he venture outside its
+scented courts and shaded gardens, the rabble assailed him with stones
+and drove him back to them. So an oracle had prescribed.
+
+Over the gathering of incense, and its coming and going in the land
+of the Sabæans, priestly tradition had flung a mantle rich in fable
+and somber with fear. Eight days’ journey to the northeast from the
+capital, in a district a hundred miles long by fifty miles wide, stood
+the sacred groves in a soil of milky white a little inclining to red.
+Thither at the time of the rising of the Dog Star, when the heat was
+most intense, went the Arabians to make incisions in the trees. The
+unctuous foam which gathered on the bark was permitted to remain and
+harden; nor was it removed until autumn. The gum which assumed the
+form of globular drops was called male incense. More esteemed were the
+pieces where two drops had adhered into the semblance of breasts, which
+were called female incense.
+
+By inherited right the harvest was the privilege of three thousand
+families. Their persons were deemed to be holy. While pruning the
+trees and gathering the gum they must receive no pollution either by
+intercourse with women or by coming in contact with the dead. They
+carried their produce to the capital upon camels by an appointed road
+and were admitted at a single gate. It was death to deviate from this
+road.
+
+Various deductions were made from the camel loads to pay for carriage,
+the service of the temples, the expenses of the state, and the
+transportation taxes laid by other countries through which the overland
+caravans were to pass. The entertainment of strangers at the capital
+was provided for out of a tithe taken from frankincense. In its journey
+of more than a thousand miles northward from Saba to Petra in the land
+of the Nabatheans, successive peoples, beginning with the Minæans,
+received the freight and passed it on. Mecca and Medina, afterward
+holy places of Islam, were stations on the incense route. It was a
+drowsy traffic that went up and down this ancient road. The suns of
+the desert, falling upon the bales, drew from them that which made the
+carriers nod upon their beasts in a dream of delight. They revived
+themselves, legend continues, by inhaling the pungent fumes of bitumen
+and goat’s-beard.
+
+There were other than ritual terrors in gathering frankincense and the
+related substances. Herodotus heard the story that the groves were
+infested by small winged serpents of the same sort that invade Egypt.
+These clung to every branch, but if one burned gum storax under the
+tree they were dislodged; a like report had it that in Malabar great
+serpents coiled themselves about the sandalwood trees.
+
+The cinnamon and cassia which the Sabæans imported from Punt, on the
+African side of the Gulf of Aden, or themselves gathered there, were
+harvested with difficulty and peril, and only after the consent of the
+god had been given. The entrails of forty-four oxen, goats, and rams
+were offered up, nothing could be done before sunrise or after sunset,
+and when the harvest was made a priest set aside the god’s portion with
+the point of a spear. A third portion was devoted to the sun, and this
+burst at once into flame.
+
+There were great birds which collected sticks of cinnamon for their
+nests, which were fastened with mud to a sheer face of rock that foot
+of man could not climb. Sometimes these nests were broken down by means
+of leaden arrows. Sometimes the merchants, like the diamond-seekers in
+the Sindbad tale, placed large pieces of meat on the ground, and their
+weight caused the nests to fall when the mother birds bore the meat
+aloft to their young. The Arabians, returning, collected the cinnamon.
+
+Cassia grew on the marshy shores of a lake where were a number of
+winged animals much resembling bats, which screeched horribly and were
+very valiant. The Arabians covered their bodies and faces with the
+hides of oxen, leaving only holes for their eyes. While they gathered
+the bark they were kept busy shielding their eyes from assault from the
+air.
+
+There was still a long journey for these aromatic stuffs before
+they reached the marts of Arabia, at least when the people of Punt
+themselves made it. They put forth over vast tracts of sea upon rafts
+which were neither steered by rudder nor impelled by oar or sail. At
+the time of the winter equinox they went to sea on a wind from the
+southeast, and when they doubled the promontory of Arabia the northeast
+wind met them and took them from gulf to gulf. They skirted shores
+where forests, set afire by the heat of the sun, were blazing. It might
+be five years before their rafts, laden with copper, cloths, bracelets,
+and necklaces, were hauled up again on the beaches of Somaliland.
+
+There may have been a memory of musk in stories told about cassia
+and about ladanum. The ends of cassia branches of the length of two
+fingers were cut off and sewn in fresh skins of cattle. When the skins
+putrified, maggots ate away the woody parts but left the bark, which
+was too bitter to invite their attack. As to the ladanum of northern
+Arabia, Herodotus remarks that, although found in a most inodorous
+place, it is the sweetest-scented of all substances. Goats gathered
+it. These animals cropped the sprouting shoots of mastic branches when
+they were swollen with a juice of remarkable sweetness. Drops thereof
+were wiped up by their unlucky beards, and became clotted with dust and
+dry from the sun. Men with shears collected it, and that was why the
+Romans found goats’ hairs therein.
+
+Out of such stories were framed the geography, polity, and ritual of
+the land of incense. What came of them was a monopoly, a mystery, a
+spell that was slow to pass. In the smoke of altars one may almost
+glimpse the temples of this dim domain, and in the tinkle of the
+censing bell hear the bells of camels along an ancient path.
+
+
+_Gog and Magog of the North_
+
+The pastures of High Asia were the range of Gog and Magog. The Caucasus
+was their prison home. Sometimes these formidable races were pictured
+as roving the steppes and deserts of the north, sometimes as swinging
+back and forth against the walls of mountain valleys, where the policy
+of Alexander or divine compassion for the rest of mankind had confined
+them. Always they were seeking a way out, and sometime they would find
+it, and the world would shudder down in ruin under their tread.
+
+These races were the nightmare vision of two thousand years. There are
+words the very sound of which evokes the myths of fear. Such are Gog
+and Magog, with their harsh internal echo and inhuman suggestion. They
+were associated with the terrors of Scythia, known and unknown--the
+incursions of dwarfish, shrill-voiced nomads upon the civilizations of
+the south, the sense of vast desolate spaces where prodigious things
+had their beginning. These misgivings, made definite by biblical
+imagery and by the literal statements of the Koran, grew into legends
+which were enriched by contributions from classic fable and shared by
+the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem worlds.
+
+Magog was a son of Japheth, says Genesis. In the book of _Ezekiel_ it
+is declared that the Lord will bring Gog with his horses and horsemen
+out of the north, and Persia, Ethiopia and Libya with them. They shall
+ascend and come like a storm and like a cloud shall cover the land.
+They shall think an evil thought, to take a spoil and to take a prey.
+But the fury of the Lord shall come up in His face and there shall be
+a great shaking in the land of Israel. Gog shall fall upon the open
+field, and a fire will be sent upon Magog and among them that dwell
+carelessly in the isles. The wreckage of their shields and staves shall
+burn for seven years, and Gog shall have a place of graves in Israel,
+the valley of the passengers on the east of the sea.
+
+The burden of prophecy is taken up anew in _Revelation_. When the
+thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed from his prison and
+shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of
+the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle. They shall
+compass the camp of the saints about, and fire will come down out of
+heaven to devour them.
+
+The Koran buttressed biblical prophecy with a historical narrative.
+It concerns the journeys of Doul-Karnain, the Lord of the Two Horns,
+a personage variously identified with Alexander, Julius Cæsar and
+Augustus, but by the east believed to be Alexander. When he went forth
+with his army he marched to the going down of the sun and found it set
+in a miry fount. He marched to the farthest east and found a people
+oppressed by the heat. Then he marched north and in a valley between
+two mountains he found a people who told him that Gog and Magog laid
+waste their land. “Build us, O Doul-Karnain,” they begged, “a rampart
+between us and them.” He bade them bring him blocks of iron, and when
+he had filled the space between the mountains, he caused them to blow
+upon the wall with bellows, and heated it fiery hot, and poured molten
+brass upon it. Gog and Magog could not scale it, nor were they able to
+dig through it.
+
+Ezekiel wrote when the memory of an invasion of Scythian horsemen
+was still fresh in Asia the Less, and he drew his imagery from it;
+to him, and to John after him, Gog and Magog were symbols of earthly
+power opposed to Jehovah. But the Semitic world, Jew and Arab alike,
+scanned the vigorous picture of a nation from the steppes riding over
+the world, and saw in it inspired prophecy of a Mongol devastation
+of civilization. So Josephus thought: Gog and Magog were Scythian
+peoples. Thrice and four times, on the immense canvases of Asia and
+eastern Europe, the fading colors of the Ezekiel vision took on the
+freshness of actuality--and the restoring brush was wielded in turn by
+Genghis Khan, Othman, Tamerlane and Akbar. Thus history has been kind
+to men of literal minds; but it has seen a misshapen fable grow up
+in its shadow. The north had been the home of the monstrous races of
+classic myth, and all their bestial and godless traits were merged in
+the Tartar tradition.
+
+[Illustration: “BUILD US, O DOUL-KARNAIN,” THEY BEGGED, “A RAMPART
+BETWEEN US AND THEM”]
+
+Bald, deformed anthropophagi mustered behind the barrier of the
+Scythian mountains. Gog was the Turkish race, Magog was the Mongol.
+The campaigns of Alexander had left legends that persist to this day
+in Central Asia, and these were gathered up in the accumulating myth.
+Alexander had also left earthworks and monuments of his marches in
+those regions, and these became memorials of the terrible peoples of
+Ezekiel. At first the two races were placed a little to the north of
+Palestine, but tradition moved them farther to the north and east to
+bring them within the Alexander cycle. As Eden was at the end of the
+east, so Gog and Magog were in the farther north, “in Scythia beyond
+the Caucasus and near the Caspian Sea,” says St. Jerome, writing in an
+age when that sea was thought to be a gulf of the Arctic Ocean.
+
+Confused reports about the Chinese wall grew into a fable of Iskander’s
+wall, which at one time was deemed to be in the Far East, and again
+was identified with the fortifications which the Sassanid kings had
+built in the passes of the Caucasus, fragments of which are still to
+be seen at Derbent. It seemed most fitting that the Caucasus with its
+towering peaks, its broken valleys, and its remnants of diverse peoples
+should be the mountain prison of these predestined scourges of mankind.
+There also were to be found the Ten Lost Tribes, who had joined them.
+Maundeville merges the two traditions and connects them with a third;
+Gog and Magog and their Jewish associates all paid tribute to the queen
+of Amazonia. According to Ricold of Monte Croce, they could not with
+patience hear Alexander’s name.
+
+There was a legend that both races escaped, guided by an owl and a hare
+over their mountain walls; wherefore the Tartars wear owl feathers
+in honor of their deliverance. But Astrakhan has the story that they
+are prisoned still in remote valleys of the Caucasus, where twelve
+trumpets, blown by the winds, keep them in terror against the day when
+they shall break forth and destroy the world.
+
+
+_Prester John’s Kingdom_
+
+When the Christian world was hard put to hold its own in its crusading
+adventure in the Holy Land, word came to it that it had an ally in
+the rear of Islam. Somewhere in the remote east, on the farther side
+of Persia and Armenia, there was a king and priest who ruled over a
+Christian people. He had taken the field with a great army, defeated
+the Moslem kings of Media and Persia, seized their capital of Ecbatana,
+and marched to the relief of Jerusalem. Without boats to cross the
+Tigris, he had gone north into colder lands, intending to cross upon
+the ice and reach the holy city by a roundabout road. But the winters
+proved too mild, and after waiting several years he had gone home again.
+
+Thus the Europe of the twelfth century heard the story of Prester
+John. In one form or another it was repeated by Otto of Freisingen, by
+Maimonides, and by Benjamin of Tudela. In the travels of the latter,
+John is a Jewish king reigning in gorgeous state over a Jewish nation
+of the deserts. Popular tradition had it that the royal Christian of
+Asia had addressed a letter to the Pope of Rome and to the Greek and
+Roman emperors. Its recital of splendors and prodigies was a challenge
+to the spirit of wonder.
+
+“I, Presbyter Joannes, the Lord of Lords, surpass all under heaven
+in virtue, in riches and in power,” runs the letter. “In the three
+Indies our Magnificence rules, and our land extends beyond India; it
+reaches towards the sunrise over the wastes, and it trends towards
+deserted Babylon near the tower of Babel. Seventy-two provinces, of
+which only a few are Christian, serve us. Each has its own king but all
+are tributary to us. Our land streams with honey, and is overflowing
+with milk. In one region grows no poisonous herb, nor does a querulous
+frog ever quack in it, no scorpion exists, nor does the serpent glide
+amongst the grass, nor can any poisonous animals exist in it or injure
+any one. With us no one lies, for he who speaks a lie is thenceforth
+regarded as dead.”
+
+The royal letter writer recites that in his dominions is the earthly
+paradise, claims as his subjects all the peoples of prodigy, and
+describes in detail his human menagerie in the Caucasus. The accursed
+fifteen nations imprisoned there eat their foes, only desisting at
+Prester John’s word. They will “burst forth at the end of the world,
+in the time of Antichrist, and overrun all the abodes of the Saints as
+well as the great city Rome, which, by the way, we are prepared to give
+our son who will be born, along with all Italy, Germany, the two Gauls,
+Britain and Scotland.”
+
+Whether this letter was ever received or no, Pope Alexander III did
+dispatch to Prester John a letter which, between the lines, reads like
+the reply to an irritating missive. It asserted the papal claims to
+universal dominion and demanded that the priest-king recognize them.
+The messenger who bore it eastward in 1177 was never heard of again.
+Meanwhile the pagan Mongols had broken into Europe and it became papal
+policy to conciliate their good will and if possible win them over
+as allies of the Cross against the Crescent. The monkish envoys who
+penetrated the heart of Asia found a power as vast as that claimed for
+the Christian monarch, but it was in the hands of the sons of Genghis
+Khan; and there was no Prester John.
+
+This was a Nestorian fable, said Rubruquis; “about nothing they make a
+great fuss.” As to their King John, “I traversed his pastures and no
+one knew anything about him.” Rubruquis speaks of Ung-Khan, prince of
+a province in Mongolia southeast of Lake Baikal. According to Marco
+Polo, who entered Asia in the same generation, this was Prester John.
+The Christian chief of a Hunnish tribe, he was defeated and slain by
+Genghis Khan. The legend faded out of the consciousness of the west,
+only to be revived and domiciled in Abyssinia when Europe learned of
+the power of its sovereigns and that they were Christians of the Coptic
+faith.
+
+The tale of this Asiatic priest-king who wanted to put his armies at
+the disposal of the hard-beset Christians of the west has the irony
+and pathos of allegory. Without purporting to do so, it tells the
+story of a great eastern adventure of the church which the Greek and
+Roman communions had almost forgotten. The Nestorians had been cast
+into outer darkness in one of the schisms of the Eastern Empire in the
+unhappy sixth century, when, as Gibbon says, Christians were “more
+solicitous to explore the nature, than to practice the laws, of their
+founder.” The offense of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, was
+that he called Mary the Mother of Jesus and not the Mother of God,
+and contended that in Christ the divine and human natures subsisted
+independently of each other. He was excommunicated, and died in exile.
+
+His followers, driven from the empire, went forth into Asia and
+established an empire of the spirit wide as that afterward claimed for
+the Prester John of legend. They founded churches in Persia, Bokhara,
+Siam, and Sumatra. They penetrated India and contended with Buddhism
+in Tibet. They won millions of followers in Cathay, where their
+religion was tolerated under an imperial edict of the seventh century
+as “virtuous, mysterious, and pacific.” From Palestine to China they
+held the field for the Christian faith, and their communicants were
+more numerous than those of either the Greek or Roman church. There
+are places in Asia which have not seen a Christian missionary since
+the Nestorians passed, as soon they did. In Kurdistan and Persia their
+faith survives in the affections of perhaps three hundred thousand
+worshipers.
+
+It was the weakness of this faith that it nowhere had a country of
+its own, and therefore no powerful central hierarchy sleepless in its
+cause. For better or worse it was never able to draw the sword; it
+spread itself only by persuasion and the tolerance of pagan countries
+whose princes followed other cults. It must be that some dreamy
+Nestorian monk, familiar with the west and its ways, and pondering what
+his church had done in Asia and might have done had the fates been
+kinder, wrote in the days of its decline the letter which gave it the
+country it lacked and set forth its spiritual dominion in terms the
+west would understand.
+
+
+_The Witch Realm of Lapland_
+
+In the dark ages a tradition arose that there was a witch nation in
+the north of Europe. Its citizens were the Lapps, whose descendants
+still fish, hunt and pasture their reindeer in the wilder districts
+of Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Finland. They are the most timid and
+inoffensive of men. They seem never to have had government of their
+own, but have been overtaxed, exploited, and at times enslaved by
+stronger neighbors. Swarthy, dwarfish, and shrill-spoken, with broad
+heads, upturned noses, and bandy legs, they may be the survivors of
+the small, dark race that once overspread the continent. Such a people
+would need supernatural powers to overcome their manifold handicaps,
+and with these legend endowed them.
+
+Their sinister reputation came to them because of their gnome-like
+aspect, because they were still in the stone age of culture, and
+perhaps because they were pagans after the remainder of Europe had
+become Christian. Their magic drums were the terror of settled lands.
+They could make themselves invisible. They could raise the winds. “They
+tye three knottes on a strynge hangying at a whyp,” wrote Richard Eden
+in 1577. “When they lose one of these they rayse tollerable wynds.
+When they lose another the wynd is more vehement; but by losing the
+thyrd they rayse playne tempests as in old time they were accustomed
+to rayse thunder and lyghtnyng.” Tales of ships which went too near to
+Lapland and were heard of no more were rife among the seafaring states.
+Yet Ivan the Terrible sent for Lapp magicians to read the portent of a
+comet, and the Norse princess Gunhild lived in their country to learn
+its lore.
+
+Much of the superstition of the neighbor Finns has entered into the
+Lapland tradition. Their magic songs picture their small cousins
+as living in almost legendary lands--Lapland itself, a dark, vague
+northern country where the people wore tall hats and spoke in whining,
+mumbling voices: Turja Fells, with its wonder-working maidens; and
+Pohjola, “home of the north,” where the old woman, Louhiatar, “the
+blind whore of Pohjola,” queened it in a realm that had neither sun nor
+moon. These songs have much to say of hazy headlands and spells wrought
+upon them and on the main. A furious old wife sweeps the sea, with a
+cloth of sparks on her head, and on her shoulders a cloak of foam.
+Four maidens of the air mow grass on a cloudy cape in a foggy island.
+The sharp maiden Terhetar sifts the mist on a shrouded promontory. A
+wood spirit shrieks at people and fills the forest with murk when they
+wander there.
+
+In the Orkney and Shetland islands, the Lapps were known as Finn-folk.
+Sometimes they crossed the North Sea and, hiding their identity,
+appeared among the islanders, with whom they intermarried; skilled
+persons, however, detected them by their wrinkled visages and the odd
+blemishes upon their skins. The visitors knew the language of birds
+and beasts, into which, indeed, they could transform themselves; and
+with impunity they rode the tricky water-horse. They could control the
+weather, predict the future, cure diseases of men and cattle. It was
+a slight task for them to make the passage from the continent. Most
+people believed they swam across--for either they were seals who took
+human form, or men who could take the seal form. Sometimes when fisher
+folk harpooned a large seal they found a strange little man struggling
+in the waves.
+
+These credulous island tales carry the legend of a witch nation of the
+north almost into the twentieth century.
+
+
+_The Spice Islands_
+
+The ninth edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ forgot to mention
+the Moluccas. A standard atlas of the world published in the United
+States neglects to describe them. A day’s sail to the southeast from
+the large Philippine island of Mindanao brings one to them, but
+American travelers do not make this trip. Only a strait, to the right
+and to the left, separates the group from New Guinea and Celebes, and
+narrow are the seas between it and Java to the south; yet these are
+names of consequence in modern geography, while it is a name all but
+unknown. There is magic, modern magic, in the tropic islands of the
+Pacific. These islands do not share it, though they lie on both sides
+of the Line in the fairest of summer seas.
+
+They have another name, the Spice Islands. For the space of two
+centuries men who followed the great waters thought of them and of
+little else. It was spices that Columbus sought when he sailed west
+from Palos in 1492 and the man who discovered sassafras in America had
+honors comparable to his own. It was an eastern route to the spice
+regions that engaged Portuguese endeavor and conducted the ships of da
+Gama into the Indian Ocean in 1497. It was a western route to the Spice
+Islands that Magellan sought in his voyage around the world a score of
+years afterward. The royal grant to del Cano, who brought one ship
+home from that expedition, was conditioned on the annual payment of
+two cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs, and twelve cloves; and the coat of
+arms which he was licensed to bear had the effigies of two Malay kings
+holding spice branches; to have gone around the world seemed to Spain
+a lesser thing than to have discovered a route to these islands. To
+reach them was the object of the attempts to open a northeast passage
+around Asia and a northwest passage around America. To determine their
+ownership was the subject of two papal bulls and a dynastic agreement
+between the royalties of Spain and Portugal; and they fell at last as a
+prize of war to Holland.
+
+In the age of discovery India and China were small words compared
+with the Spice Islands. The place this forgotten group once held in
+the imagination of men is one of the great illusions of commercial
+geography.
+
+Nor was it all illusion. If the world trade of antiquity was mainly
+in incense, the world trade of the Middle Ages was mainly in spices,
+and for a similar cause--with the primitive transportation of the
+period, less valuable and more bulky things could not be carried far
+at a profit. Nowadays the meats, grains, vegetables, and fruits of
+all climes travel long distances to the dinner table, and men’s diet
+has both variety and quality. In former times the range of eatables
+was small, the quality poor. The service of spices was to improve
+and diversify the flavors of viands, to disguise the shortcomings of
+mediæval cookery as well as mediæval larders. The salt-fish diet of
+European winters created the spice trade with the east.
+
+When the Turkish seizure of Egypt in 1521 closed the southern overland
+route to the east the same year that both the Portuguese and the
+Spanish reached the Moluccas, the stage was set for the romance of
+spice. Passing from unknown sources through various hands, it had
+reached the west at a tenfold price. Here was opportunity to deal
+direct in what all Europe wanted.
+
+It was known that these were not the only spice lands. Cassia grew in
+Somaliland and cinnamon in Ceylon, and both were used in food as well
+as incense. The ginger root came from a reed of Cochin-China. Benjamin
+of Tudela, Ibn Batuta, and Friar Odoric had described the pepper
+“forests” of Malabar, and Marignolli had even told of pepper wars
+between Jews and Christians. Through the Chinese port of Amoy, so Polo
+thought, there passed a hundred times as much pepper as came to all
+Christendom. But somehow the Moluccas, whence came cloves, nutmegs, and
+mace--the husks of nutmegs--seemed to be the kingdom of spicery.
+
+They had won this distinction centuries before the first western
+ship entered those seas. Although the islands have an area of only
+twenty-five thousand square miles and a population of less than four
+hundred thousand persons, their two sultanates of Tidor and Ternate
+achieved dominion at about the same time as the Italian republics of
+Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, which in power they paralleled; and the one
+group of states, no less than the other, lived on the spice trade.
+The colonial empire of the Moluccas extended over the neighboring
+archipelagoes and penetrated the continent; their trading settlements
+dotted the wide spaces of Malaysia. Java was their export market, and
+there Polo saw the testimonials of their power in a spice trade that
+seemed to him to account for the greater part of the world’s supply of
+aromatic and pungent vegetable substances. They had already entered
+into a political decline when the Europeans came, and this eastern
+venture of the Portuguese executed for them the same decree of fate
+that it was to do for the maritime states of the Mediterranean.
+
+When Serrano reached the Moluccas he wrote to his friend, Magellan:
+“I have discovered yet another new world, larger and richer than that
+found by Vasco da Gama.” The caravels of Portugal went no farther, and
+the nation took such pains as it could that none others should go so
+far. It was Portuguese policy in the spice trade, as it had been Arab
+policy in the incense trade, that the sources of supply should remain
+unknown. Always the unknown is magnified. Robert Thorne, writing from
+the Spanish court in 1527, declared that the islands abounded not
+only in cloves, nutmegs, mace, and cinnamon, but in “Golde, Rubies,
+Diamondes, Balasses, Garnates, Jacincts, and other stones and pearles.”
+The precious commodities he thought the simple natives would part with
+on equal terms for the lead, tin, and iron of the north; and, measure
+for measure, they would traffic their spices for corn, their diamonds
+for pieces of glass.
+
+In these islands fable found another home. Here, it was said, were men
+having spurs on their ankles like cocks, horned hogs, hens that laid
+their eggs several feet under ground, oysters so large that the shells
+were used as baptismal fonts for children, crabs with claws so strong
+that they could break the iron of a pick-ax, stones which grew like
+fish and out of which men made lime, and a river well stored with finny
+creatures and yet so hot that it scalded the unwary bather. Drake,
+refitting here in his voyage around the world, saw “an infinite swarme
+of fiery wormes flying at night making such a shew and light as if
+every twigge or tree had been a burning candle.” Also he saw bats as
+big as hens and crayfish that dug holes like conies, and one of which
+was a meal for four hungry men.
+
+These decorations of fancy can add but little to the great theme of
+forgotten islands once the goal of the world’s desire.
+
+There was another curious chapter written when Dutch succeeded
+Portuguese. It was such a chapter as monopoly writes, and it comes
+down into the nineteenth century. The ships of Holland cruised in the
+surrounding seas, cutting down spice groves wherever they found them.
+Before they were exported, all nutmegs were treated with fire and lime,
+so that no plantations could be started elsewhere--but pigeons carried
+them to other islands and mother cloves were taken away in hollow
+bamboos, and the produce of home orchards multiplied, and the world
+spice trade dwindled in relative importance as the food of mankind
+became more varied.
+
+Dampier tells of an island where the ground under the trees was
+carpeted with cloves several inches thick, left there to decay. Another
+traveler tells of seeing three heaps of nutmegs burning at one time,
+each of which would have filled a church. So the Dutch East India
+Company reduced supplies in striving to maintain prices. The spicy
+odors that floated over the seas surrounding the Araby of fable became,
+on occasion, a fact of the Molucca group. It was the incense neither of
+nature nor of religion, but of a dying commerce.
+
+The nutmegs of to-day are grown mainly in the island of Penang in the
+British East Indies and in the island of Grenada in the British West
+Indies, while cloves come from the African island of Zanzibar.
+
+
+_Arcadia_
+
+Arcadia is at once a country and a province of the imagination.
+
+The real Arcadia is a mountainous plateau some forty miles square in
+the central part of the Peloponnessus of Greece. Its chief exports in
+the old time were asses. Its inhabitants were--and are--gruff-spoken
+herdsmen and peasants, equally scornful of letters and politics. They
+seldom went outside their own valleys, and few strangers came among
+them. They had no central government and no relations with the other
+states of Greece, and they wanted to be let alone. Yet they were
+willing to fight--for pay; and sometimes they had to fight because
+Sparta was their neighbor and they were on a war track. When Arcadia
+took the field in force as the ally of another state, almost always it
+espoused the wrong side. In the quarrels of the Greek republics, and
+in the series of wars in which Pompey, Julius Cæsar, Mark Antony, and
+Augustus figured, it shared the hard lot of the vanquished. Although it
+lay remote and its spirit was aloof, the plateau had at least its share
+of the troubles of the world.
+
+The Arcadia of poetry occupies the same boundaries, but has had a
+different history. All that the poets have done has been to stress
+certain facts and forget the others. This land, as it seemed to them,
+stood like a fortress of rustic innocence above the turmoil of politics
+and the bustle of maritime trade that was ancient Greece. At each of
+the corners of the plateau, like bastions, rose a group of mountain
+peaks, from which, on a fair morning, one might see the whole of
+Arcadia, the neighbor states of the coastal plains, and beyond them
+the Mediterranean. Great groves of gnarled oaks grew upon the mountain
+sides, there were pine forests, and in the open fields stood the
+graceful plane tree, beloved of the classic world. Though the Arcadians
+were unlettered, pastoral song had its birth among them, before the
+inspiration of Theocritus gave it a home in Sicily. Pan was their
+tutelar deity, and it seemed to the rustics sometimes that they could
+hear the plaintive music of his pipes as the goat-god reclined under
+the plane tree. In this artless land, myth has it, Hermes strung cords
+across the shell of a giant tortoise and made the harp.
+
+Arcadia was equally skilled at the harp and the flute, and to these
+the shepherds sang their simple lays. Aside from their love of music,
+they seemed to the Greeks of the towns men of ignorant rusticity, and
+they figure as simpletons--“acorn eaters”--in the Middle Comedy. The
+Romans copied this as they did everything else in Greek drama, and the
+dull Arcadian of the stage moved Latin audiences to laughter; “Arcades
+ambo,” both sweet innocents, is a phrase of the period. But the Romans
+caught also the spirit of their rustic song, and the Arkady of poetry
+was born in the Virgilian bucolics. Its outlines are disclosed in
+the Tenth _Eclogue_, in passages which tell of browsing goats, and
+clover-rifling bees, and bubbling springs where dark-blue violets
+blow, and, animating the scene, the vintagers of mellow grapes and Pan
+himself, red with elderberries and with cinnabar. “Arcadians, none but
+ye can sing!” exclaims the poet.
+
+On this delicate outline the Renaissance laid the rich colorings of its
+fancy. The rugged, troubled mountain land became the one land in all
+the world of simple peace and rustic innocence and wistful charm of
+things ideal. Sanazzaro’s Arcadian pastoral went through sixty editions
+in a century. France, Spain, England, and Holland, following Italy, all
+made their excursions into Arkady. There was a succession of romantic
+sketches wherein lyrics declaring the loves of swains and bewailing the
+death of virgins are interspersed with dialogues that tell in prose
+the poetry of pastoral life. The classic work of this school is the
+_Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney. There, and not in the Morea, the Arkady
+that is a province of the imagination may best be explored.
+
+It is a tale of knightly youths and dainty maidens and one sentence
+will declare its quality. When Pamela disrobed for the bath and set
+foot in a stream “the touch of cold water made a pretty kind of
+shrugging come over her body, like the twinkling of the fairest of the
+fixed stars.”
+
+Here, says Sidney, the very shepherds have their fancies lifted to
+so high conceits as the learned of other nations are content both to
+borrow their names and imitate their cunning. The hills garnish their
+proud delights with stately trees, the humble estate of valleys is
+comforted with the refreshing of rivers, and the thickets declare the
+cheerful disposition of well-tuned birds. Sheep pasture with sober
+security and by them are pretty lambs whose bleating oratory craves the
+dam’s comfort. The herd girls sing their lays, while on the uplands
+pipes the shepherd boy “as though he shall never be old.”
+
+This is vision, all of it, sunshine and haze working their spell upon a
+rocky hillside. There are wolves in the sheepfolds of life.
+
+
+_Bohemia_
+
+Bohemia is a subtler Arcadia, another province of youth and love and
+dreams; but youth passes thence, and love is a brief madness, and the
+dream may fail of fulfillment. Like Arcadia, the Bohemia that is a
+state of mind has its reality in a mountain-girdled land, but, unlike
+Arcadia, it has shifted on the map, refusing to be confined by any
+boundaries known to geography.
+
+Now even the name of it, with its music and implications of poetry,
+is lost to geography, and in its stead is the harshly named
+Czecho-Slovakia. Wherefore the Bohemians of art and literature, and
+unregulated impulse and fantasy, have no homeland they can call their
+own. This is a fitting thing. In a sense there never was a Bohemia,
+although there was always the fortress land which nature placed at the
+headwaters of the Elbe on the borders of Germany. The Celtic tribe
+whence it was named is only a shadow in history, and the Bohemians who
+fought with Poles and Germans, who wanted to be Protestant, who started
+the Thirty Years’ War, who were a dukedom, and a kingdom, and a part of
+the Holy Roman Empire, were Slavs who called themselves Czechs.
+
+Their literature is older than the German, their university at Prague
+was one of the earliest centers of European culture, their capital is
+the westernmost outpost of the east in Europe, their patriotism is a
+proverb, and their glass fabrics, their beer, and their beet sugar
+are staples of world commerce. Upon this people and their hill-walled
+home the name of Bohemia and the traditions of “the gayest and most
+melancholy country of the world” fit but loosely. Whence the Bohemia
+that is a haunting word on the lips of youth?
+
+Shakespeare budded it, and the gypsies, and Frenchmen who knew too
+little, and Frenchmen who may have known too much. _Winter’s Tale_ gave
+Bohemia a seacoast and centuries of critics a chance to say its author
+nodded. Yet under the puissant Ottokar the country did have coasts on
+both the north and south of Europe. The scene of the play is near the
+head of the Adriatic. The Bohemia it pictures, instead of lying inland,
+is probably the maritime province of Istria, and historically the
+background is correctly named.
+
+From _Winter’s Tale_ the Bohemians of the studio and pothouse got
+themselves a coast, a glamour, and their First Citizen. “Places remote
+enough are in Bohemia,” the poet says. Here again is shepherd’s love,
+and a prince whose courtship of a “queen of curds and cream” is timed
+by the flowers as they pass--“daffodils that come before the swallow
+dares, and take the winds of March with beauty,” and violets dim, pale
+primroses, bold ox-lips and the flower de luce. “The fanned snow that’s
+bolted by the northern blasts” is far away.
+
+On this scene of Arkady enters a figure in no wise Arcadian--Autolycus,
+earliest Bohemian, citizen of no country and of all. He is a vagabond,
+a minstrel, a ballad-monger, a ribbon peddler, a cut-purse. His is
+the footpath way, and his revenue, he explains, is the silly cheat.
+“Enter Autolycus singing” is the stage direction. Exit Autolycus also,
+singing, “A merry heart goes all the day, your sad tires in a mile-a.”
+
+Here is a blood-brother of Villon, and Bohemia is already a province
+of his song. It becomes a kingdom with the coming of the gypsies.
+Mediæval France called them Bohemians, and thought them such, as other
+countries thought them Egyptians. The roadside was their home, the
+world was their country, they paid no taxes or rents, and report had it
+that they had written the canons of their creed on cabbage leaves which
+a donkey found and devoured. They practiced the wandering arts, were
+musicians, metal-workers, horse-dealers, bear-leaders, snake-charmers,
+herb-venders; their women read palms, and were “pleasaunt dauncers.”
+
+The gypsy philosophy found its first devotees in rogues of old Paris,
+who called themselves dukes in Bohemia; Hugo has sketched their lawless
+commonwealth in his _Notre Dame_. The Bohemia of artists and dreamers,
+like many a country of the map, had ruffians, cheats, and vagrants for
+its early colonists. It was left to Murger to fix its frontiers, write
+its laws, and treat for its admission into the league of ideal lands.
+The results are spread at large in his _Scenes de la Vie de Bohème_.
+
+Much has been written of the whereabouts of this land and of the
+conditions by which one becomes a citizen, but the matter is found
+entire in Murger’s preface and in Arthur Symons’s introduction to
+this preface. “Any man,” says Murger, “who enters the path of Art,
+with his art as his sole means of support, is bound to pass by way of
+Bohemia.” To Symons, Bohemia is “the sentiment youth has of itself
+at the flowering moment of its existence”; the sadness of it is the
+consciousness of the flight of youth.
+
+The whereabouts of the country that has been mapped as neighbor both to
+Germany and Italy? Murger answers that Bohemia “neither exists nor can
+exist anywhere save in Paris.” But that is only Murger’s answer.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII. Islands of Enchantment
+
+
+“The thirteenth day of May we passed by the Island of Paris, and
+the Island of the bankes of Helicon, and the Island called Ditter,
+where are many boares and the women bee witches.” This glimpse of
+Mediterranean travel from one of the sixteenth-century wanderers whose
+voyages are recorded in Hakluyt might be paralleled from the outer
+Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, or the South Seas. In the
+_Arabian Nights_, for example, Sayf Al-Muluk and his companions came in
+turn to the isle of the old men of the sea; to the isle of ghouls who
+sleep under cover of their ears; to the isle of gigantic blackamoors
+with protruding eyeteeth; and to the isle of trained apes “bigger than
+he-mules.”
+
+Such folk seem at home in the wilderness of waters. These distant
+spaces of the sea are little worlds of their own which imagination
+feels free to dower with peculiar institutions and stock with peculiar
+peoples. In islands of reality or fantasy men place their ideal states,
+their pirate realms, their abodes of exile, their refuges from the
+restraints and traditions of life--the sanctuaries of pursuits and
+companionships other than those of which they have tired. In them,
+also, they place the regions of repose; to reach felicity one must
+cross water.
+
+On journeys thither one might sight the shores of the folk of prodigy.
+There were islands of men, and islands of women, and islands of
+hermits, and islands of witches, and islands of satyrs, and islands of
+giants, and islands of dwarfs, and islands of dog-headed, ox-worshiping
+cannibals. The impulse thus to set aside a maritime domicile for the
+nondescript nations was strongest with Arab geographers and Celtic
+story-tellers. It culminates in the romancing narrative of Maundeville,
+who dotted the eastern seas with the archipelagoes of his fancy and
+settled them with the creatures of fable.
+
+When the spell of terror woven in classic times began to lift from
+the Atlantic, its islands swam into sight as to the strains of harp
+music. They appeared to belong equally to geography and to poetry.
+Of Madeira, the discovery of which is associated with the romance of
+fugitive English lovers, an old writer declared that such a delightful
+land “could only have been discovered by love.” For reasons as yet
+unexplained, nearly all the newly found islands of the eastern Atlantic
+bore the names of animals or birds. About them, Sir John Hawkins wrote,
+“are certaine flitting Ilands which have been oftentimes seene, and
+when men approched neere them, they vanished.” The older maps show one
+such island which was called St. Brendan’s. It is a memory of the Irish
+sea epics, and the latter are themselves a review of the entire island
+story.
+
+In these five wander-tales the empty spaces of the Atlantic are filled
+in with islands which were loaned to the Irish by Homer from the
+Odyssey and Plato from his Atlantis; by the Greek, Lucian, from his
+Rabelaisian _True History_; by the Roman, Seneca, with his vision of a
+continent in the west; by him who saw the Sea of Glass from the rock
+of Patmos; by Arab story-tellers, and by early Moorish and Spanish
+chroniclers from their narratives of the shadowy Antillia, the Isle
+of the Seven Bishops, and the legendary journey of the Deluded Folk.
+Celtic fancy passed a wand over this jumble of material, and a strange
+new world appeared. Headlands of snow and ice and islands of perpetual
+summer were within a day’s sail of one another, pagan fables and
+monkish marvels were domiciled together, there was much mist and much
+sunshine, and around all was “the mighty and intolerable ocean” which
+St. Brendan saw at Sliabh Daidche.
+
+Tennyson has set one of these tales, _The Voyage of Mældune_, to his
+own music. It was a journey of revenge a chieftain made with his men to
+slay the man who has slain his father. They came to the Silent Isle,
+where their voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse
+shriek; to the Isle of Shouting where wild birds cried from its summit
+till the steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died in the field;
+to the Isle of Flowers where were blossom and promise of blossom and
+never a fruit; to the Isle of Fruits, and in every berry and fruit the
+poisonous pleasure of wine; to the Isle of Fire, which shuddered and
+shook like a man in a mortal affright; to the Bounteous Isle, where the
+men began to be weary, to sigh and to stretch and yawn; to the Isle of
+Witches, naked as heaven, who bosomed the burst of the spray; to the
+Isle of the Double Towers, that shocked on each other and butted each
+other with clashing of bells; and to the Isle of a Saint, who told the
+men, “Go back to the Isle of Finn, and suffer the past to be past.”
+
+This narrative may stand with variations for all of the Irish sea
+tales. Under the sway of some overmastering motive the hero puts forth
+upon the deep--for revenge, or to save a comrade condemned, or to seek
+a woman, or to reach the Land of Promise, or to find the Lord upon
+the sea. The voyagers pass from island to island. Complaisant Circes
+greet them from one shore and indignant female virtue repels them from
+another. They come to the isle called the Delicious, to the Isle of
+Sheep, to the Isle of Laughter, to the Moving Isle which was a whale’s
+back, to the isle which is the mouth of hell. They see demons racing
+their horses on a magic course, and red-hot swine issuing from caves,
+and stinging cats, and Judas on his rock, and ants the size of foals.
+A griffin assaults them, the Cyclopes threaten them, birds sing psalms
+to them. Repentant, or triumphant, or prophetic, or stricken in years,
+they come back at last to an Ireland that has forgotten them.
+
+Who fares on from island to island with these Celtic dreamers may visit
+the whole realm of fable.
+
+
+_The Sunken Lands_
+
+Gazing into the ocean depths in warm latitudes one sees the fronds of
+tall aquatic plants sway slightly as if a slow breeze stirred them.
+Walls of coral rise there with a wavering semblance to palaces. The
+purple mullet swims in and out of sunken grottos. Such sunlight as
+reaches them is subdued to softness, like that admitted by cathedral
+windows when it is late afternoon. These seem to be groves and gardens
+and habitations under the sea. Beings like one’s fellow mortals, but
+more beautiful and gentle, might live there and rove in the dim peace
+of meadows beneath the foam and tumult of the reefs.
+
+Such thoughts come without bidding. Always men have sought the land of
+heart’s desire, and sometimes they told themselves that it was under
+the sea; or perhaps that what they saw there was not the promise of
+what should be but the wreck of what had been.
+
+The sea is a mirror as well as a window. It repeats the curves of
+shore and sky and all that is between--cornfields, and grazing cattle,
+and the burden of orchards, and cottage smoke, and the loom of church
+towers. Here is an underworld, though it be but the simple magic of
+light upon smooth water. There is a subtler magic of mist and water
+and uncertain sun gleams when one stands on the west coast of Ireland
+and looks seaward through the eyes of a people in whom wonder never
+flickered down in doubt.
+
+Dwelling alone on the outer coast of the world as the ancients knew it,
+these folk had beheld strange things in the great waters that roared
+along their cliffs. Shadowy islands showed themselves in thick weather,
+and, though no trace of them remained when the cloud bank lifted, these
+were no tricks of mirage wrought by fog and muffled sunlight. They were
+isles of enchantment that might have floated out of sight, but more
+likely had sunk beneath the wave, not to emerge again until another
+seven years were gone. The glints of splendor upon the distant sea were
+not the track of the sun in broken water. They came from the golden
+roofs and spires of a sunken city.
+
+So out of things seen--as in a glass darkly--upon, above, and under the
+billow, and out of things imagined or hoped for, men have wrought the
+legend of cities that sleep beneath the ocean. The tale of Atlantis
+is the oldest form of the legend. But the tales of lost cities are
+not legend altogether and the tale of Atlantis may not be legend
+altogether. There are submerged ruins on which romance bases itself as
+upon reality, there are authentic historical happenings, and there are
+local traditions which, it may be, retain the memory of cities that
+were upon islands or coasts engulfed by the sea.
+
+[Illustration: _In Islands Men Placed Their Ideal States.... To Reach
+Felicity One Must Cross Water_]
+
+Along the Italian coast the columns of sunken Roman villas have given
+rise to stories of drowned cities. The ruins of towns lie under the
+Zuyder Zee. Some inroad of the deep may be preserved in the legend of
+Vineta, the fabled city beneath the Baltic near the Holstein coast.
+There have been subsidences within historical time in the waters about
+the British Isles, and the ocean has taken toll of the English coast
+itself. The Channel shoal called the Goodwin Sands, and Seal Rock,
+fragment of the Irish island of Inis Fitæ which was split into three
+pieces in the eighth century, are tokens of these subsidences. In the
+Azores group, scene of the Atlantis legend, four islands appeared in
+the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and sank again. Expedition
+Island, northwest of Australia, which Dutch naturalists visited within
+a generation, lies under seven fathoms of water. The populous island
+of Torca in the Indian Ocean went out of sight in a sheet of flame in
+1693. Tuanaki, an island in South Polar waters, has not been seen in
+ninety years. The cloud bank which Peary called Crocker Land has been
+removed from maps of the Arctic region. Three new islands have been
+born in the Aleutian group, one of them as late as 1909. The strange
+stone images on Easter Island have given rise to conjecture that it
+might be the remnant of a continent and a civilization lost beneath the
+Pacific.
+
+Thus there is a broad basis of fact for the legends of sunken cities.
+Some of these are of great beauty. Whether the product of pagan or
+Christian brooding, the sound of church bells is in them--peals that
+come floating solemnly to the surface from towers through which deep
+waters are moving. When the sunshine falls upon calm seas, so fisherman
+say, they can discern these towers, and rising about them the peaked
+roofs of houses like those of the Middle Ages.
+
+Beyond all others the Celts are the people of the lost lands. These
+seem part of the Celtic heritage of defeat and dreams. The legends of
+Wales tell of a fair land sunken by the folly of a drunken prince.
+The lost Lyonesse, a great promontory of Cornwall, was such another
+land, and the Scilly Islands are the remnants. Tennyson and Swinburne
+have rescued its memory from oblivion and Walter de la Mare pictures a
+scene “in sea-cold Lyonesse, when the Sabbath eve shafts down on the
+roofs, walls and belfries of the foundered town.” The story of Is, the
+vanished Breton capital, has been told in folk-song, in poetry, in
+stately music. It is one of the haunting fables of men, and back of it,
+as of so many tales of ruin and overthrow, is the figure of a beautiful
+and wicked woman.
+
+The city of Is lay far in the west of France, where the coast of
+Brittany makes its great thrust into the Atlantic. Peasants point out
+the blocks, visible at low tide in the Bay of Douarnenez, which they
+say are its foundations. The city was builded in a wide plain below
+the level of the sea, and strong walls, controlled by sluice gates,
+defended it from the encroaching waves. It was an habitation of vice
+and pleasure, and it had a king as blameless as Arthur, and he a
+daughter as cruel, as lustful, and as fair of face as Arthur’s sister,
+Morgan le Fay. King Gradlon and Princess Dahut are the central figures
+in the drama of Is.
+
+Dahut dwelt in a tower, where she entertained a long train of lovers,
+drowning each as she tired of him. To please a paramour she stole from
+her father’s neck in his sleep the silver key which unlocked the sluice
+gates and let in the sea. Awakened by the warning tumult of the waters,
+Gradlon mounted a horse and fled, bearing his daughter with him. But
+the floods moved after him and a voice bade him sacrifice to the sea
+the beautiful demon who rode with him. Dahut fell to her death in the
+waves, and their course was stayed. At Quimper the king rebuilt his
+seat, but Is was lost forever beneath the Atlantic. Though it happened
+fifteen centuries ago, there are Bretons who say that the faint chime
+of bells still comes to them when wind and tide move shoreward together.
+
+Nine is the number of islands under the sea to the west of Erin.
+They appear above the surface once in seven years. Though a man may
+descry them from the coast, yet might he go toward them in a currach
+for two days and not come up with them. Some of them are larger than
+Ireland itself. They have been seen by trustworthy observers,--Otway,
+for example. In a paper read before the Royal Irish Society, Westropp
+describes O Brasile, the best known of these, as he saw it in 1872: “It
+was a clear evening with a fine golden sunset, when, just as the sun
+went down, a dark island suddenly appeared far out to sea, but not on
+the horizon. It had two hills, one wooded; between these, from a low
+plain, rose towers and curls of smoke. My mother, brother, and several
+friends saw it at the same time. One cried out that he could see New
+York!”
+
+Illusion, but for thousands of years Irish eyes have beheld these
+phantom islands lift and fade in the west, and the Celtic glamour is
+in the legends that tell them. “Lost Kilsapheen,” sighs the poet,
+“its palaces and towers of pride ... all buried in the rushing tide
+and deep sea waters green.” Churches and convents and castles are in
+these islands, and those who have seen them or thought they saw them
+report more intimate touches--an old woman coming out of a cabin to cut
+a cabbage; the bleating of sheep and lambs heard in a fog on the open
+sea; the apparition of “an old Scotch gentleman” wearing the raiment
+of another century upon an enchanted shore. Sometimes a seeming of
+tumult troubles these realms of shadow. There are flames and smoke and
+fugitives. Then the spell passes and there is naught but the slant of
+the gull’s wing and the roll of a porpoise on a distant billow.
+
+The inhabitants of the islands are people of a vanished time, and
+sealmen, and mermen, and giants, and the prisoners of giants. If you
+can find the golden key to one of the sunken lands it will rise to the
+surface and remain there; but the key has been hidden under a cairn
+or is buried in the ruins of a Druid temple. There are other ways of
+lifting the spell. Casting a clod of earth upon an island when it is
+above water may disenchant it. Another way is by dropping a coal of
+fire upon it, or knocking the glowing ashes from your pipe upon the
+shore, or shooting a red-hot arrow from a boat, for “fire is hostile
+to anything phantasmal.” So was Inishbofin fixed above the surface of
+the sea. Fishermen landed upon it in a fog and lit a fire. Then the fog
+cleared and they saw an old woman driving a white cow to drink. One of
+them seized the cow’s tail and found in his hand a spray of seaweed;
+and the woman and cow were turned into rocks. This was ages ago.
+
+
+_Where Eden Lies_
+
+Eden, Elysium, and the Fortunate Isles are one. They are upon the earth
+and yet not of it. They are no part of the realm of shades and it is
+not through the gates of death that one enters them. Mortal men have
+dwelt in them, or may reach them, and thither the heroes pass without
+leaving “the warm precincts of the cheerful day.” These are the ideal
+lands of afternoon sunshine and airs that are at once a sigh and a
+caress. The poetry and pity of men created them that there might be
+some place of happiness with portals less somber than those of the
+tomb, and without the sadness of irrevocable farewells upon the paths
+that lead to it.
+
+So the realms of bliss were placed afar, at the end of difficult
+journeys which yet might be attained, or at least attempted. Eden lay
+eastward. The Fortunate Isles of the Roman and the Elysian lands of
+the Greek and Celt lay westward. In the conception of men these were
+islands, Eden almost as much as the others. The four sacred rivers
+flowed from it and around it, and in later times, what men who came
+near to it particularly noticed was the sound of falling water.
+
+It seemed to Columbus that the rushing current of the Orinoco flowed
+down from Eden’s steeps. It seemed to men before him that paradise
+might lie in the southern hemisphere, deemed “the noblest and happiest
+part of the globe,” and perhaps in the South Seas. There were those
+who made Eden a coast on the northern ocean, and others who placed it
+among the fountains of Armenia. To most men the island of Ceylon was
+its seat. There Carpini heard the plash of its waters, and Maundeville
+drank thereof, as he reports, to his bodily betterment.
+
+The Fortunate Isles, the Elysian abode of the heroes, were placed by
+the Greeks in the extreme west, near the river Oceanus. Their position
+receded with the advance of world-knowledge and finally was fixed in
+the Canary and Madeira islands, furthest outpost of Roman discovery.
+Satire though it is, the _True History_ of Lucian describes the Blessed
+Islands in the very term men used when they were glad to believe.
+As his party approached these islands, odorous airs came out from
+shore, in which one could detect the mingled breath of the rose, the
+narcissus, the hyacinth, and the lily. There was music from harp and
+lute, and then, as the boat grounded on the beach, “the guardians of
+the isle immediately chained us with manacles of roses, their only
+fetters.”
+
+These were the same islands which the Celts called by many beautiful
+names and whither the coracles of legend journeyed. It is hard to tell
+where the sunken islands of their history give way to the imaginary
+islands of their geography, and these to the ideal lands of their
+myths. The three groups seem to lie one behind the other in the outer
+seas of the _Imrama_. The farthest group was the Celtic other-world,
+and yet so near was it to the coasts of the New World, that a claim
+for the discovery of America is based on St. Brendan’s voyage to the
+Land of Promise. The group may best be called an archipelago where
+pagan and Christian ideals shared dominion. Therein was not only the
+Land of Promise, but “Magh Mell of many flowers,” the Land of Truth,
+“whose truth was sung without falsehood.” There was the Land of the
+Living, and the sensuous Land of Fair Women. In all these happy
+islands music swelled, and laughter, and there was neither wailing nor
+treachery, and death was not; and the magic food was unsalted pork, new
+milk, and mead.
+
+It was the singular fate of this god’s land of the Celt to become
+confused with the geographical story of both Europe and America. The
+memory of actual Irish voyages to the New World may be in the legend,
+and inference from wreckage carried from afar, along with the stuff
+of old dreams. Of the latter is a Spanish story wherein the Celtic
+paradise masks itself as the Island of the Seven Cities to which seven
+bishops had led their flocks to escape the Moor. Men whose hap it was
+to sight this shadowy coast were carried in a barge to the shore and
+entertained in a lofty hall by men who spoke their own tongue, though
+with the antique accent. Europe credited the tale, nor guessed that the
+barge was the same as that which bore the wounded Arthur unto Avalon.
+
+These dream isles, at once aspiration and allegory, were found also,
+or rather they were sought, in the eastern seas. It is recited in the
+Buddhist records that the king of Udyana had a true report of the
+silver walls and golden roofs of an island of the sages in distant
+waters. The Chinese emperor, Tshe Huan Ti, of the third century before
+Christ, heard of a happy land seven hundred miles to the eastward in
+the Yellow Sea, and sent young men out to find it. They saw it on a far
+horizon and a roseate light was upon it. But storms drove them back.
+The Japanese tell of such a land lying toward the sunrise, and call it
+Oraisan.
+
+Maundeville knew of an island in the eastern ocean. It was something
+like the places of eternal bliss in the far west, and yet was the home
+of people who were much as other men are except that they were better.
+When Alexander would have conquered them, an embassy bore him this
+message, “Nothing may thou take from us but our good Peace,” and he let
+them alone. In this isle of Bragman was “No Thief, nor Murderer, nor
+common Woman, nor poor Beggar, nor ever was Man slain in that Country.
+And because they be so true and so righteous, and so full of all good
+Conditions, they were never grieved with Tempests, nor with Thunder,
+nor with Lightning, nor with Hail, nor with Pestilence, nor with War,
+nor with Hunger, nor with any other Tribulation, as we be, many Times,
+amongst us, for our Sins.”
+
+The island paradises of mankind lie upon many waters and in every
+quarter of the earth. Alike for the Indians of Chile and of the
+American Northwest, Elysium was in the distant Pacific. The natives
+of Haiti believed it was in western valleys of their own island. The
+natives of Australia called it “the gum-tree country.” The Semang of
+the Malay Peninsula said it was across the sea in a land of screw
+pines and thatch palms. It was their ancient island home, said the
+people of the Celebes. It was northwest of Tonga, the Friendly
+Islanders thought, and Bulotu was the name they gave it; yams and
+breadfruit were plentiful there, hogs abounded, and there were reefs
+for shark-catching. Many Kanaka tribes named it Havaika, which is
+perhaps Java, or the Samoan island of Savaii, points of dispersion
+in their migrations. The natives of Torres Straits called it the
+island of Kibu; in its treetops ghosts sat twittering. But the Solomon
+Islander could hear their laughter as they bathed in the surf of his
+own sea-befriended paradise. “These Marquesas,” a nun said to Frederick
+O’Brien, “make no more of death than of a journey to another island,
+and much less than of a journey to Tahiti.”
+
+Among races of higher culture Elysium takes on a more ordered beauty,
+yet remains naïve. Annwfn is its Brythonic name and it lies at the end
+of a long voyage; no infirmity is there, and sweeter than white wine is
+the drink from its mighty well. Before men embarked for it, they said
+in Babylon, there was a formidable land journey to take, over a high
+pass guarded by scorpion men in the mountains of Masu, along a road
+of black darkness, through a park of precious stones, across a bitter
+river--and then the waters of death; these may have been the Atlantic,
+or the sea of the Arabs. Elysium was far to the east in some mellow
+clime beyond the ocean, so the Slavs thought; and thither the birds and
+insects went in autumn. It is a land of lotus lakes in the west, and
+its name is Sukhavati, say the Buddhists of Nippon; out of it comes a
+continual harmony of flowing rivers, murmuring leaves, and soft bells
+swung by softer winds. It is a kingdom in the northern ocean and its
+name is Vaikuntha, some Hindus say. Others speak of a paradise which
+they call Svetadvipa, “the white island” that is somewhere in the north
+beyond the Sea of Milk.
+
+For inland peoples the thought of a sea to be crossed, as every day
+the sun crosses the sea to its rest, gave way at times to the thought
+of a river with a difficult bridge, and paradise on the farther side.
+Such in the Hindu classics was the land of the Uttarakarus which lay
+on the shores of the northern ocean beyond the radiance of the sun and
+the moon. A river that petrified whatever entered it flowed between it
+and the countries of the south. Lakes with golden lotuses and tanks
+of crystal water shimmered in the light airs of this favored land. In
+its odorous orchards birds always sang, and beautiful maidens, hanging
+by their long hair, grew among the blossom-burdened branches--another
+glimpse of the enigmatic women of Wak-wak. Amid the sound of music and
+laughter these Indian Hyperboreans did their pious deeds, nor shed the
+god-unlawful tear, until ten thousand and ten hundred years had passed.
+Then they died, and fowls with sharp beaks carried their bodies to
+mountain caves.
+
+An Irish myth of the Middle Ages holds closer to the facts of existence
+than any of these stories of terrestrial felicity, and there is a
+note of sadness in the beauty of it. In a lake in Munster were the
+islands of life and death. There was no port for death to enter the
+first island, but age and pain and sickness were there, and all the
+wearinesses of years. Its inhabitants learned at last to look on the
+opposite island as the place of repose, and, steering their barks to
+its shore, they entered upon eternal rest.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII. The Terrible Ocean
+
+
+In some of its moods the sea presents itself as a symbol of eternity.
+For ages it was more than the symbol; it was eternity itself.
+Men shrank from contemplation of it, as they might shrink from
+contemplation of the hereafter. A voyage into its outer spaces was like
+the voyage of the soul into the shadows that lie beyond life. Still,
+this conception shapes the imagery and colors the faith of the race.
+Life is a passage down a river that reaches an immeasurable sea. Death
+is a journey upon dark waters. The bark of salvation spreads its sails
+for the pure of heart, and favoring winds waft them to the Beautiful
+Shore. In the songs of Christendom one hears soft winds blowing over
+expanses of peaceful water. The earth geography of Homer is the
+heavenly geography of Bunyan. The Ocean Stream that flowed around the
+world is the river that flows by the Throne of God.
+
+Classic mythology ties up the sea’s infinities with those of time
+through the medium of the Styx, which was at once a branch of the Ocean
+Stream and the river that encircled the land of shades. The lake of
+Avernus which afforded entrance to the nether world, Charon’s ferry,
+the rivers Cocytus, Acheron, and Phlegethon, and the Stygian Pool
+itself, all gave to a Roman death the aspect of maritime adventure,
+although underground. The freer Greek fancy placed the Elysium of the
+soul somewhere in the western ocean, where the sun sank to rest. There
+were the Isles of the Blessed, or Fortunate Isles, where there was
+neither rain nor snow, but the shrilly-breathing west wind fanned and
+watered the land.
+
+Other isles were there, the abodes of formidable men and dangerous
+women and prodigious animals. But one could get along very well by
+accepting the fictions of the poets as good enough geography and
+ethnography without launching maritime expeditions to confirm them.
+The western ocean offered the peoples of the Mediterranean no present
+promise or profit to match its terrors, and to alloy delights that
+had too spectral a cast. Unlike the Indian Ocean, it was not a great
+highway of trade. Thick clouds covered it, perpetual darkness reigned
+upon it. It was an unnavigable morass and a confusion; so said Hesiod,
+Pindar, and Euripides, voicing the beliefs of their time.
+
+There was one race that without fear put forth upon the sea. This was
+the Phœnicians, and their rich African colony, the Carthaginians. Their
+adventures beyond the Pillars of Hercules brought profit to them, and
+they saw to it that the tidings of them should bring dismay to others.
+A Phœnician fleet sent out by Necho, a Pharaoh of the XXXVIth dynasty,
+seems to have sailed around Africa. About B.C. 500 a Carthaginian fleet
+under Hanno explored the African west coast as far as the mouths of
+the Senegal and Gambia. At nearly the same time another Carthaginian
+fleet under Himilco discovered the British Isles, but it brought back
+depressing stories. The islands were four months’ distant from the
+Straits of Gibraltar, and the voyage thither was through waters haunted
+by frightful monsters and thick with entangling seaweed, where wild
+storms and protracted calms succeeded one another.
+
+These were not true tales, but other nations believed them, and the
+seafaring Semites were permitted to build up trading stations along
+the coasts of the outer ocean--in western Africa, in Lusitania, in the
+Scilly Islands, and in Cornwall. None challenged their monopoly of
+the tin trade of the Cassiterides. They covered their tracks so that
+whoever had the temerity to test their fables, or seek to tap their
+sources of raw material, would not know whither to go. Strabo tells
+how the Carthaginians concealed from everyone the passage to the Tin
+Islands: “When the Romans followed a certain shipmaster, that they also
+might find the market, the shipmaster of jealousy purposely ran his
+vessel upon a shoal, leading on those who followed him into the same
+destructive disaster. He himself escaped by means of a fragment of the
+ship, and received from the state the value of the cargo he had lost.”
+
+According to Eratosthenes, the Carthaginians went further: “They drown
+any strangers who sail past on their voyage to Sardinia or to the
+Pillars.” Thus through piracy, stratagem, and fable they maintained
+their monopoly on the waters of the west, and for once Greek curiosity
+played into a rival’s hands. Tyrian and Punic marvel tales were
+elaborated and adorned by the poets of Attica, until everyone felt that
+a journey beyond the Pillars was a thing not to be undertaken. All that
+the earlier Greeks knew, even of the western Mediterranean, was that
+near it was a mountain called Atlas on which the sky rested, and that
+the world ended at the pillars set up by Hercules.
+
+One Greek was determined to learn more, and see if his countrymen could
+not also profit from the tin and amber trades. The journey of Pytheas
+of Massilia, at about B.C. 333, along the coasts of northern Europe
+is one of the noteworthy scientific expeditions of history. He is the
+first to speak of Thule. He found where amber came from. He noted that
+the cereals gradually disappeared as one traveled north, that the
+northern grain was threshed in barns instead of upon open threshing
+floors, and that fermented drinks there were made from corn and honey.
+In a peculiar passage he asserted that beyond Britain there was neither
+earth, air, nor sea, but a mixture of all three--something like the
+element which held the universe together. This substance, which he
+compared to the jellyfish, rendered navigation impossible and led the
+Romans later to name those waters the Sluggish Sea. The apparently
+fabulous statement, made on hearsay, has been interpreted as referring
+to the dense fogs of the northern seas, to the blended effects of
+mist and light, and to the broken ice or slush that floats there in a
+translucent state. The reference to the jellyfish may be either to its
+translucence or its luminosity.
+
+All that Pytheas reported of northern Europe was discredited. How, asks
+Polybius, could a private individual conduct such a vast expedition
+with his narrow means? Strabo accuses the Massilian of having forged
+his tales, “making use of his acquaintance with astronomy and
+mathematics to fabricate his false narration.” His complete vindication
+is the work of modern scholarship.
+
+The next report of consequence from the outer seas comes nearly three
+centuries later and was made to Sertorius, the Marian general under
+whom for a time Spain maintained its independence of Rome. A tale of
+the Fortunate Islands--probably of the Canaries--drifted in through the
+Straits and found the great soldier weary of life in camp and field.
+Two sailors had arrived from islands which they described as about
+twelve hundred miles west of the coast of Africa. Rains seldom fell
+there, they said. The dews watered the earth, which yielded its fruits
+in abundance without the labor of man. The seasons were temperate,
+the air was serene and pleasant, and soft winds blowing from the west
+and south brought days of bright moist weather. Even the barbarians
+believed that this was the seat of the blessed.
+
+There was that in the jaded commander which lifted to the thought of
+new horizons. Sertorius, says Plutarch, was seized with a wonderful
+passion for these islands and had an extreme desire to go and live
+there in peace and quietness, safe from oppression and unending wars.
+But the Cilician pirates, who were his allies, wanted not peace, but
+spoils. So the remainder of his life was spent in wars and government,
+and the world was denied an adventure instinct with romance and
+pregnant with the potencies of great discovery.
+
+With the voyage of Polybius in the fleet of Scipio along the west
+African coast, the campaigns of Cæsar in Gaul and Britain and the
+reduction of both into imperial provinces, even the incurious Roman
+became possessed of adequate geographical knowledge of the western
+coasts of Europe and the waters near them. This knowledge, however, was
+tinctured with the marvelous, and was not long retained. Strabo, for
+example, pictures the men of the Scilly, or Tin, Islands as wearing
+black cloaks and tunics reaching to the feet, and as walking with
+staves, thus “resembling the Furies we see in tragic representations.”
+He must have meant the Druids.
+
+In the same century in which the legions were withdrawn from Britain,
+Procopius, the foremost historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, was
+born. Yet in that century of dissolution most of what the ancient world
+had learned of the coasts and waters of the Atlantic was forgotten.
+The western ocean had been a domain over which mists of ignorance and
+superstition hovered, sometimes rising for a moment of distant vision,
+sometimes falling like a blank curtain. In the sixth century A.D. they
+drew so closely to the shores of Europe that even England was lost
+behind them. It had ceased to be a Roman province and was become a land
+of ghosts.
+
+Procopius tells his story with due note of its dreamlike quality; and
+yet, he says, numberless men vouch for its truth. It is the story of
+the English Channel become the ferry of souls. The fisher folk on the
+continental side are subject to the Franks, but pay no tribute, because
+it is their task in regular turn to transport the souls of the dead to
+Britain. Those on duty for each night keep indoors until a knocking is
+heard and a mysterious voice summons them. Arising from sleep, they go
+down to the beach, where they find strange boats awaiting them. These
+seem to be empty, but when they seize the oars and push off they find
+the gunwales only an inch above the water. In silence they make the
+journey and in an hour find themselves on the opposite shore, although
+their own skiffs could scarcely cross in a night and a day. When the
+keels grate on the beach, suddenly the boats ride high on the waves.
+There is none to greet them, but again a voice is heard, announcing the
+name and station of the spectral passengers.
+
+Thus the end of the ancient world found men knowing only a little more
+about the western ocean than they did at the beginning. The chief
+advance over the Homeric age was that they knew it was an ocean and not
+a circumfluent river. The old idea was not dead that it was a morass
+made unnavigable by seaweed and mud, too thick and too shallow for
+sailing ships to venture upon. This notion was fostered by observing
+the unfamiliar phenomena of ebb tides, with the long windrows of weed
+and the wide expanses of muddy flats they laid bare upon the coasts.
+Plato had deepened the belief and provided a reason for it in his story
+of Atlantis. “That is the reason,” he concludes, “why the sea in those
+parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is such a quantity
+of shallow mud in the way.”
+
+Men had no such notions, or fears of the open seas to the east,
+although they were careful not to get too far from their shores.
+They knew that inhabited lands were beyond them, and that by not
+impossible shores and islands they could reach these. The Periplus of
+the Erythræan Sea had full accounts of the coasts from Aden clear
+to the mouth of the Ganges, and reports also on Indo-China and China
+itself. There were pirate-haunted archipelagoes and islands tenanted
+by the monsters of Oriental fancy. But these were Eastern waters and
+it behooved men to know something about them and to take a chance upon
+them, for a great traffic moved across them--silken fabrics, spices,
+pepper, gold and silver and precious stones from the hidden storehouses
+of Asia. Wherefore men faced the seas of sunrise with no such fears as
+invaded them when they looked out upon the empty and spectral Atlantic.
+
+Another race beside the Phœnician was unafraid of the western sea. This
+was the Northmen, of whom it was said that they never slept under a
+smoke-blackened roof, nor ate and drank at any hearth. Their tradition
+looked outward, where that of the Mediterranean races looked inward.
+The ocean was the whale path of their skalds, and their hearts sang
+along it. Its waters carried the challenge and promise of the present,
+not the glooms or pallors of the hereafter. When their long boats drove
+through the Straits of Gibraltar into the old Roman world to pillage
+and rule there, it was the return visit of the men of the outer spaces,
+ferocious and blithe sea-rovers who thus requited the trafficking and
+timid excursions of Phœnician and Roman into the seas that washed the
+continent.
+
+The very names of Viking chieftains--Sigurd Snake-eye, Thord the
+Yeller, Ottar the Swart, Harold Blue-tooth, Eric Blood-ax, Thorfinn
+Skull-cleaver, Sweyn Split-beard--sketched a hardihood that made light
+of supernatural terrors upon the sea and knew none other. These men of
+the viks or fjords rid the coasts of Europe in the eighth and ninth
+centuries of every fear except of themselves. Then they went westward
+to America.
+
+There is a bolder note in their geographical tradition than in aught
+that had been before. One catches the swing of the Atlantic surges and
+the pulses of people at home there in the chapter, “On the Situation of
+Countries,” which begins the chronicle of the _Heimskring’la_: “It is
+said that the earth circle which the human race inhabits is much cut
+asunder with bights and bays, and that great seas run into the land
+from the outer ocean. Of a certainty, it is known that a sea goes in at
+the Norva Sound (Gibraltar) right up to the land of Jerusalem; and from
+that sea, again, a long bay, which is called the Black Sea, goes off
+to the northeast, and it divides the two World-Ridings, that is to say,
+Asia on the east from Europe on the west. To the north of the Black
+Sea lies Sweden the Great, or the Cold (Russia); and this is reckoned
+by some as not less in size than the Great Saracen Land, or even the
+Great Land of the Bluemen (the Moors). And the northern parts of this
+Sweden are unpeopled, by reason of the frost and the cold, just as the
+southern parts of Blue-Land are waste because of the sun’s burning.
+Mighty lordships are there in this Sweden, and people of manifold kind
+and speech; there are giants and there are dwarfs--aye, and Bluemen,
+and folk of many kinds and marvellous, and wild beasts, and dragons
+wondrous great.”
+
+When the pagan Northmen became Christians their ferocity was moderated,
+and their spirit of enterprise, as it seemed, almost extinguished.
+Their old contempt of the sea did not pass into the veins of the
+peoples over whom for a time they had dominion. Rather the confused and
+credulous views of the churchmen became their own, henceforth occupying
+the entire field of European thought. Adam of Bremen, eleventh-century
+churchman, pictures the sea as his time conceived it--the old
+forbidding canvas of classic legend framed with the icicles of Gothic
+discovery.
+
+Terra Firma, says Adam, is entirely surrounded by the infinite and
+terrible ocean. The northern spaces of the deep are covered with ice
+and darkness and this expanse is called the frozen, glutinous, or
+darkling sea. It is stiff with salt and covered with black ice, formed
+long before and so dry that it will burn like peat.
+
+The German bishop even borrows a tale from the Northmen to engender
+terrors to which they had been stranger. Their king, Harald Hardrada,
+the most daring of men, had reports from Frisian mariners which caused
+him to set sail for the limits of the earth. In the darkness he
+arrived at the North Pole--a profound vortex into which the ebb tides
+were sucked and out of which the flood tides were disgorged. His ship
+plunged down into the boiling chaos, but the sea which took could also
+give, and the outward heave of its vast bosom flung the vessel back
+again beyond the clutch of the whirlpool.
+
+[Illustration: ROARING FORTIES _By_ F. J. Waugh]
+
+As late as 1406 a chronicler tells of English ships, bound for
+Bordeaux, which penetrated an unfrequented sea where four vessels from
+Lynn were swallowed up in a whirlpool, which thrice a day drew in and
+cast out the flood. When fishermen of that time went a few miles from
+land they used only haaf-words--a sea speech in which persons, animals,
+and things had other names than what they bore ashore; so might they
+avoid offense to whatever was astir in the deep.
+
+It is refreshing to turn from the gloomy imaginings of the West to
+Indian and Chinese legends of the Seven Seas. In the quainter fancy
+that animates them, at least the note of fear is missing. From the
+Puranas, Gerini has made these identifications: The Sea of Salt Water
+surrounds India. The Sea of Sugar Cane Juice surrounds Burma. The Sea
+of Wine surrounds the Malay Peninsula. The Sea of Clarified Butter
+surrounds the Sunda Archipelago. The Sea of Milk surrounds Siam and
+Cambodia. The Sea of Curds or Whey surrounds South China. The Sea of
+Fresh Water surrounds North China and Mongolia.
+
+Fear of the ocean, and above all of the Atlantic, is, however, the
+distinctive note in mediæval Arab geography. This was perhaps a native
+growth of the desert, and its spirit is in the Koran passage which
+speaks of “black night upon the deep, which wave on wave doth cover,
+cloud upon cloud, gloom upon gloom.” Arab merchants and pilgrims
+ranged to the ends of the Moslem world. Save Marco Polo, Ibn Batuta
+was the earth’s greatest and most curious traveler. To the Arab port
+of Bassorah, sailors from the Nile, the Mediterranean, and even the
+China Sea brought the gossip of mankind. Yet a dread of the deep sounds
+through the works of Arab geographers, as through the saga of Sindbad,
+with the effect of a refrain.
+
+Around the fair meadows of the world swung the terrible ocean, the Sea
+of Darkness as the Arabs called it. To Massoudy the Atlantic was the
+Green Sea of Gloom. None dwelt there, none could sail there, none knew
+to what infinite distances it reached. Ibn Khaldun described it as
+the boundless, impenetrable limit of the west. Other lights of Islam
+spoke of the whirlpools into which vessels were drawn, and argued that
+even if sailors knew the direction of the winds they did not know
+whither the winds would carry them; nor could they carry them anywhere,
+for there was nowhere to go, and in the realms of mist no prospect
+of getting back. Sane men would not attempt a venture out of sight
+of land, said certain of the doctors. To plan such a journey, it was
+asserted, was evidence of an unsound mind; to embark upon it was ground
+for depriving a man of his civil rights.
+
+Idrisi, Mohammedan savant in the service of King Roger of Sicily in
+the twelfth century and the greatest of Arab geographers, utters the
+authoritative Arab word upon the sea: “The ocean encircles the ultimate
+bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it is unknown. No one
+has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of its
+difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound
+depth and frequent tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its
+haughty winds; yet there are many islands in it, some peopled, others
+uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter its deep waters; or
+if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts, fearful of
+departing from them.”
+
+Whether this was in some part a literary convention--a gesture of
+geography--or the expression of an unshakable dread, the sentiment
+limited the service of Islam to mankind. The Arab coasting trade had
+reached as far as China and as far down the eastern side of Africa
+as Zanzibar. But this people, so resourceful on land, never pushed
+their coasting adventures around the Cape of Good Hope, as Prince
+Henry and his Portuguese successors did from a farther north on the
+other side of Africa. Nor did they attempt, as Columbus did, the
+crossing of a great sea. Nor did they essay, as Magellan did, to prove
+by a circumnavigation the rotundity of the earth on which their own
+geographers had spoken with the clearest voices of the Middle Ages.
+
+A group of remarkable legends illustrates the later annals of the
+western ocean and carries them on to the Columbian adventure. Idrisi
+tells a story of the eight Deluded Folk, or Lisbon Wanderers, who went
+out to sea when the wind blew from the east and for more than a month
+were carried before it. They reached an island supposed to be one of
+the Canaries, where they found a people who spoke Arabic and who sent
+them back when a wind arose from the west. St. Brendan voyaged for
+seven years among seven islands of the west, according to a story
+widely circulated in the eleventh century. The tenth-century tale of
+the island of the Seven Spanish Bishops who had left Spain to escape
+Moslem rule was revived by a Portuguese ship captain who claimed to
+have reached the island; but when Prince Henry bade him go back for
+proofs, the romancer took refuge in flight.
+
+It may have been that the Phœnicians made atonement at last for the
+fables of paralyzing fear which they had spread abroad, and on the
+outer verge of the Old World in the days of their decline left their
+secret as a legacy for the bold to profit from. The scene is Corvo,
+westernmost of the Islands of the Sun, as the Azores were called;
+and the passage, though from a Portuguese writer of the seventeenth
+century, refers to events a generation before the Columbian discovery.
+Says Manoel de Faria y Souza: “On the summit of a mountain called
+the Crow was found the statue of a man on horseback, without saddle,
+bareheaded, the left hand on the horse’s mane, the right pointing to
+the west. It stood on a slab of the same stone as itself; beneath it,
+on a rock, were engraved some letters in an unknown language.”
+
+One explanation of the legend is given by a traveler of the last
+century, who said that the superstitious folk of the island fancied
+they saw in a promontory which reaches far into the sea the semblance
+of a person with his hand stretched out toward the New World. This,
+they declared, was the work of Providence, and Columbus read the sign
+aright. But the tale may not so easily be interpreted and dismissed.
+A hoard of Carthaginian coins, so runs a report which Humboldt
+accepts, was discovered in Corvo in 1749; and there are other stories
+of equestrian statues of Carthaginian design erected upon Atlantic
+islands. Against the utter drama of the legend--the parting gesture of
+good will of a bold and subtle race of ancient time--may be set another
+legend, more in keeping with the superstition and fears of the Middle
+Ages. This was no equestrian statue pointing westward, if the Pizzani
+map of 1367 was to be believed. It was the figure of a saint with his
+back to the sunset and his outstretched hand warning mariners away from
+the unnavigable seas behind him.
+
+The monkish monument was the parable of a twilight time. To the
+fifteenth century the deep was an eerie domain where the creatures of
+pagan and Christian story couched upon the ocean floor, showed their
+unholy shapes among the waves, chattered on desert island strands,
+and wove their enchantments in the mists. In the north the witches of
+Lapland raised storms and wrecked the ships that passed their shores.
+To the south none might sail beyond Cape Bojador on the African Gold
+Coast. Who did so was turned from white to black, and never came
+back. There the flaming sword of the sun was laid across the paths of
+the sea. What was beyond it was boiling brine and air heated into a
+flame--a landless firmament of water and a starless firmament of sky.
+
+Looking westward, men cowered before visions of the Hand of Satan,
+thrust upward from far horizons to drag ships into the depths. Or “the
+wind that blows between the worlds” might carry mariners away on a
+journey from which was no returning. Or currents, setting always in one
+direction, might sweep them into illimitable space. If the world was
+flat, one might sail off its edge. If it was round, its very rotundity
+would present a sort of mountain up which no ship could climb on the
+backward voyage. As to the Atlantic races, the mediæval maps told
+one what to expect. What chance of succor, or agreeable converse,
+or a profitable traffic from spouting monsters, satyrs, sirens and
+conch-blowing tritons? Could one warm his hands at the witch-fires of
+the sea?
+
+Out of these gray forebodings the ships of Columbus, with one stout
+heart and many questioning ones aboard, sailed into the unknown, as
+vessels move through the sluggish dark before the dawn breeze springs
+up and the sky reddens toward sunrise. Ere long the caravels were
+steering among isles fanned by soft breezes and bathed in tropical
+sunshine, and naked, kindly peoples were hailing the mariners as
+visitors from the skies. Morning had broken at last upon the western
+ocean, and in its level rays a path lay sparkling clear across the
+sea--the path of enterprise, of conquest, of gold, the path of
+victorious dreams. Along that highway hardy spirits soon would press
+on great adventures. In the stead of ghost-ridden hearth-keepers,
+mumblers of old fable, shrinkers from the outer surges, there were
+men who dared go round the earth in flimsy barks and lead a handful of
+followers against the haughty empires of the Cordilleras.
+
+Terror was dead upon the deep. Somewhat of fable remained.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX. The Sargasso Sea
+
+
+If there were no Sargasso Sea there would still have been a legend of
+one to satisfy the demand of the mind, in a world of change and motion,
+for a place where there was neither. Conscious of the flight of time,
+noting the flow of rivers, the wind’s wandering, and the climbing and
+falling of the waves of the ocean, the mind has created realms where
+time stands still, countries of morning calm and afternoon sunshine,
+and spaces where the pulse of the sea is asleep. Peace there was in
+the grave, but what was sought was a paradox--something alive and
+yet motionless in time and space. There were stagnant pools in the
+imagination, grotesqueries, junk heaps, a sense of silences and of slow
+decay that was no decay at all but the serenity of noon in a swamp. The
+outward symbol of these moods men would have in the world about them.
+
+For uncounted ages that symbol had been a fact of the mid-Atlantic.
+People must have known of the Sargasso thousands of years ago, though
+the memory of the voyages in which they learned of it is no more, and
+the tales that seem to speak of it are not accepted as facts. Plato
+had told of the thick waters that rolled over the sunken Atlantis,
+preventing the passage of ships. When Columbus entered this sea and
+saw tunny fish playing about his caravels, he remembered a story of
+Aristotle that certain ships of the Semites, coasting beyond the
+Pillars of Hercules, were driven before a gale from the east until they
+reached a weedy sea, resembling sunken islands, among which were tunny
+fish. On his voyage to Britain Himilco reported that he found vast
+fields of floating weeds which retarded his vessels and brought them to
+danger.
+
+The ancient view of the Atlantic was that it was a region of baffling
+calms and shallow water and mud and seaweed. This was based on Punic
+reports, and the Carthaginians told such tales of the open seas
+as would frighten other nations from them. Yet their distorted
+statements had so much of truth intermixed with error that it is hard
+to believe they intended altogether falsely, and were vindicated only
+by coincidence when a grassy sea, greater than their dominions at their
+widest, was found west of the Azores. With flagrant exaggeration,
+however, they had spoken of sea grasses with needle-like tops, a sort
+of marine wheat with stalks as close together as in sheaves of grain.
+In B.C. 300 Theophrastus had written of wide-leaved weeds that drifted
+from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. In his poetic account of
+the African west coast Festus Avienus described in detail the weedy
+impediments to navigation, using, so he says, the journals of Punic
+ships. Scylax recited that the sea beyond Cerne on the coast of
+Mauretania could not be navigated “in consequence of its shallowness,
+its muddiness, and its sea grass.” With easy exuberance of fancy Lucian
+had told in his _True History_ of encountering a floating forest in
+the sea and of sailing right over the tops of the trees toward “that
+continent which we supposed lies opposite our own”--a reference which
+gains in significance from its casual character.
+
+Though most of them have been lost, there were strange Sargasso
+legends in the ancient world, based on reports of floating seaweed and
+the claims of captains that this had put them in hazard. What weedy
+growths could do in restless water men knew by observing their effects
+in rivers, notably on the upper Nile. The envoys of Nero had been
+halted there by a sea of floating vegetation; a long line of travelers
+thereafter had a like experience, and a tragedy of this floating
+greenery is of our own time. By the blocking of the Nile channel in
+1880 Gessi was held prisoner for three months with five companies of
+soldiers and a multitude of freed slaves, and most of them died before
+help came.
+
+The burden of these old fables was of a stagnant death in silent spaces
+of the sea where nothing ever happened. The weedy continent was a trap
+which closed in upon ships and suffered no escape, even though with
+double banks of oars the rowers strove. Death claimed the crew, and
+slowly the sea claimed the galleys. Marine plants crept over bow and
+stern and writhed into the cabins and climbed the masts and swathed all
+in a green decay; and silently, as the timbers parted below and the
+weight of vegetation massed above, the vessel sank, perhaps into some
+harbor of the lost Atlantis.
+
+A prison for lost souls, the St. Brendan legend calls the grassy sea
+of the west. The ferment was working in men’s imaginations. There must
+be a spectral haven in the sea, a place into which vessels might come,
+out of which they could not go. For a while in the waters of the east
+this was the Island of Lodestone, which drew and held to itself all
+craft that had iron in their timbers. In Maundeville the legend of
+the Sargasso Sea is full blown, though with him it is truth--travel
+truth--of a magnetic rock.
+
+“I myself,” he said, “have seen afar off in that Sea as though it had
+been a great Isle full of Trees and Bush, full of Thorns and Briars,
+great Plenty. And the Shipmen told us, that all that was of Ships that
+were drawn thither by the Adamants, for the Iron that was in them. And
+from the Rottenness and other Things that were within the Ships, grew
+such Bush, and Thorns and Briars and green Grass and such manner of
+Things, and from the Masts and the Sail-yards it seemed a great Wood or
+a Grove. And such Rocks be in many Places thereabouts. And therefore
+dare not the Merchants pass there, but if they know well the Passages,
+or else that they have good Pilots. And also they dread the long Way
+more far by many dreadful Days’ journeys than Cathay.”
+
+Thus the Port of Missing Ships came into view as the creation of
+classic and mediæval legend, to which modern exploration had given a
+sure place in the sea. It fulfilled a stagnant something in the souls
+of men. It offered harbor to certain of their dreams. It yielded a
+last resting place to derelicts that had wandered far, among them the
+derelicts of fancy. It gave reply to questions that arose whenever
+the argosies went out and did not come back. Against the eternal
+restlessness and fated journeyings of the Flying Dutchman it summoned
+up the picture of a fated and eternal calm. It added to the terrors of
+the sea a horror that was half poetry. This became poetry altogether
+when men had ceased to believe and yet wanted to believe, and in their
+art evoked the vision of ruinous hulks of Tyrian, Roman, and Spanish
+ships side by side upon a spectral main, silent witnesses of all the
+maritime adventures of mankind.
+
+The actuality behind the mask of legend, a vast expanse of sea in the
+Atlantic, in many places resembling an inundated meadow, Columbus
+discovered on his first voyage, when for three weeks he traversed it.
+But instead of having misgivings, he rejoiced at what he conceived to
+be evidence that land was not far distant. On one of the floating weed
+masses he saw a white tropical bird of a kind that does not sleep upon
+the sea. His journal speaks little of the apprehensions of the sailors,
+but his son Fernando recites these--their fears that the weeds, which
+plainly retarded the ships, would halt them altogether; that the
+marine growths might conceal the lurking rocks, shoals and quicksands
+of a shallowing ocean; and that, run aground or fatally entangled in
+gulfweed, the ships might rot and fall apart far from any shore or any
+hope of aid. Memories of the Atlantis legend raised in their minds the
+menace of drowned lands and the monumental ruins of a lost continent.
+
+To Columbus, however, the Sargasso Sea stood, not for a lost continent,
+but for the boundary between the worlds. Where it began, west of the
+Azores, the New World began also, and the Old World ended. This was
+no theoretical meridian, he thought, but a true physical line of
+demarcation drawn by nature between the hemispheres. He could sense a
+difference in climatic conditions in crossing the line, and the compass
+seemed to show magnetic deviations. On his return he believed that he
+could determine his longitude by observing the first floating masses
+of tangled seaweed. So persuasive was his imaginative force, so great
+his influence in Europe, that soon after his arrival there the eastern
+boundary of the weedy sea became the globe’s first, and last, political
+boundary of an all-embracing kind. Title to newly discovered lands
+east of it was awarded by a papal bull to Portugal. Title to newly
+discovered lands west of it was awarded to Spain.
+
+Oviedo gave this expanse the name of Sargasso Sea, from Sargaço, the
+Portuguese word for seaweed. It was freely traversed by the explorers
+who followed Columbus. The world-rounding expedition of Drake reports
+that for five days “wee sayled through the sea of Weedes, about the
+space of one hundred leagues, being under the Tropicke of Cancer.” The
+size and exact location of the sea were long a matter of conjecture.
+Varenius, for example, placed its northern limit opposite the
+mid-Sahara and its southern opposite the Cape of Good Hope. The note
+of Humboldt in his _Views of Nature_, published near the middle of
+the nineteenth century, is the first scientific account of it. This
+was based on rather scanty observations of English and Dutch sailing
+vessels which took a course through it from the West Indies to Europe.
+Humboldt thought the Sargasso Sea comprised two weed banks, the larger
+one west of the Azores, the smaller between the Bermudas and Bahamas,
+with a transverse band connecting them. Fuller reports, since made by
+steamers, with the careful records of the German Hydrographic Office,
+have enabled scientists, and particularly Doctor Krümmel, to correct
+these conclusions and plot the true outlines of the sea.
+
+The Equatorial Current sets west from the coast of Africa. The Gulf
+Stream sets north and east from the Straits of Florida--still following
+the direction, Donnelly ingeniously contended, that was given it by the
+lost continent of Atlantis, around which it flowed. The two currents,
+moving in nearly opposite directions, impart a circular motion to
+the waters that lie between, so that all things adrift over an area
+of millions of square miles, seaweed, driftwood, and hulks of ships
+are drawn toward a common center, which may be called the floating
+storehouse of the North Atlantic. Banks of weed are found as far west
+as the Bermudas, and this outer grassy sea covers an expanse of about
+three million square miles, or as much as continental United States.
+But the true Sargasso Sea of dead waters, where gulfweed is found
+thickly, covers an area of about one million two hundred thousand
+square miles, or the size of the Mississippi Valley. It is an ellipse
+with the Tropic of Cancer as its longer axis. The sea stretches through
+fifteen degrees of latitude and more than twenty-five degrees of
+longitude, the two foci of the ellipse being near 45° and 70° west.
+
+With the shift of winds and calms the weedy sea itself shifts somewhat,
+but its mean location remains unchanged. Humboldt was convinced that in
+his time it was precisely where Columbus had found it three and a half
+centuries before, and Maury’s study of marine observations leads to the
+conclusion that there has been no change in the last fifty years. Of
+all the larger aspects of nature this is perhaps the only one that is
+just as it was in the time of Columbus. During thousands of years, when
+the ocean was battering at the coasts of the continents, breaking down
+or building up the shore; when earthquakes and volcanoes were causing
+islands to appear and disappear; when the wind and rain were at their
+unending tasks of bearing everything terrestrial into the deeps; and
+when races of men were remodeling some small portions of the earth’s
+surface with roads and ports and bridges, the Sargasso Sea may have
+been the only thing immune from change. This eternal vortex might well
+be called the true Navel of the World.
+
+Even now, when many ships ply these waters, and after the records
+of centuries seem to have assured that there are no reefs or shoals
+under their greenery, travelers admit a sense of uneasiness as their
+craft plunges into what seems a sunken meadow. Nearer view, however,
+discloses that the patches of vegetation are discontinuous. The larger
+single masses may be several acres in extent, or may not be more than a
+hundred feet across. The weeds commonly lie in long parallel rows that
+tail to the prevailing winds. By noting the rows, the mariner can tell
+whether the wind has been blowing steadily, or has recently shifted,
+and in which direction. The lines are sometimes so near together as to
+seem one mass, or they may be as far apart as two hundred feet. In some
+places the weeds in them barely touch, in others they are so crowded
+that their tops are thrust a little distance above the water.
+
+A distinctive fauna, sparse in species but unnumbered in individuals,
+has been developed among these masses. The floating berries are thickly
+incrusted with white polyzoa. About sixty animal species peculiar
+to the area have been noted, among them small fish, shrimps, crabs,
+molluscs, gastropods, and one insect. The fishes have developed a
+strong protective resemblance to the shapeless weeds among which they
+feed. Strangest of these is the _Antennarius marmoratus_, a little
+creature not more than four inches long and indistinguishable from a
+plant spray. It seems half adapted for walking; its fins, which suggest
+the extremities of four-footed creatures, have real toes, and the front
+fins have the form of arms with elbows and fingered hands.
+
+The Prince of Monaco conducted a scientific expedition into these
+waters in 1905, and in 1911 the United States Hydrographic Service sent
+a party of scientists for a three months’ study of them; but adequate
+knowledge is still wanting.
+
+There is a Sargasso question: How does the weed get into the sea? The
+old theory was that it is a true oceanic plant. To those who held to
+the belief in a sunken continent the grassy domain was a sort of canopy
+suspended over it, the flying banners of the lost Atlantis. There is
+still good scientific opinion of which the French are the leaders, that
+the weed grows in the area where it is found, reproducing itself by
+fissure, the parent stem throwing off branches which multiply in turn.
+The bulk of scientific opinion outside of France is that these meadows
+of the sea are the spoil of the neighboring islands and continents. The
+gulfweed which covers them, it is held, has been torn from the shores
+of northern Brazil, of the West Indies, and of North America as far as
+Cape Cod, and has drifted into this vortex--a journey that may take
+almost half a year. The French contend that even without these admitted
+contributions from America there would still be a weedy sea about the
+Tropic of the Crab.
+
+From time to time commercial enterprise has canvassed the possibilities
+of a Sargasso adventure. It may be that a profitable fishery will
+yet be established there with the Azores for its base, and that the
+kelp will be converted into potash for fertilizer or for gunpowder.
+Thus would the arts of war and peace draw support from the sea, that,
+if legend speaks truly, sleeps over the continent which spread them
+through the antediluvian world.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX. Atlantis
+
+
+Under the Sargasso Sea, if a few accomplished thinkers, a somewhat
+larger number of speculative scientists, and a host of dreamers are
+right, lies the lost Atlantis. This legend of a continent beyond the
+Pillars of Hercules, which reached a high level of civilization,
+extended its rule along both shores of the Mediterranean, sent its
+armies to battle with Egypt and Athens, and “in a day and a fatal
+night” sank beneath the sea eleven thousand years ago, is the most
+haunting and poignant thing that has come down from antiquity.
+
+The story derives from Plato, who attributes it to his relative, Solon,
+who had it from a priest of Egypt. It is told briefly and completely
+in the _Timæus_ and with much greater detail in the _Critias_;
+unfortunately, the latter portion of this work is wanting and the
+narrative ends abruptly, before recounting the cataclysm outlined in
+the earlier work. Both are built upon the conversation between Solon
+and the Egyptian priest. Discoursing on the ignorance of the Greeks
+concerning their own history, the priest said that they knew nothing
+of a thing which was preserved in the sacred books of the temple at
+Sais--that, nine thousand years before, the Athenians had repelled an
+invading force which threatened the conquest of Europe and Asia. This
+force had come in through the Straits of Gibraltar from the Atlantic
+Sea, “which was at that time navigable.”
+
+Beyond the Straits, according to the _Timæus_, lay the island of
+Atlantis, greater than Libya and Asia (Minor) together. Other islands
+surrounded it, and farther west was a continent. Between Atlantis and
+this continent rolled an ocean so great that, compared with it, the
+land-locked Mediterranean was merely a harbor. A powerful dynasty of
+kings arose on the island, subjugated the surrounding archipelagoes
+and a part of the unnamed continent beyond, and in the Old World
+swayed Libya up to Egypt and the northern shore of the Mediterranean
+as far as Tuscany. They undertook to complete their conquest of the
+Mediterranean coasts, but the Athenians, though deserted by their
+allies, beat off their ships. While the fleet from beyond the Straits
+was still in the Inland Sea, it would seem, the island of Atlantis was
+sunk, and the earthquakes that submerged it and the monstrous waves
+that followed spread ruin all along the Mediterranean shores.
+
+Here is the passage in which Plato records the concluding words of
+the priest of Solon: “But after (the battle) there occurred violent
+earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of rain all your
+warlike men in a body sunk into the earth, and the island of Atlantis
+in like manner disappeared and was sunk beneath the sea. And that is
+the reason why the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable,
+because there is such a quantity of shallow mud in the way; and this
+was caused by the subsidence of the island.... There are remaining in
+small islets only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called,
+all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the
+mere skeleton of the country being left.”
+
+The longer account in the _Critias_ describes the civilization of
+Atlantis. It begins, as all chronicles used to do, with the affairs of
+the gods, and their amorous interest in the daughters of men (_Gen._
+vi: 2). The sea god Poseidon fell in love with Cleito, a mortal island
+maiden, and she bore him five sets of twins. The ten sons became kings,
+each ruler of a tenth part of Atlantis, but all subject to the eldest
+son, Atlas. The capital of the island became his abode, as it had been
+his mother’s before him. Poseidon himself had laid out the palace
+compound, making alternate zones of sea and land; “there were two of
+land and three of water which he turned as with a lathe out of the
+center of the island.”
+
+At this point in the account, the divine figures disappear and it
+becomes seemingly a straight historical narrative. Its picture of
+the capital is more exact in its topographical, architectural, and
+engineering detail than many that have come down to us of the older
+capitals of Asia, or than any biblical picture of Jerusalem. The laws,
+religion, and arts of the people are all adequately noticed.
+
+There was a barrier of lofty mountains around the shores of the
+island, their flanks sloping precipitously to the sea. In the upland
+valleys were rich and populous villages. The middle of the island was
+a great and fertile plain surrounded by a ditch one hundred feet deep.
+Abundant rivers coursed the plain and the moisture of the rainy season
+was supplemented in the summer by a system of aqueducts. In the center
+of the plain was a magnificent city.
+
+Assuming that this is no dream geography, it is necessary to determine
+the size of Atlantis, and in doing so to reconcile a conflict of
+statements in Plato’s story. He speaks of it as a large island, though
+small as compared with a land domain west of it, which “may be most
+truly called a continent”; yet he says Atlantis was larger than Libya
+and Asia combined. The tale becomes incredible if Libya receives its
+common Greek extension as the whole of Africa, and if Asia is taken in
+the larger sense; for such an island there would not be room in the
+Atlantic. The passage is brought into harmony with the context if other
+ancient definitions are followed, so that Libya is made to mean the
+district immediately west of Egypt and Asia to mean Asia Minor. This
+would give the legendary Atlantis a territory of perhaps three hundred
+thousand square miles, or about twice that of the state of California.
+
+There are precise figures for the great central plain and they
+harmonize with such an estimate of the island area. The plain was
+three hundred and forty miles long by two hundred and thirty wide--in
+other words, exactly the size of the state of Washington, but with
+its greater dimension from south to north. The topography of the
+whole island suggests that of California, although its shape was more
+compact. Its central plain lay within its mountain barriers as the San
+Joaquin and Sacramento valleys lie between the Sierras and the Coast
+Range. And in its mineral riches, its mild climate, its system of
+irrigation, and in the products of its fields, orchards, and vineyards
+it was very like the Pacific coast state.
+
+“Whatever fragrant things there are in the earth,” says Plato, “whether
+roots or herbage or woods, grew and thrived in that land.” He mentions
+melons--“fruits with a hard rind”--chestnuts, and “the pleasant kinds
+of dessert which console us after dinner when we are full and tired of
+eating,” which may mean, among other things, grapes and oranges; and
+all these “the sacred island lying beneath the sun brought forth fair
+and wondrous in infinite abundance.” In this picture there is but one
+unfamiliar figure. Herds of elephants roved there, where California can
+show only the fossil remains of the mastodon.
+
+In the account of the capital city it is illuminating to recur to the
+Pacific state, for the metropolis of Atlantis lay in the midst of a
+mountain-girdled plain, and yet, like Sacramento, had access to the
+sea, in this case by a ship canal perhaps connecting with a river.
+If one can imagine the buildings and grounds of the Panama-Pacific
+Exposition of 1915 with the wharves and commerce of San Francisco
+removed to Sacramento, one may glimpse the legendary metropolis. In
+the center of the city, on an artificial island, were temples and
+palaces like those of the exposition, but of a barbaric splendor.
+Greatest of these was the temple to Poseidon, a structure about as
+large as one of the palaces surrounding the Court of the Universe at
+the exposition, and doubtless of no greater height, for this was a
+region of earthquake, and within the temple was one statue that reached
+quite to the roof. Its walls were silvered, with gilded pinnacles,
+and under the ivory roof the interior blazed with gold and silver and
+“orichalcum”--copper, or an alloy of it, and esteemed next to gold.
+
+The wall that encircled this inner island or citadel “flashed with the
+red light of orichalcum.” There was a broad canal around it, and then
+an encircling zone of land, about which was a wall sheeted with tin.
+Around this was still another canal encircled by another land zone, and
+here was a wall coated with brass, beside which ran a racecourse two
+hundred yards wide where horses contended. Encircling this again was
+the outermost canal. Beyond it lay the city.
+
+The buildings of the outer city, as well as those of its sacred
+citadel, were of stones in three colors--white, black and red--which,
+with all the minerals useful to man, were taken from the bosom of the
+island. There were hot and cold springs, with baths and with pools
+for horses and cattle; the surplus water was conveyed by aqueducts to
+the grove of Poseidon. Around the harbor front were docks, triremes,
+and naval stores. Back of them the plain was densely crowded with
+habitations. The harbors were full of vessels, and merchants coming
+from all parts who from their numbers kept up “a multitudinous sound of
+human voices and din of all sorts night and day.”
+
+A copper column stood in the temple of Poseidon, on which the laws of
+the land were graven. The chief of these were that the people should
+not take up arms against one another, and that they should all come
+to the rescue if anyone in any city attempted to overthrow the royal
+house. On the plain and in the populous mountain valleys there was
+a system of military service by districts and chiefs of districts,
+somewhat like that of ancient Peru; and when Atlantis went to war ten
+thousand chariots moved in front of its armies, and twelve hundred
+vessels swept the sea lanes east and west. It was a powerful nation and
+a happy--so long as the divine nature of their founder retained its
+force among the people. Says Plato:
+
+“They despised everything but virtue, not caring for their present
+state of life and thinking lightly on the possession of gold and
+other property which seemed only a burden to them; neither were
+they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their
+self-control; but they were sober and saw clearly that all these goods
+are increased by virtuous friendship with one another, and that by
+excessive zeal for them, and honor of them, the good of them is lost
+and friendship perishes with them.”
+
+At length, however, the divine nature in the Atlantines became diluted
+by mortal admixture. They were filled with avarice, pride, the lusts
+of the flesh; and “the fairest of their precious gifts” departed from
+them. Base to men of insight, they still appeared to others as glorious
+and blessed. In order to effect their chastisement and correction,
+says Plato, returning to the mythological vein, a council of the gods
+was called, and Zeus “spoke as follows.” What the Olympian said will
+never be known, for here the _Critias_ ends, and for the fate of the
+Atlantines one must recur to the _Timæus_.
+
+The mythical prologue and epilogue excepted, the whole account
+reads as if the author believed it himself. It is singularly free
+from fantasy--this is no Cloud-Cuckoo Land of an Aristophanes. The
+transcriber of the legend was perhaps the largest mind of antiquity
+and a man of unblemished character; and “strange but altogether true”
+he calls his own story. He was, however, a constructive dreamer, and
+in his _Republic_ he has given a detailed sketch of an ideal state.
+Was this another essay of a like nature? Might not the narrative
+carry further if it came from a man of less imaginative sweep--from
+the contemporary Xenophon, or from Plutarch, both of them vivacious
+chroniclers with their eyes on facts? Phædrus had said to Socrates,
+“You can easily invent a tale of Egypt.” Has the great disciple of
+Socrates done this?
+
+These questions are asked still, and antiquity asked them. Proclus in
+his commentary on the _Timæus_ assumed that the legend was a symbol
+of the contest between the primeval forces and the spirit of art and
+science; he recites that Crantor, the first commentator, accepted it
+as literal history and was ridiculed for it. Strabo and Pliny barely
+mention the story. Thus Plutarch sets down the circumstances of its
+relation: “Solon attempted in verse a large description, or rather
+fabulous account of the Atlantic Island, which he had learned from the
+wise men of Sais; but by reason of his age he did not go through with
+it. Plato laid out magnificent courts and inclosures, and erected a
+grand entrance to it, such as no other story, fable, or poem ever had.
+But he began it late, he ended his life before the work, so that the
+more the reader is delighted with the part that is written, the more
+regret he has to find it unfinished.”
+
+There is evidence that at any rate the legend is not an invention
+of Plato. It was claimed by Plato himself that the victory of the
+Athenians over the Atlantines was depicted on one of the ceremonial
+tunics which were borne in the midsummer festival of the Panathenæa.
+Diodorus has a reference to this war. Ælian says that Theopompus heard
+a similar story in Phrygia, in which, however, the island was called
+Meropis. Proclus quotes from the _Æthiopica_ of Marcellus a tale of ten
+islands in the outer sea, the inhabitants of which preserved the memory
+of a large island that had ruled over the archipelago and was sacred to
+Poseidon.
+
+The following are the main explanations, ancient and modern, of the
+legend: 1. Atlantis was no island, but a part of either Europe or
+Africa--the Iberian peninsula, or Senegal, for example--so remote from
+Egypt as to seem an island to mariners who reached it after beating
+about beyond the Straits. 2. Atlantis was Minoan Crete, resembling
+Plato’s island in its configuration if not in its site; the ancient
+Cretan civilization was destroyed about B.C. 1500, almost as completely
+as if by a submergence in the sea. 3. “Atlantis is too obviously an
+earlier and equally colossal Persia, western instead of eastern.”
+4. Atlantis is pure fiction, arising, like the tales of Homer and
+Hesiod, in the belief that the abodes of the heroes were in the extreme
+west. 5. Atlantis is a variant of the old tradition of a Golden Age.
+6. Atlantis and the Fortunate Islands and the Azores are one, but
+tradition placed them too near the Straits, and the legend of a great
+sunken island arose when no land was found where people thought land
+should be. 7. Atlantis is another form of the solar myth--the setting
+of the sun in the red ruin of evening, and the coming of dark upon the
+deep. 8. Atlantis and the Republic are companion realms, the one no
+less imaginary than the other, and each intended to illustrate Plato’s
+conception of ideal polity.
+
+These are the conjectures of a skepticism which properly refuses to
+believe that so great a thing has happened and left such slight traces
+in monuments or in tradition. Yet there are some details in Plato’s
+story not so easily disposed of, and they appear more distinctly when
+Atlantis itself is erased from it. These are the islands on both sides
+of the legendary continent, the impassable sea that covers its site,
+the great ocean beyond it, and the continent in the west which hems in
+that ocean. None of these things the men of Plato’s time knew of, but,
+to give them their modern names, they seem to be Madeira, the Canaries,
+the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores on the one side of the Sargasso
+Sea, the West Indies on the other, the Sargasso Sea itself, the open
+Atlantic, and the American continent.
+
+If the classic world had few and faint traditions of a sunken
+continent and ignored them or dismissed them as idle tales, it had one
+overmastering feeling that could not be called a superstition because
+it never took a tangible form. The feeling was a blind terror of the
+Atlantic Ocean, as if something dreadful had happened there, but so
+long before that nobody knew what it was.
+
+Nothing has developed in Europe itself that makes Plato’s story of a
+lost continent a whit more probable or less plausible than it was when
+he wrote it; but there have been contributions to the legend from the
+ocean floor and from the New World. The variations, and in a measure
+the shifts, of opinion on the Atlantis story in the last hundred years
+are represented by three names--Humboldt, Ignatius Donnelly, and
+Pierre Termier. Writing in 1826, the German savant noted evidences
+of an external influence in the historical monuments of Central
+America. In his book, _Atlantis: The Antediluvian World_, Donnelly
+boldly contended that a continent had disappeared in the mid-Atlantic,
+that this sunken domain had been the cradle of civilization, and
+that the widespread traditions of a deluge were race memories of its
+disappearance. This writer’s identification with the Baconian cipher
+theory, and his espousal of fanciful beliefs and lost causes, political
+or other, together with his credulity and his snap judgments, obscured
+the industry, the wide range of information, and the real gift of
+generalization to which his book bore witness. It came with something
+like a shock to the scientific world when the French scholar, Prof.
+Pierre Termier, Director of the Geological Survey of France, read his
+paper on Atlantis before the Oceanographic Institute of France in
+1912. This was published at Monaco in the Bulletin of the Institute of
+Oceanography in 1913, and a translation, included in the annual report
+of the Smithsonian Institution for 1915, provoked a discussion among
+geographers in America that continued for several years.
+
+“It seems more and more evident,” concluded Termier, “that a vast
+region, continental or made up of great islands, has collapsed west
+of the Pillars of Hercules, and that its collapse occurred in the not
+distant past.”
+
+In support of this inference Termier arrays the evidence of the
+Atlantic’s surface and of the floor which its waters conceal. A ship
+sailing due west from the Straits of Gibraltar four thousand miles
+to Cape Hatteras would meet with no land. But if it lengthened its
+course a little by making a detour, first toward the southwest, then
+toward the northwest, then again toward the southwest, it would bring
+in view Madeira, the more southern Azores, and the Bermudas. And if it
+took soundings it would discover that, the marine depths over which it
+was passing were strangely unequal. If the ocean were drained dry,
+what would be seen would be a long elevated region lying between the
+Old and New Worlds, separated from both by two enormous valleys, the
+wider and deeper one on the American side. This is the revelation of
+oceanography--a hidden continent in the Atlantic basin with the islands
+named above as its mountain peaks.
+
+Geology adds that the eastern region of the Atlantic over all its
+length and probably from pole to pole is a great volcanic zone.
+“Everywhere,” says the French geologist, “earthquakes are frequent,
+here and there islets may spring up abruptly from the sea, or rocks
+long known may disappear.” The ocean may conceal the continuity of
+these changes, but to geological science they are incontestable and
+they affect a zone which reaches from Iceland to the Cape Verde Islands
+and is about 1,875 miles broad.
+
+When a ship was laying the cable between Brest and Cape Cod in 1898,
+the cable broke and was recovered by grappling. The grappling irons
+encountered various submerged rocks with hard points and sharp edges,
+and brought to the surface fragments of the vitreous lava called
+tachylyte. These “precious fragments,” as Termier calls them, are
+in the Museum of the School of Mines in Paris. The significance of
+their structure is that if they had solidified under water they would
+have been composed of confused crystals. In the form in which they
+were found they must have cooled when they were still above the sea’s
+surface. The sharp edges of the marine rocks, whence these fragments
+came, argue that the region collapsed suddenly and recently. Had they
+remained after the volcanic disturbance a long time above the sea, they
+would have been smoothed by atmospheric erosion. Had they been a long
+time under the sea, they would have been smoothed by marine abrasion.
+The inference is that “the entire region north of the Azores and
+perhaps the very region of the Azores, of which they may be only the
+visible ruins, was very recently submerged, probably during the epoch
+which the geologists call the present, because it is so recent, and
+which for us, the living beings of to-day, is the same as yesterday.”
+
+The evidence of zoölogy has been arrayed by another French scholar, M.
+Louis Germain, briefly as follows: The present fauna of the Azores,
+Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape Verde Islands originated in Africa; the
+Quaternary formations of the Canaries resemble those of Mauretania and
+inclose the same species of mollusca. Therefore these archipelagoes
+were connected with Africa up to an epoch near our own, at the very
+least until toward the end of the Tertiary. Among the present mollusca
+of the archipelagoes are some species which seem to be survivors of the
+European Tertiary. Therefore there was a bond between the islands and
+Spain which was severed during the Pliocene. The _Pulmonata mollusca_,
+called oleacinidæ, are found only in Central America, the West Indies,
+the Mediterranean Basin, and the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores,
+and are larger in America than in these other regions. Therefore the
+continent which included these islands had extended to the West Indies
+at the beginning of the Miocene, but had been separated from them
+during the Miocene. Fifteen species of marine mollusca lived at the
+same time both in the West Indies and on the coast of Senegal, and
+nowhere else. Therefore until very near the present time a maritime
+shore extended from the West Indies to Senegal.
+
+The arguments of geology and zoölogy may be combined. Termier is of
+those geologists who believe the ancient alignment of continents was
+east and west instead of north and south. There was a North Atlantic
+continent comprising Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, Greenland and
+Canada, and later a large part of central and western Europe and of the
+United States. There was also a South Atlantic or African-Brazilian
+continent extending northward to the Atlas, eastward to the Persian
+Gulf, westward to the Andes. Between the two continents was the
+Mediterranean depression, the ancient maritime furrow still marked in
+the present Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. These continents were
+broken up by foldings and collapses and a new design appeared, the
+general direction of which is from north to south.
+
+M. Germain, confining himself mainly to the middle region between these
+two supposed continental areas, infers the existence of an Atlantic
+continent connected with Spain and Morocco and prolonging itself so far
+south as to take in regions of desert climate. During the Miocene this
+continent reaches the West Indies. It is then broken up and portioned
+off, at first in the direction of the West Indies; then in the south,
+by the establishment of a marine shore which reaches Senegal; then in
+the east, probably during the Pliocene, along the coast of Africa. “The
+last great fragment, finally engulfed and no longer having left any
+further vestiges than the four archipelagoes, would be the Atlantis of
+Plato,” says Termier, himself reviewing the conclusions of Germain.
+
+Thus the geological and zoölogical arguments correspond very closely.
+To Termier there is no doubt at all that until an epoch near our own
+there was a continental domain in the Atlantic west of the Pillars
+of Hercules, and that it was sunk in a cataclysm. There is only one
+question left: “Did men then live who could withstand the reaction
+and transmit the memory of it?” Geology and zoölogy have perhaps told
+all they could tell by way of answer. “It is from anthropology, from
+ethnography, and lastly from oceanography,” says Termier, “that I am
+now awaiting the final answer.”
+
+Anthropology and ethnography have provided some hints, such as they
+are. Men of scientific or of speculative cast have noted cranial and
+other correspondences in the subtropics on both sides of the Atlantic,
+and what seemed to be African influences in the civilizations of
+Central and South America. Quatrefages named five races of American
+Indians which seemed to him “true negroes.” Le Plongeon remarked the
+thick lips and woolly hair of certain sculptured figures at Chichen
+Itza. Retzius thought there were the same form of skull and the same
+reddish-brown complexion in the Carib Islands and in the Canaries.
+Elephant heads with trunk and tusks have been discovered in the friezes
+of ruined temples in Yucatan. Wiener contends, on the evidence of
+philology, that yams, manioc, peanuts and tobacco came to America from
+Africa before Columbus rather than went out from America afterward.
+
+In ancient times the people of the Old World and the New were in
+contact. The belief has been that this was across the Pacific, but the
+traditions of Mexico and its neighbors point in a different direction.
+
+Two dominant notes are struck in the legends of the races fronting on
+the Caribbean. One is the belief that civilization was brought to them
+by white, bearded strangers who came over the sea from the east. The
+other is the tradition of a deluge or related cataclysm. And sometimes
+the two stories are grouped; the beneficent strangers are refugees from
+the disastrous something that had happened upon the sea. Cataclysm has
+been called the pivot of Central American myth and the basis of the
+Mexican calendar.
+
+The legendary founder of the oldest Mexican civilization, the Toltec,
+was Quetzalcoatl, who was worshiped as a god, but was reputed to
+have been a bearded white man who came from the east with a band
+of colonists and instructed the natives in the arts and sciences;
+his symbol was a boat. The story was that he was driven out by the
+witch doctors, but promised to return. Aztec belief that the Cortes
+expedition was the return visit made easier the Spanish conquest. Among
+the Mayas the divine stranger was known as Kukulcan, and his title
+was Lord of the Hollow Tree (the ark?). Coming from “Valum Chvim,” he
+founded the ancient city of Palenque. His company was described as
+wearing black mantles with short sleeves; the Mayas called them “men
+with petticoats.”
+
+Native legends of tropic America, some of which Spence has marshaled,
+present a panorama of flood, fire, hilltops of refuge, arks, survivors.
+According to the Arawaks of Guiana the world was smitten by fire, from
+which men hid themselves in caverns; and then by flood, from which
+a leader and his followers saved themselves in canoes. In the Carib
+deluge myth men escaped to the mountain tops. In the Tupi-Guarani myth
+the Creator scourged the world with fire but a great magician put it
+out with a rainstorm and men took to trees (boats?). In the Karaya
+myth an evil spirit invoked the deluge and sent fish to pull the
+survivors down from the hill Tupimare. Various hills in Mexico and the
+American southwest are pointed out as the Ararats of flood refugees.
+There is even an account in the Nahuatl language of the building of an
+ark. According to early Spanish writers there were similar stories of
+oceanic upheaval among the natives of the Antilles.
+
+All the New World flood myths, the Chaldean, Aramæan, and Iranian, the
+Hebrew story of Noah, and the Greek story of Deucalion, as well as the
+indicated ending of Plato’s tale of Atlantis, agree in their main
+lines--that a malevolent spirit sought to drown all men, or that an
+angered divinity sought by a deluge to punish their lusts and pride,
+and that a few righteous or lucky men escaped. One of these stories,
+recited in the sacred book of the Quiche Indians of Guatemala, was
+believed by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg to be an account of the
+disaster to Atlantis. As the briefest of the flood myths, and not the
+worst, it may be repeated:
+
+“They did not think or speak of the Creator who had created them, and
+who had caused their birth. They were drowned, and thick resin fell
+from heaven.
+
+“The bird Xecotcovach tore out their eyes; the bird Camulatz cut
+off their heads; the bird Cotzbalam devoured their flesh; the bird
+Tecumbalam broke their bones and sinews and ground them into powder.
+
+“Because they had not thought of their mother and father, the Heart of
+Heaven whose name is Hurakan, therefore the face of the earth grew dark
+and a pouring rain commenced, raining by day, raining by night.
+
+“Then all sorts of beings, little and great, gathered together to abuse
+the men to their faces; and all spoke, their millstones, their plates,
+their cups, their dogs, their hens,” denouncing them and railing at
+them.
+
+These traditions of disaster, survival, and immigration are the
+collateral support of native American myth to Plato’s narrative of
+Atlantis. The monumental ruins of Central America yield some evidence
+which in no wise confirms the traditions, but into which they fit.
+The Maya civilization has been described as immigrant from a region
+unknown. Its palaces and temples and columns, and the figures and
+inscriptions upon them, represent an art that seemingly had reached
+its maturity when the earliest of them was made. There are no local
+evidences of the slow evolution of skill and taste, such as would be
+expected in an indigenous culture. The resemblances to the monuments of
+Burmah and Siam are superficial. The evidences of a European influence
+are practically _nil_. The indications of a civilization remarkable
+along certain lines are convincing; the Mexican calendar, the Maya
+astronomy, betray a knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies
+which was equal to that of Europe in the Columbian period, and yet
+independent of it.
+
+The Maya monuments have one singularity which has challenged
+speculation. “It has been found,” says Spence, “that the starting
+point of all the dates found on the monuments, save two, is the same.
+Thus all Maya reckoning dates from one definite day in the past, a
+day 3,000 years prior to the first date in Maya history which can be
+described as contemporary with the monument upon which it is found.
+Upon this practically all Maya scholars of repute are agreed.” It has
+been conjectured that this normal date of the Mayas is the date of a
+cataclysm, somewhat as the people of San Francisco, with the memory of
+their earthquake and conflagration strong in them, date many events in
+their conversation as since the Fire. It has also been conjectured that
+this date, and a developed civilization, were brought to the Mayas by
+the survivors of the cataclysm.
+
+Such is the case for Atlantis as it has been made up by men with some
+rank as students or specialists. The bold guesses of Donnelly, from
+whose work several of these citations have been taken, must be added.
+His most interesting contention, perhaps, is that the Bronze Age in
+Europe must have been preceded by a Copper Age, since bronze is an
+alloy of copper and tin; but that there is no evidence of a Copper Age
+in Europe. There was, however, a Copper Age in America, from Bolivia to
+Lake Superior, and therefore Atlantis was the bridge between the Copper
+Age of America and the Bronze Age of Europe.
+
+With a characteristic sweep of statement Donnelly announces his
+conclusions. The people of Atlantis “were the founders of nearly
+all our arts and sciences; they were the parents of our fundamental
+beliefs; they were the first civilizers, the first navigators, the
+first merchants, the first colonizers of the earth; their civilization
+was old when Egypt was young, and they had passed away thousands of
+years before Babylon, Rome, or London was dreamed of. This lost people
+were our ancestors, their blood flows in our veins; the words we use
+every day were heard, in the primitive form, in their cities, courts,
+temples. Every line of race and thought, of blood and belief, leads
+back to them.”
+
+For every fact, tradition, or coincidence which seems to point toward
+the disappearance of a continent in the Atlantic sea, there are other
+explanations with authoritative names behind them. The old dread of the
+Western Ocean is attributed to the teaching of primitive religions that
+there was the land of shades, and to the colossal trickery of Phœnician
+mariners who wanted no competitors beyond the Pillars. The American
+legends of bright-faced strangers coming over the water from the east
+are declared to be still another form of the sun myth. The world-wide
+tradition of a deluge may represent the independent thinking of various
+races of men who found fossil shells on their hillsides and reasoned
+that at some time a sea had covered them. It is asserted that Termier
+assumed too much for his specific evidence of a recent submersion--the
+fragments of tachylyte dredged from the ocean floor--when he declared
+that vitreous lava could not form under the sea. Accepting, as many
+geographers do, that a great land domain has sunk near the coast of
+Africa, they say that this was not a historic, nor a prehistoric, but a
+geologic event.
+
+The controversy reduces itself, at last, to a question of time: Did
+the large island which Plato called Atlantis disappear after men came
+upon the earth? Termier does not assert this, but thinks it possible,
+and in some measure the wish is father to the thought. As an American
+geographer puts it, “It is well known that Professor Termier is not
+only a good geologist, but also a great lover of the beautiful and
+much given to the poetic in speaking and writing.” This passage in the
+Termier address is in point:
+
+“Meanwhile not only will science, most modern science, not make it a
+crime for all lovers of beautiful legends to believe in Plato’s story
+of Atlantis, but science herself through my voice calls their attention
+to it. Science herself, taking them by the hand and leading them
+along the wreck-strewn ocean shores, spreads before their eyes, with
+thousands of disabled ships, the continents submerged or reduced to
+remnants, and the isles without number enshrouded in the abyss.”
+
+Beyond the appeal to poetry the Atlantis legend has another--an appeal
+which is also a temptation. It explains much, perhaps too much. There
+are gaps in the story of human origins, and in the history of the arts
+and sciences, that are as wide as the black voids the astronomer sees
+in the skies. Atlantis fills them all. Science has sought to fill
+them by assumptions--the origin of man in a drowned continent of the
+Pacific called Lemuria, of which Australia is a fragment; the origin of
+civilization on the Mediterranean floor when it was dry land. These are
+assumptions without a tradition behind them. Paradoxically enough, the
+point of attack upon the Atlantis theory is that a legend supports it,
+and other legends fit into it. The whole matches into an ingenious and
+simple design, and are the affairs of nature and man ever so simple?
+
+It is not for anyone to answer yet, perhaps ever. But one has license
+from Termier to speculate, and, if one will, to dream. If in substance
+Plato’s tale was true, it needs no effort of imagination to picture the
+empire of Atlantis as it was eleven thousand years ago, for all its
+drama save the dreadful end has been repeated. The British Isles, with
+their sea-borne commerce, their Mediterranean and Caribbean garrisons,
+their mines and metal workings, their ancient Druidical religion
+and costume, even their addiction to horse-racing, reproduce in the
+northern seas the story of this vanished island dominion south and west
+of Gibraltar.
+
+The outlines of the crowning calamity of history--if history it
+was--have already been drawn by legend, and there are authentic human
+experiences on a lesser scale, and in other times and places, to
+fill in the canvas. In the European port nearest the supposed site
+of Atlantis, on the first day of November, 1775, a sound of thunder
+was heard underground, and in an earthquake that shook twelve million
+miles of sea and land the city of Lisbon fell in ruins, burying sixty
+thousand persons beneath it.
+
+“About one o’clock in the afternoon”--it is Pliny the Younger speaking,
+the place is near Pompeii, and the time August 24th, A.D. 79--“a vast
+and singular cloud was seen to elevate itself in the atmosphere.
+It spread horizontally, in form like the branches of the pine, and
+precipitated the burning materials with which it was charged upon the
+many lovely but ill-fated villages which stood upon this delightful
+coast.... Multitudes crowded toward the beach, but the boisterous
+agitation of the sea, alternately rolling on the shore and thrown back
+by the convulsive motion of the earth, precluded every possibility of
+escape.... Now were heard the shrieks of women, screams of children,
+clamors of men, all accursing their fate and imploring death, the
+deliverance they feared, with outstretched hands to the gods whom many
+thought about to be involved together with themselves in the last
+eternal night.”
+
+Let the biblical account of the deluge speak the closing word upon
+Atlantis: “And all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were
+covered, and the waters prevailed upon the earth.”
+
+One turns from the convulsion and welter of the deep, and the beautiful
+and dreadful thing that lay beneath it, and fixes the gaze on archaic
+ships, laden with strangely robed men and women, riding the long
+billows of the Caribbean toward a quiet shore. There--if the dreamers
+are right--they built another civilization, which flourished and in
+turn vanished, with its temples and palaces, beneath the green mantle
+of the tropic forest. If the dreamers are right.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI. The Gilded Man
+
+
+The high plateau of Cundinamarca in the interior of Colombia was once
+an inland sea. Its vestiges remain in small lakes which the Indians
+held sacred, and into which they cast offerings of emeralds and golden
+ornaments. There was a special ceremony at Lake Guatavitá. When a
+cacique died and another was chosen, a long procession moved down to
+the shore. At the head went mourners, nude and wailing, their bodies
+stained with red ochre. Behind them were other groups in jaguar skins,
+their hair dressed with feathers, their limbs agleam with barbaric
+jewelwork. Amid the joyful tumult of horns and pipes followed the
+priests in tall black caps and long black robes. In the rear came high
+priests and nobles carrying a barrow hung with disks of gold. Upon the
+barrow rode El Dorado--the Gilded Man--newly chosen chief of an obscure
+native tribe, and destined to become, through no quality of his own,
+the elusive central figure in the most singular chapter in exploration,
+above all others the figure of fate in South America.
+
+He was well named, with the poetry wherewith Spain had invested the
+very headlands and harbors that her sons had found in the west. Like
+the mourners, the Gilded Man was naked, and yet he was clad. His body
+had been rubbed with fragrant gums, and priests with tubes had blown
+gold dust over him, until he gleamed like the god of day incarnate.
+Arrived at the shore, the enameled chief went upon a raft with his
+cortège and was ferried to the middle of the lake. There he plunged
+in and laved himself while the people shouted and the trumpets brayed
+on the beach. The golden dust that had covered him glimmered down
+through the water as an offering to its deity. In its wake followed the
+bracelets and brooches which the attendant lords flung into the pool.
+So the ceremony ended.
+
+This rite, beautiful and significant, is history, and not baseless
+legend. Golden ornaments have been uncovered in the lake, which was
+drained by modern treasure-seekers; among them was a piece wrought with
+some art which seems to be a representation of the sacred raft and its
+passengers. Humboldt thinks that the rite came from warmer regions and
+that the nude figures and coronation bath are alien to the climate of
+the tableland. But the fatal feature of the ceremony is that it was
+already history when the Spaniards heard of it. The Muysca Indians of
+the Bogota region subjugated the Muysca Indians of the Guatavitá region
+about the time of the discovery of America. The custom of bathing a
+gilded cacique passed with this small tribal conquest. The memory of it
+remained. Unique among the customs of the continent, it was talked of
+along the coasts of the Caribbean when the Spaniards came. There were
+rumors of it in Peru, and even farther south.
+
+“Let us go in search of that gilded Indian,” said Belalcazar when a
+native of the north brought the first news of him to Quito, which had
+fallen to Pizarro a few years before. The Spaniards went, and found
+all there was to find--the deep waters of Guatavitá. But this did not
+content them. The Gilded Man was a symbol. He stood for something
+larger than a rite that might take place once in a generation. He stood
+for the very arrogance and folly of a royal and a priestly wealth that
+must be beyond measure. Every sunrise the body of the haughty savage
+was covered afresh with glittering dust. Every sunset, so the Spaniards
+fabled, he cleansed himself in a pool, the bottom of which had slowly
+paved itself with gold, as generation after generation of his dynasty
+performed their ablutions. Only a mighty nation and a rich could have
+so prodigal a king; and so El Dorado came to mean not so much a man as
+a golden city in a gilded land. The altars and ewers and basins of its
+temples, the furnishings and plate of its palaces, the jewels and table
+service of its nobles--here was promise of a booty to match the loot of
+Mexico and Peru.
+
+In seeking it Spain spent more lives and sank more treasure than in all
+its conquests in the New World.
+
+Somehow the land that held it seemed to recede as the exploring columns
+advanced. It was sought in Colombia, in Venezuela, in eastern Peru,
+in northwestern Brazil, in Bolivia, and from Paraguay. Over a great
+inverted triangle the base of which was a line nearly a thousand
+miles long drawn east from the Cordilleras of Colombia nearly to
+the mouth of the Orinoco, and the apex of which was in Paraguay two
+thousand miles to the south, ceaselessly marched the expeditions. The
+El Dorado country of the exploring parties--the region which knew
+their tread--was thus a territory of about a million square miles.
+It repeated the general lines of the continent itself, an enclave of
+illusion surrounded by the realities of mountain and coast.
+
+Into this triangle from all sides struck the Spanish columns. They
+moved east, north, and south from Quito, south from the Caribbean,
+south and west from Trinidad, north from Asuncion. They climbed
+mountains, forded rivers, penetrated deserts. They froze in the passes
+of the Andes, sickened in the flooded, fever-haunted valley of the
+Amazon, died of hunger in the pathless plains; and everywhere the
+poisoned Indian arrows found their targets. Three of the columns, one
+of which had been on the road for five years, entered the plateau
+of Cundinamarca at the same time--a coincidence without parallel in
+history. Germans and Englishmen also essayed the adventure. As for
+Spain, when de Silva appealed for funds and followers, the country
+could have been depopulated, says Padre Simon, so strong was the belief
+in the Gilded Land.
+
+Under the fable of the Gilded King ran other delusions. It was thought
+that the northern part of South America was rich in the precious
+metals. It was thought that the auriferous steeps of Peru and New
+Granada swept eastward almost to the mouth of the Orinoco. There was
+no comprehension of the continental extent of intertribal trade, and
+the presence of gold among Indian tribes was thought to be proof that
+it could be had in their country, even when this was flat prairie or
+inundated forest. Native traders followed their own path from the Andes
+to the Caribbean; it is significant that the site of the legendary city
+moved along it through successive generations almost from end to end.
+
+The search for it falls into four chapters--the quest of El Dorado of
+Cundinamarca; the quest of El Dorado of Canelas; the quest of El Dorado
+of the Omaguas; the quest of El Dorado of Manoa.
+
+By the chance meeting of three expeditions, already noted, the end of
+the quest for El Dorado of Cundinamarca is sheer pageantry. Belalcazar,
+lieutenant of Pizarro and governor of Quito, had sent his captains in
+1535 to discover what he conceived to be a golden valley between Pasto
+and Popayan in the Cordilleras of southern Colombia, not far from the
+South Sea. The following year he undertook the search in person and
+pushed it farther north to the plateau of Bogota. There he found two
+other expeditions already in contact. Quesada had started from Santa
+Marta with eight hundred men and a hundred horses. With this command
+he had subjugated the Chibcha nation, numbering a million persons if
+the chroniclers are right, and dispersed an army of twenty thousand men
+which they had put in the field. After difficult marching and fighting
+he brought a handful of men--a hundred foot and sixty horse--to the
+neighborhood of Bogota. Soon he saw approach the remnants of an
+expedition which had left the coast of Venezuela five years before. The
+German, Federmann, brought to the plateau a hundred ragged men out of
+the four hundred well-equipped soldiers with whom he had started.
+
+The three commands bivouacked almost within striking distance of each
+other. They presented a spectacular contrast, for the men from Peru
+were in Spanish steel and scarlet, those from Santa Marta wore Indian
+fabrics, while the men from Venezuela were clad in the skins of wild
+animals. The clergy labored feverishly to avert the expected appeal to
+arms, and for once in the history of New World exploration resolute men
+of the Iberian strain settled their differences without fighting. The
+three captains went back to Spain together where each laid his claim
+to the governorship of New Granada before the throne. Only Belalcazar
+was recognized and he only with the post of Adelantado in the Popayan
+region.
+
+The quest of El Dorado of Canelas is the story of the expedition
+of Gonzalo Pizarro and the secession therefrom of his lieutenant,
+Orellana. Across all the history of Spanish exploration flashes the
+treacherous and brilliant deed of Orellana, somewhat as the “moving
+equator”--the Amazon--which he discovered, cuts across the meridians
+of longitude between the Andes and the Atlantic. Canelas was the Land
+of Cinnamon, and here, and here only upon the soil of America, the
+two leading motives of exploration--the search for gold, the search
+for spices--were interwoven. Pizarro had heard of a fabled spiceland
+hard by the territories of the Gilded King, and this was his avowed
+objective. But his imagination roved further. In the valley of the
+Napo, a stream which for a space forms the boundary between Ecuador and
+modern Colombia, there were plains where the inhabitants wore armor of
+“massy gold.” Gonzalo would have a look at this armor. He set forth
+with 500 Spaniards, 4,000 Indians, 150 horses, 1,000 dogs, and 5,000
+swine and “Peruvian sheep.”
+
+While threading the passes at the very threshold of the journey a
+tremendous earthquake rocked the mountains under his feet, and an
+Indian village with hundreds of houses sank out of sight. Followed
+the tempests, and for six weeks tropical rainstorms with incessant
+thunder and lightning beat upon the men. It was a prelude in keeping
+with the disasters to come. The Land of Cinnamon was found, and left
+behind as too remote to offer present profit. A brigantine was built
+on the Napo, and Orellana was sent ahead with it to gather supplies in
+the Indian settlements. The party never came back, but swept down the
+Amazon in a wild adventure to the Atlantic sea, whence their tales of
+the mighty river, its warrior women, its still stranger peoples, and
+its temples roofed with gold, set Spain on fire. Gonzalo waited for
+months, but he was of the strain of the Pizarros--all hero as well as
+all scoundrel--and did not succumb when he knew he had been betrayed.
+In a march of over a year he led the remnant of his command back to
+Quito. All his Indians had died or deserted, and only eighty Spaniards
+remained. When they entered the City of the Line in June 1542, it
+seemed, says Prescott, as if the charnel-house had given up its dead.
+
+El Dorado of the Omaguas had many seekers, and in some measure unveiled
+itself before the eyes of Philip Von Hutten. After him, the Gilded
+Land had for a time a place certain on the map. It was the region
+between the Guaviare and Caqueta rivers in southeastern Colombia and
+northwestern Brazil--the territory of the Omaguas, a rich and numerous
+Indian nation.
+
+Von Hutten was a relative of the Welsers, the Augsburg bankers to whom
+Charles V had ceded a large tract in Tierra-firma, and who had already
+sent out Federmann for the adventure of Cundinamarca. The second German
+expedition began almost humbly. Von Hutten had only 130 men, and when
+he found that Quesada was ahead of him with 250 men, he was content to
+follow in his tracks, hoping to share the rewards of discovery. But
+when Quesada reached the headwaters of the Caqueta, he had seen enough,
+and Von Hutten pushed ahead into the unknown.
+
+His Indian guide told him of a populous city called Macatoa in a
+country rich with gold, and he even displayed small golden apples which
+came from there. The winter rains overtook the command on its road to
+this halfway house to El Dorado, and, marooned on high ground, the men
+subsisted on maize and ants, and on grubs, beetles, and roots. Their
+very hair and beards fell off, but at length they reached Macatoa, and
+went on to the land of the Omaguas.
+
+From a hill they saw at last the city they sought. It stretched beyond
+the utmost range of the vision--long streets and densely clustered
+houses, and a temple. In the temple, the guide said, were idols of
+gold as tall as small children, and one golden statue as tall as a
+woman, with other treasures above price. Beyond, he assured them, lay
+still richer cities. What they saw and what they heard were enough
+for Von Hutten and his band. There were only forty left of them, and
+within the city, they were told, was a large force of native warriors.
+The adventurers clapt spurs to their horses and dashed in--and then
+dashed out again, their leader wounded and fifteen thousand Indians
+in pursuit. The figures are their own, as well as the statement that
+they beat off the attacking force and retired. Afterward Von Hutten was
+murdered by his men.
+
+To die on the march, to be stabbed by one’s companions, or to be
+beheaded by one’s king, seemed the lot predestined for captains who
+sought the Gilded Devil.
+
+As was proved again when the Spaniards quested for Cibola, an Indian
+town is a deceptive thing when seen at a distance. What Von Hutten
+really saw was probably a collection of closely grouped villages, and
+among them a council house or temple, larger than the others but no
+more imposing than the bark communal houses under which at that time
+Algonquins were living upon Manhattan Island. Yet the bruit of his
+discovery launched expedition after expedition from New World and Old.
+Martin de Proveda, starting from Peru, reached the country of the
+Omaguas and went on to Bogota. Pedro de Silva brought a party of six
+hundred out of Spain, and in a six months’ journey across the llanos of
+Venezuela saw all but thirty die or desert. He tried again with another
+party of 170 Spaniards going up the Orinoco. Famine, disease, and
+Indian arrows accounted for every member of his party save one.
+
+There is evidence that unruly spirits were encouraged to seek El
+Dorado in order to rid the settled places of the New World of their
+turbulence. Such was the expedition which Pedro de Ursua led out of
+Peru in 1559. A rabble of lawless adventurers had been attracted
+thither by the civil wars which followed the conquest. The viceroy was
+glad to commission this young officer and see him depart with these
+“Gentlemen and old souldiers of Peru” as Lopez Vaz called them. When
+they reached the Indian villages of Omagua the expected happened.
+The men murdered their leader, and the command fell to Aguirre, who
+told them that whoever spoke further of El Dorado should die. With
+his followers he set forth to reach the Atlantic and return by way of
+Panama to Peru, where he purposed to seize “riches, bread, wine, flesh,
+and faire women also.” His men murdered him in turn, but not until he
+had done an amazing thing. Starting down the Amazon, his boats won the
+sea by way of the Orinoco, having used the Cassiquiare to cross from
+one river system to the other.
+
+The Omagua chapter ends with the great and tragic expedition of
+Gonsalo Ximenes de Quesada, conqueror of New Granada, and one of the
+largest figures among the conquistadors, brother of the Quesada who
+had sunk his means in a like search eighteen years before. With 350
+Spanish soldiers, 1,500 Indians, a number of negro slaves, and a train
+of cattle and swine, Ximenes left Bogota in 1579. Torrential rains,
+inundated lands, prairie fires, mosquitoes, Indian warfare, disease,
+famine--the disastrous routine of other expeditions--were repeated on a
+larger canvas. Quesada got as far as the confluence of the Guaviare and
+Orinoco, and then had to return. He brought back seventy-four Spaniards
+and four Indians, and he left behind with his dead a fortune of two
+million dollars scattered along the trails of the wilderness.
+
+The quest of El Dorado of Manoa lowers a curtain, rich and somber
+and yet of fantastic design, upon the career of the most remarkable
+Englishman of the Elizabethan age. In this last phase of a long
+delusion other explorers led their thousands to die in the jungles
+of the Orinoco, but their endeavor does not so engage attention as
+that of Raleigh, who lost little save his own fortune and head. There
+are two names, and then the Elizabethan. Antonio de Berreo, married
+to Quesada’s niece, came from New Granada down the Meta and part way
+down the Orinoco for three years of dark futility. He came again and
+founded towns at the confluence of the Caroni and the Orinoco, and in
+the island of Trinidad at the Orinoco’s mouth. His lieutenant, Domingo
+de Vera, went on to Spain and came back with a fleet and two thousand
+men. These perished, all but a few, in the two towns de Berreo had
+founded, or in the leagues of turbulent river that rolled between them,
+or in the fever-wasted jungles into which they set forth to find Manoa.
+De Berreo himself fell a prisoner to Raleigh, who had set sail from
+England about the same time that de Vera embarked from Spain.
+
+This time the Gilded Phantom, in order to make sure of victims in an
+age about to grow weary of long quests and wary of far horizons, had
+come almost across the continent to entrap them. Not in the eastern
+foothills of the Andes, but along the lower reaches of the Orinoco
+where the Atlantic tides still throbbed, the snare was spread. In the
+mighty empire of Guiana, it was said there was a lake of salt water
+almost as great as the Caspian Sea, and upon it the largest, the
+fairest, and the richest city of the world. A fugitive Inca had come
+down from the Andes, and the nobles and merchants had followed him,
+and long trains of llamas had borne their possessions through the
+wilderness, and an armed host went before. They “conquered, reedified
+and inlarged” Manoa, says Raleigh.
+
+So vast was the city that when the Spaniard, Juan Martinez, was brought
+into it blindfold at noon, and his face then uncovered, he moved
+through it all that afternoon and night, and the next day from sun
+rising to sun setting, before he came to the palace of the emigrant
+Inca. At the feasts of this emperor, so de Berreo told his captor,
+when he “carouseth with his captaines, tributaries and governours,”
+the company stripped and were anointed with balsam and dusted off with
+finely powdered gold, blown through hollow canes. So they sat, in
+radiant drunkenness, for six or seven days together.
+
+Thus the striking inaugural ceremony of a vanquished Indian tribe
+on the tableland of Bogota had become in the lowlands of Venezuela
+the symbol of a luxurious and sensual court, and of an intolerable
+splendor. Not one man, once in a lifetime, but a host of drunken
+sybarites, carousing in repeated revels, wore the golden coat; the raft
+on a tarn of the western plateau had become a palace and a city greater
+than any other, and seated in the eastern wilderness on a lake that was
+an inland sea. Upon the mythical estate and possessions of the Gilded
+King had been piled the fugitive prestige and riches of the Incas.
+The magnificent and yet sordid culmination of a century of splendid
+dreams and desperate endeavor, with cupidities, basenesses and heroisms
+uncounted, it needed for its final victim one who embodied in signal
+fashion the strength and the weaknesses of the age. It found him in Sir
+Walter Raleigh.
+
+Raleigh was the most accomplished man of his time, and every fiber of
+him was Elizabethan. On the scaffold he said, “I have been a soldier,
+a sailor, and a courtier, all of them courses of wickedness and vice.”
+Let it be added that in them he excelled most other men. He learned
+soldiering under Coligny, fighting the battles of the Huguenots. As a
+sailor he took prizes of Spanish treasure ships, captured Fayal, led
+the attack on the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, contributed to the strategy
+that threw back the Armada; with him, as with Drake and his companions,
+the ruling passion was to singe the beard of the king of Spain. As a
+courtier he had his place among the vivacious friendships of the Virgin
+Queen, and he was rewarded and rebuked in turn with honors, monopolies,
+rustication, exile.
+
+Raleigh introduced the use of tobacco in England and the culture of
+the potato in Ireland. He founded two short-lived colonies in North
+Carolina, which has honored his memory in the name of the state
+capital. He aided the colonizing ventures of his stepbrother, Sir
+Humphrey Gilbert, and came to North America with him. He encouraged
+and aided the poet Spenser. He assisted Richard Hakluyt in bringing
+out his remarkable collection of explorers’ manuscripts. It falls in
+with the picture that Raleigh was skilled in brewing new drinks, one of
+which bore his name; in the Tower of London he divided the time between
+his library and a small distillery he had set up in a hen-house.
+
+Like his great contemporaries, Raleigh was both a man of action
+and a man of affairs--compound of statesman, _condottiere_, and
+merchant-adventurer. He was also a writer of noble gifts. Instead of
+moping in his long years of confinement in the Tower, he wrote there
+his _History of the World_. And he made beautiful poems. “If all the
+world and love were young” is his line. His is the epigram, “The
+shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.” In one mood he could pen the
+invocation beginning, “O eloquent, just and mightie Death,” and in
+another carol,
+
+  If she undervalue me,
+  What care I how fair she be?
+
+His best-known line, “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall,”
+graven by him on a windowpane for the eye of Elizabeth, was least
+characteristic of Raleigh. If always he sought to climb the heights
+of adventure, he had little fear to fall. This record concerns his
+strangest adventure and his final fall. In most part it is the
+story as recounted in his book, _The discoverie of the large, rich,
+and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and
+golden citie of Manoa, which the Spaniards call El Dorado_. It is a
+fascinating book, for seldom before or since has pen so gifted set
+down a travel tale; but there is tragedy in the very title, which is
+the memorial of a vain dream. Let the historian Bancroft recite the
+justification, or the excuse, for the illusion of a worldly-wise man
+who was also an Elizabethan: “If Elizabeth had hoped for a hyperborean
+Peru in the arctic seas of America, why might not Raleigh expect to
+find the city of gold on the banks of the Orinoco?”
+
+The bare narrative of Raleigh’s first quest of El Dorado of Manoa
+need not long detain, for this skillful administrator, intrepid
+explorer, and subtle diplomat found no golden city, lost no men in
+the wilderness, and had no trouble with the Indians, whom his engaging
+bearing and politic address won to his side. He had sent a ship to
+reconnoiter in 1594, and after his own expedition came and went in
+1595, he sent another ship in 1596 to continue the exploration, while
+he himself took command of the squadron that dashed in upon the Spanish
+shipping at Cadiz. Raleigh’s Guiana flotilla of the year before
+consisted of five ships, one of them from the British Admiralty. That
+there might be no enemy behind him, he seized the Spanish settlement at
+Trinidad, capturing de Berreo; anchoring his ships there, he set off in
+barges with a hundred men up the stubborn current of the Orinoco. Six
+months after he sailed from England, he was back again with some Indian
+hostages, some pieces of golden ore, and the marvelous stories with
+which his _Discovery_ is adorned.
+
+His travel narrative lays its scenes in “the insular regions and broken
+world” of Guiana, which then included a good part of Venezuela. Through
+its pages flows “the great rage and increase” of the swollen Orinoco.
+Through them flit “birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson,
+orange-tawny, and purple,” so that “it was unto us a great good passing
+of the time to behold them.” “I never saw a more beautifull countrey,
+nor more lively prospects,” exclaims Raleigh. From afar off he gazed on
+a “mountaine of Christall.” “There falleth over it,” he says, “a mighty
+river which toucheth no part of the side of the mountaine, but rusheth
+over the toppe of it, and falleth to the ground with so terrible a
+noyse and clamour, as if a thousand great bels were knockt one against
+another.” Enters the note of gold and of politics: In Guiana, it
+seemed, “every stone that we stouped to take up, promised either golde
+or silver by his complexion.” For “health, good ayre, pleasure and
+riches,” he concludes, “this country hath no equal, East or West.” It
+would be easy for the English to defend it, for the woods are so thick
+along the rivers that “a mouse cannot sit in a boat unhit from the
+banke.”
+
+The book holds also the statement of the large national aims of
+Raleigh, into which, as he assured himself, the gold hunt fitted. Not
+for him were mere “journeys of picory,” nor “to go long voyages, to lie
+hard, to fare worse, to be parched and withered,” solely to “cozen
+myselfe.” Here was “a better Indies for her Majestie than the King of
+Spaine hath any.” With the gold of western America Spain bade fair
+to dominate the world. Only by tapping the Indian treasure-house of
+eastern America could the balance of power be restored. In a notable
+passage Raleigh enunciates a theory of international politics that
+would sound familiar to modern ears, if for the gold lust there were
+substituted the lust of markets.
+
+“If we consider,” he says, “the affaires of the Spanish king, what
+territories he hath purchased, what he hath added to the acts of his
+predecessors, how many kingdoms he hath indangered, how many armies,
+garrisons & navies he hath and doth mainteine, the great losses
+which he hath repaired, as in 88 above 100 saile of great ships with
+their artillery, & that no yeere is lesse unfortunate but that many
+vessels, treasures, and people are devoured, and yet notwithstanding
+he beginneth againe like a storme to threaten shipwrack to us all: we
+shall find that these abilities rise not from the trades of sacks, and
+Sivil oringes, nor from ought else that either Spaine, Portugal, or any
+of his other provinces produce: it is his Indian gold that indangereth
+and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence,
+creepeth into counsels, and setteth bound loyaltie at libertie, in the
+greatest Monarchies of Europe.”
+
+This enterprise of matching gold with gold, Guiana against Peru,
+Raleigh hoped would be intrusted to him, and he must have pictured
+himself as viceroy, under England, of such another India as Englishmen
+of later centuries were to attain. Yet the _Discovery_ is a defense,
+as well as a political tract and a collection of mirabilia. Raleigh’s
+return, empty-handed, had aroused the resentment of some who had put
+money into his venture, and the ridicule and censure of more. It was
+alleged that he had procured his golden ore in Barbary, and naught
+better than marcasite from Guiana. It was even noised abroad that he
+had not been with the fleet at all, but had been concealed in Cornwall
+while his ships were away. The dreaming adventurer had his enemies.
+
+After his second voyage to Guiana they were able to destroy him.
+Twenty-one years had elapsed since the first expedition. Twelve of
+these Raleigh had spent in the Tower, imprisoned on one of the
+charges of treason which in those days meant little save that a man
+was disliked by the royal favorites of the moment. At sixty-four years
+of age he was paroled and went to Guiana with a squadron of fourteen
+vessels and the coveted commission of governor of the country. He spoke
+now of a wonderful mine and little of a thing that was in the back of
+his head, for still he dreamed of Manoa’s golden towers, which, as many
+men would have it, were nowhere on earth.
+
+The expedition turned out disastrously. King James had submitted to
+Spain through its ambassador at London a detailed copy of Raleigh’s
+plans and had received what was represented to Raleigh to be a pledge
+of unmolested passage to the up-river country claimed by him by right
+of discovery. He found the Spaniards fortified against him. There were
+clashes in which his own son lost his life and also the governor of a
+river town, kinsman of the Spanish ambassador.
+
+Raleigh returned to face his fate, and in effect it was Spain’s
+own hand that wrote the decree of death, for the two royal houses
+were about to be united by marriage, and the Stuart was studiously
+complaisant to the Hapsburg. Sir Walter was tried on a charge of
+masking, under a project to discover a mine, a piratical raid on the
+Spanish settlements--a charge which the national contacts of a hundred
+years invested with a grim humor. But he was executed on a more
+serviceable pretext, the long-suspended sentence for treason; nor did
+it avail him to urge that the king’s commission for his voyage was in
+itself a grant of pardon. The night before his death on the scaffold he
+wrote these lines:
+
+  E’en such is Time, who takes in trust
+  Our youth and joys and all we have,
+  And pays us but with age and dust.
+
+Thus the great Elizabethan faced and dismissed two vanities. Equally
+so he had found life itself and the mocking parable of his New World
+quest--for hopes, frustration; dross for gold.
+
+With Raleigh ended the larger expeditions to find El Dorado. There is
+a little more to say. Some years before, two parties had sought the
+Gilded City, starting from far south. One came from Buenos Aires in
+1537, all the colonists leaving that ill-fated city, and passing up
+the river in the hope either of finding El Dorado or of reaching the
+Spanish settlements on Lake Titicaca. A detachment of this party halted
+on the Paraguay and founded Asuncion. Another detachment, numbering two
+hundred persons, pushed on into Bolivia, where the Indians ambushed and
+killed them all. A later party which was led by De Chaves left Asuncion
+in 1560, wandered northwest into Bolivia and there disbanded.
+
+The imaginary lake of Manoa, sometimes called Mar Eldorado or the
+Golden Sea, was delineated on maps of South America for nearly three
+centuries after the time of Columbus. Periodical overflows of the
+Orinoco tributaries, which cover wide regions with standing water,
+serve to explain the origin and persistence of the lake legend. For the
+shift of the basic legend from Colombia to Guiana, Humboldt suggests an
+explanation in a custom of native tribes in the latter country. Instead
+of tattooing themselves, the Indians anointed their bodies with turtle
+fat and stuck spangles of mica with a metallic luster, white as silver
+and red as copper, upon their skins, so that at a distance they seemed
+to wear laced clothes.
+
+In 1740 Don Manuel Centurion, the Spanish governor of Santa Thome del
+Agostina, made further search for the fabled lake of Manoa and the
+city washed by its waters. The popular imagination was inflamed by the
+reports of an Indian who came down the river Caroni. In the southern
+sky he showed the natives the dim radiance of the Clouds of Magellan.
+This he said was the reflection of golden ore on an island in the lake
+of legend. So may one leave the city of illusion where it belongs, in
+cloudland.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII. The Dream Quests of Spain
+
+
+The search for El Dorado was the greatest of the dream quests of Spain.
+It was not the first, it was not the last. Along with lesser ventures
+without number Spain sought certain grand objects. These included the
+Fountain of Youth, the Earthly Paradise, the Temple of the Sun, the
+Cradle of Gold, the Country of Cinnamon, the Enchanted City of the
+Cæsars, the Islands of Solomon, El Gran Moxo, El Gran Paititi, the
+Sepulchres of Zenu, the Temple of Dobayba, the Seven Cities of Cibola,
+Quivera the prairie capital. And Spain sought also buried cities and
+phantom lakes and craters abrim with liquid gold.
+
+Through most of these quests is the flow of delusive water. It sparkles
+in the youth-conferring spring which De Leon failed to find. It moves
+in the River Jordan, for which red man and white hunted in Florida.
+It sweeps past the mythical Quivera, bearing huge canoes with prows
+of gold. It shines on the far horizon of Cibola, and on it there are
+barks of Cathay. It glimmers in the tarn of Guatavitá. In the legendary
+sea of Manoa it reflects the fugitive gold of El Dorado. It laves the
+enchanted City of the Cæsars hard by the lake of Nahuelhuapi. In the
+Laguna de los Xarayes it ripples around the island home of El Gran
+Moxo. It flashes on the beaches of fabled islands west of the southern
+continent.
+
+There were reasons for the illusory lakes of Spanish adventure. The
+City of Mexico was seated in a lake with causeways crossing it and
+canals reaching the heart of the city. The Empire of Peru held Lake
+Titicaca as sacred. The scarcely less remarkable civilization of the
+Chibchas of Colombia rendered homage to the lakes of the central
+plateau. So the Spaniards thought that when they sought other golden
+cities in the wilderness they would find them on the shores of inland
+seas.
+
+The periodic inundations of the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Paraguay,
+and the tributaries of these streams deceived and disturbed men with
+appearances which they could not understand. One explorer would come
+upon a vast sheet of still water, and in due time it would get upon the
+maps. Another would lead his column dry shod over the same place, and
+men were slow to realize that each had made correct report of what he
+saw. For example, the legendary lake of Xarayas, long supposed to be
+the source of the Paraguay, is merely a seasonal inundation; but during
+high water this transitory sea extends three hundred and fifty miles
+north and south and one hundred and fifty miles east and west.
+
+The things of the spirit--religion, romance, pure fantasy--animated
+Spain in some of the quests it followed beside the still waters of the
+lakes of dream. Its rude chivalry could serve the ideal with a whole
+heart. But for the most part cavalier and muleteer sought gold alone.
+Gems, spices, pepper, dyewoods, grain fields, raw materials, rubber,
+bananas, coffee--these are objects of ancient or modern enterprise in
+strange lands. They meant little to the Spaniard. Nor was his deepest
+interest in metal that was still underground. He was looking for the
+gold that for generation after generation Indian civilizations had
+brought to the surface and stored in their capital cities. The rewards
+of savage toil he would seize for himself who better knew their value,
+or thought he did.
+
+That is why the visionary expeditions of Spain are in the main a search
+for cities, or, failing these, projects to loot temples and rifle
+graves. Neither the digging nor the assembling of the golden treasure
+was in the scheme. The purpose was to take the central treasure houses.
+So Spain had already done in Peru. The captive Inca Atahuallpa had
+himself suggested a kindred thing. For ransom he offered to fill his
+prison chamber, a room seventeen feet wide and twenty-two feet long,
+with gold to the depth of nine feet, or as high as the reach of the
+tallest cavalier. When the bargain was made, gold began to pour in from
+all corners of the empire--statues, vases, vessels, utensils, plaques,
+disks, chains, temple ornaments, nuggets, and golden dust. Of course
+his captors killed the Inca, and rushed on to seek the sources whence
+flowed the maddening stream; and what they found did not satisfy. Much
+of the treasure of the Incas had disappeared. Nor has it been uncovered
+since.
+
+Those vain enterprises of Spain, with which a great part of the New
+World’s sixteenth century was filled, were attempts of adventurers to
+lay hold of the gold which had escaped the conquistadors in Mexico and
+Peru, or which it was imagined had escaped them. It was supposed that
+the descendants of the Montezumas, taking rich treasures with them, had
+retreated northward to Cibola or to Quivera, and there renewed their
+state. It was reported, and with some basis of fact, that princes of
+the Inca blood had gone north, south, or east from Cuzco and set up new
+cities in the wilderness. The basis of fact was the flight of Manco
+Capac, called the Last of the Incas. This prince raised the country
+against its conquerors, flung an army of two hundred thousand warriors
+against the Spanish garrison in Cuzco, and before night settled on the
+empire of the Andes gave proof on the battlefield that there was valor
+in the Quichua blood. At the mountain fortress of Choquequirau, the
+Cradle of Gold, six thousand feet above the valley of the Apurimac,
+Peruvian geographers believe the Last of the Incas made his seat.
+
+
+_The Fountain of Youth_
+
+It is best to begin the recital of the dream quests of Spain with the
+dream of all ages--the search for lost youth. It was the first of those
+adventures in the New World in which the sons of Spain were to show
+they were different from other men, in that when they imagined a vain
+thing their imagination rushed on to action.
+
+In an unfinished poem Heine sketches the beginning of this quest. Ponce
+de Leon, the veteran ex-governor of Porto Rico, lies in his hammock
+and an old Indian servant sings to him of the Bahama island of Bimini
+with its bird song and undying flowers, and of its interesting tenants.
+These were old men restored by a magic spring to riotous youth and
+beldames who had drunk of its waters and regained girlhood’s bloom;
+they were afraid to return home because of the scandal their shamefully
+youthful appearance would work among their friends. Poetic license
+carries this sketch only a little beyond the credulity of the period,
+for Peter Martyr had written at length to the bishop of Rome of an
+island with a youth-restoring spring some three hundred leagues north
+of Hispaniola.
+
+[Illustration: _The Things of the Spirit Animated Spain in Some of the
+Quests It Followed Beside the Still Waters of the Lakes of Dream_]
+
+The Spanish cavalier set sail with three ships in 1512, in search of
+Bimini. There were nearly seven hundred islands and islets in the
+Bahamas and his journey was through a labyrinth. For a part of the
+voyage he had the strangest, and perhaps the most fitting, of pilots.
+To a clump of islands near the Lucayos he gave the name of La Vieja
+or the Old Woman group because he found them without inhabitants save
+one ancient woman. Her he took aboard to help guide him through the
+sea passages. He found Florida, but he did not find Bimini, which was
+discovered later by his captain, Juan Perez de Ortubia, the sagacious
+old woman directing him to its shore. The water there was like any
+other water. Ponce de Leon, however, escaped the disabilities of age. A
+poisoned Indian arrow launched from a Florida bow did for him when he
+was about sixty-one.
+
+Before his death, the quest for a fountain from which one might quaff
+the draught of youth had been broadened to include a River Jordan of
+rejuvenating baths. This was somewhere on the peninsula of Florida,
+where for half a century red men and white searched for it, bathing
+in every stream, lagoon, and swamp they found, in the hope that the
+magic water, in some sudden transformation scene, might betray its
+whereabouts.
+
+Though they did not know it, the Spaniards themselves brought to the
+New World the legend of the fountain of youth and the name of Bimini,
+as well as that of the River Jordan. Wiener has traced each step. In
+1493, a year before the Pope made the line of demarcation between the
+Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, he had given to Spain the newly
+discovered lands on condition that the natives should be baptized
+in the Catholic faith. Amerigo Vespucci falsely reported that, in
+compliance therewith, a fountain of baptism had been placed on an
+island in the Gulf of Mexico. Peter Martyr in his _Decade of 1511_
+called this the _fonte perenni_, but the cartographer misread his
+Latin, and on the map attached to his work a coast line north of Cuba
+is called _isla de beimeni parte_. Thus the perennial fountain became
+Bimini, and the fiction of a Christian baptismal font revived a pagan
+myth.
+
+
+_The Enchanted City of the Cæsars_
+
+The quest of the Enchanted City of the Cæsars was the southernmost
+adventure of the dreaming mind of Spain. It was prosecuted along the
+slopes of the southern Andes and the Patagonian plains beyond--that
+mysterious and desolate region which made so deep an impression upon
+Darwin. Over the remote prairies, peopled only by huanacos and roving
+bands of tall savages, Spanish commands hunted for a capital which the
+natives called Trapalanda, and which, according to the oath of those
+who said they had seen it, was as great as ancient Nineveh and as
+populous as Peking.
+
+Outbound to the Moluccas, the story ran, a vessel belonging to the
+bishop of Palancia was shipwrecked in the Straits of Magellan. The
+captain of the stranded craft, Sebastian de Arguello, found himself on
+the Patagonian coast with three thousand miles of mountain and plain
+between his little band and the outpost of Spanish power at Cuzco.
+Followed by about two hundred soldiers and sailors, thirty adventurers,
+twenty-three married women, and three priests, he struck boldly into
+the heart of the pampas, moving northward. When the company reached
+a region of lakes and meadows rimmed by snowy summits resolution was
+taken to found there an independent state aloof from the perturbations
+of the world. Other fugitives had reached this inviting spot before the
+Spaniards--a numerous native people flying from the wreck of Peru.
+
+It would seem from the rapid growth of the city which was said to
+have arisen upon the shore of Lake Nahuelhuapi that red men and white
+mingled their blood. The first report of the austral capital reached
+Concepcion in Chile, in 1557.
+
+The Spanish settlements were led to picture a great, rich city in the
+south. A strong wall ran around it, and over it the roving Indians
+of the prairies could see reddish roofs that gleamed as with gold.
+The houses were of cut stone and those who had been within them
+spoke of beds, chairs, and table service made of precious ores. The
+central edifice in the capital was a noble church roofed with silver,
+and from it were decreed and regulated the pompous festivals of the
+ecclesiastical year.
+
+Wishing to keep their isolation inviolate, its inhabitants had an
+understanding with the Indians that the secret of the city should be
+told to none. But when it received the name of _La Ciudad encantada
+de los Cæsares_ (the enchanted City of the Cæsars), it was a presage
+that from all the Spanish settlements of the south, expeditions should
+go forth to seek it out, for the very words were a challenge to the
+imagination.
+
+It was called the city of the Cæsars because the men who founded it had
+been subjects of Charles V of Spain, whom men had styled the Cæsar in
+recognition of his world-wide dominion. It was called enchanted because
+of the beauty of its lake setting and the splendors within its walls.
+Soon its people became known as the Cæsars, and the men who conducted
+expeditions to reach them as the Cæsaristas.
+
+There were other motives for the quest beside the golden treasure
+to be found there and the wish to visit a clime so fair that none
+died save of old age. Here were a kindred people, cut off from their
+fellows, and, it might be, lapsing decade after decade into a splendid
+barbarism. The purity of their Christian faith was in danger of
+corruption from every sort of heathen error. Civilization and religion
+were both concerned in the rescue of this fascinating creole capital,
+which had done so well by itself and yet needed to renew its contacts
+with the world. So said the Spaniard wherever fortune had placed
+him--in the homeland, in Mexico, in the Philippines, and most of all in
+the colonies of the southern Cordilleras and the eastern plains.
+
+There were a number of small expeditions to seek the legendary city,
+and three of importance. Diego Flores de Leon reached Lake Nahuelhuapi
+from the Pacific side, heard of savage armies massed on his front, and
+went no further. Half a century later came the Jesuit father, Nicolas
+Mascardi. Fearing that the southern capital might have forgotten the
+mother tongue of Spain, he collaborated with another churchman in
+a letter which was translated into seven languages--Greek, Latin,
+Spanish, Italian, Chilean, Puelche, and Poya. The letter was sent
+ahead by an Indian courier after he reached the shores of Nahuelhuapi.
+Hearing a report that the site of the city was near the Atlantic, he
+crossed the continent, and then turned southward toward the Straits of
+Magellan, falling at last to an Indian arrow. This was in 1673. More
+than a century afterward the Franciscan friar, Menendez, was sent out
+by the viceroy of Peru, but found no city beside Nahuelhuapi.
+
+Thereafter faith in the fable died, save among the imaginative and the
+credulous. Of the former was Charles III of Spain, who died believing
+it in 1788. Of the latter are the common people of Chile and Argentina,
+who see in the streams of lava and volcanic sand at the foot of Osorno
+the roads of a hidden people, and who still hear in the noise of the
+avalanches upon Tronador the thunder of artillery along enchanted
+battlements.
+
+
+_The Seven Cities of Cibola_
+
+In the quest of the Seven Cities of Cibola Spain dreamed northward,
+and again deluded itself by the magic and sonority of a name. When
+the fable was full blown it was of a city as great as the capital of
+the Montezumas and ruled by a fugitive prince of that house. Lesser
+cities surrounded it, as they surrounded Tenochtitlan on the plateau
+of Anahuac. It stood beside a great inland sea out of which flowed the
+Colorado, and on the coasts of this land were ships from China.
+
+The inhabitants of the plains were cattle of deformed shape and
+ferocious aspect, which the Spaniards called the kine of Cibola. The
+inhabitants of the seven cities, says Friar Marcos, who saw them at a
+distance, were a people “somewhat white,” clad in cotton garments and
+dwelling in stone houses with flat roofs. The Franciscan continues:
+“They have emeralds and other jewels, although they esteem none as much
+as turquoises, wherewith they adorn the walls and porches of their
+houses, and their apparel and vessels, and they use them instead of
+money through all the country. They use vessels of gold and silver,
+for they have no other metal, whereof there is greater avail and more
+abundance than in Peru.”
+
+This capital of the buffalo country was located within the limits of
+the present United States. Somewhat shrunken from the dimensions of
+legend, it is still in existence and the descendants of the men fabled
+to traffic with Cathay go about its streets. Their skins are darker
+than Marcos reported them, but they have the features and expression of
+white men.
+
+Here is another myth of a gilded land and a refugee king, but overlaid
+with material of a strange texture brought from afar. Its scene is
+inland where buffalo are feeding; yet one of its windows commands the
+Pacific with slanting Chinese sails upon it, and into the other comes
+an old tale of the open Atlantic. The Seven Cities of Cibola are the
+legendary seven cities of Antilia, founded by seven Spanish bishops
+who fled the Moor, and they are the seven caves out of which came the
+Aztecs. But they are also seven towns, the remains of which, waste or
+tenanted, are to be found in New Mexico near the Arizona line. The vice
+of the legend is that they are small towns, and poor.
+
+There are names of consequence in the quest of the Seven Cities of
+Cibola, but a broad blotch of buffoonery is smeared across it. Alone of
+all the visionary searches of Spain, it invites the treatment of ironic
+burlesque. Yet there is heroism in the story and a great chapter of
+geography.
+
+The first of these names is that of the luckless but stout-hearted
+Cabeza de Vaca who left a trail of wandering mishap clear across the
+continent of North America, and who was yet to break new paths through
+the forests and savannas of South America where he founded the capital
+of the Silver Republic. In 1536 the outposts of Melchior Diaz, who
+commanded in the northern Mexican district of Culiacan, came upon a
+strange party--a white man, nearly naked, with matted hair and beard,
+a negro, and eleven Indians. The white man spoke in Spanish and with
+such joyful agitation as to arouse a momentary suspicion. It was Cabeza
+de Vaca. His negro companion was named Estivanico. There were three
+other Spaniards a day’s march behind. In what was to follow, singularly
+enough, the negro is the central figure; in what had gone before the
+story is the Spanish captain’s.
+
+In 1527 he had sailed for Florida as treasurer of an expedition with
+five vessels and six hundred men, in search of the Golden Apalache, one
+of the minor dream quests of Spain. Quitting the fleet in a Florida
+bay, three hundred men marched inland to their objective. What they
+found was a collection of forty wigwams on the Suwanee River and a
+rude people that engaged them in daily skirmishes at arms. So they
+marched on, became entangled in the swamps and bayous along the coasts
+of Alabama and Louisiana, made one fatal attempt to build rafts and
+cross the Gulf to the Mexican coast, and then succumbed by degrees
+to the wilderness. All but four of the Spaniards perished and these
+were buffeted from tribe to tribe in an aimless drift westward. They
+had almost reached the Gulf of California when they met the Spanish
+outpost, and in eight years they had wandered from Atlantic to Pacific.
+
+What they told launched the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola.
+Farther north they had found tribes of sedentary Indians living in
+stone houses, wearing cotton garments and turquoise ornaments, and
+with indications of stores of gold to draw upon. Francisco Vasquez
+Coronado, governor of Northwest Mexico, was commissioned by Mendoza,
+Viceroy of New Spain, to explore in that direction. Distrusting
+the reports of Cabeza de Vaca, his first step was a reconnaissance
+under the Franciscan, Fray Marcos. As guide and attendant the negro
+Estevanico went with him, and a party of Pima Indians accompanied them.
+They started northward from Culiacan in 1539, following the coast. In
+Sonora the friar committed the folly of sending the negro ahead with
+instructions to report to him at intervals by messenger. If he found
+a mean thing he was to send a cross a hand’s length long; if a larger
+matter, a cross two hands’ long; if the negro found a country better
+than New Spain he was to send back a great cross.
+
+That was the last Fray Marcos saw of the negro, but he heard from him,
+and from time to time he heard about him. Four days after his departure
+an Indian came back bearing a wooden cross as high as a man and the
+word of Estevanico that thirty days’ march ahead were seven cities
+abounding in pearls and gold, and all subject to one lord. The houses
+were of stone and mortar, one, two, and three stories high, and the
+chief’s house was of four stories. One of the cities was named Cibola.
+As the friar proceeded, the natives brought tales which seemed to
+confirm the reports, and used place names that suggested grandeur. He
+heard of a province called Totoneac, of the city of Ahacus, and of the
+kingdoms of Hacus and Marata.
+
+Meanwhile Africa was blazing a trail far ahead into Darkest America.
+It was broad, dusty with the feet of an accumulating multitude, and
+finger-posted by avarice and imposture. The negro had taken the
+adventure out of the hands of the too-trusting monk. In his wanderings
+with Cabeza de Vaca he had won assurance, some knowledge of the
+Indian nature, and a gourd rattle. He moved with the state and tumult
+of a medicine-man, this clapper his potent emblem of authority. The
+superstitious natives met all his demands, and he demanded much--more
+food than he could use, gold, green stones, women. The monk followed,
+several journeys behind, in a sort of anti-climax.
+
+The procession of the black Bacchus had its inevitable ending. Marcos
+learned it while he was still some days from his goal. He met a number
+of the Indians who had been with Estevanico, and they were flying
+toward Mexico. They told of entering Cibola with the negro, where his
+arrogance and folly mounted to new levels. Noting the lowering looks
+of the sedentary Indians, several of these plains Indians went outside
+and, hiding themselves, awaited the finish they foresaw. One day they
+beheld their companions running from the town with men in pursuit. The
+negro was not with them. His hosts had killed him.
+
+With two of the Indians Marcos went on to a hill from which he looked
+down upon a valley dotted with villages. The nearest of these and not
+the largest was Cibola. To Marcos it seemed “as large as the City of
+Mexico.” It is situate, he says, “on a plain at the foot of a round
+hill, and maketh shew to be a fair city, and is better seated than any
+that I have seen in these parts. The houses are builded in order, all
+made of stone with divers storeys and flat roofs.” Then he adds from
+hearsay details of golden vessels and turquoise-studded porches.
+
+Setting up a wooden cross, Marcos hastened back, rejoicing, to make his
+report to the viceroy. Out of what he told, and the far-sounding names
+of provinces and kingdoms which he had heard, the Spanish mind made a
+thing too rich for the haggard realities of the American southwest. It
+seemed to call for a well-appointed expedition, and Coronado urged this
+on the viceroy.
+
+With Marcos as his guide he was dispatched with a land force of
+three hundred and twenty Spaniards, three hundred native allies,
+and a thousand Indian and negro camp followers. He left San Miguel
+in February, 1540, and in May a fleet under Alarcon was sent from
+Acapulco to act in concert with him along the coast of the Gulf of
+California. Alarcon went to the head of the gulf with his ships, and up
+the Colorado, but, learning from natives that white men had already
+entered Cibola, he returned with his fleet to Acapulco.
+
+What Coronado had entered was the Indian pueblo of Zuñi and its
+attendant villages in northwestern New Mexico. As soon as his soldiers
+beheld these little settlements, writes Castaneda, who went with the
+expedition, they “broke out in curses against Fray Marcos.” They
+accused him of deceiving them, and in fear of his life he was glad
+to go back with the courier who bore to the viceroy the report of
+Coronado. “I can assure your honour,” says the report, “the friar said
+the truth in nothing that he reported, saving only the names of the
+cities and great houses of stone; for although they be not wrought with
+turquoises, nor with lime nor brick, yet are they very excellent houses
+of three or four or five lofts high, wherein are good lodgings and fair
+chambers. The seven cities are seven small towns, and they stand all
+within four leagues together, and none of them is called Cibola, but
+altogether they are called Cibola.”
+
+In his scholarly account of this expedition Bandelier defends the
+credulous monk, and urges that the Spaniards had tricked out his story
+with their own imaginings. He argues that the comparison with the City
+of Mexico was not with the old Aztec capital, but with the new Spanish
+town which, as Fray Marcos knew it in 1539, may not have had as many
+as a thousand inhabitants. As to the statement that the citizens of
+Cibola embellished their houses with green stones or turquoises, it
+has been learned that it was an old custom in Zuñi to decorate the
+roof hatches by which the people descended to their chambers with
+turquoise, malachite, phosphate of copper and other stones or ores
+of green and blue. This was truthful detail, although lending itself
+to exaggeration. But the golden vessels, which most concerned the
+Spaniard, were fable, and the Coronado expedition had cost $250,000.
+
+Despite the forthright words of Coronado, one conquistador who would
+look facts in the face, his countrymen were unwilling to surrender the
+vision all at once. The English merchant, Henry Hawks, spent five years
+in Mexico and in 1572 made this report: “The Spanyards have notice of
+seven cities which old men of the Indians shew them should lie towards
+the northwest from Mexico. They have used and use dayly much diligence
+in seeking of them, but they cannot find any one of them. They say that
+the witchcraft of the Indians is such, that when they come by these
+townes they cast a mist upon them, so that they cannot see them.”
+
+Zuñi lies south of the great Navaho reservation, and is a pueblo
+of the same type as Taos, Acoma, Laguna, and the Hopi towns. Its
+identification with the Seven Cities of Cibola rests on the reports
+of the explorers themselves, on an examination of their routes, and
+especially on the researches of Frank H. Cushing, commissioner of the
+American Bureau of Ethnology, who became a member of this Indian tribe
+in 1880 and lived with it four years while he studied its traditions.
+At that time Zuñi had sixteen hundred inhabitants.
+
+These people called their home Shivano (Spanish, Civano). Cushing
+found that the sonorous Marata and Tontoneac were not kingdoms or
+provinces, but directions, and that one of the distant “cities” named
+by the natives was Acoma, which lies near the Mesa Encantada. While the
+Spaniards had denied that Marcos and Estevanico really made a journey
+to the north, Cushing heard from the Zuñi story-tellers that a “black
+Mexican” had come among them and had been killed for his rudeness to
+their women. Soon afterwards the first “white Mexicans” they had seen
+entered their land as conquerors.
+
+
+_Quivera_
+
+Coronado was not content to bring back his costly expedition,
+empty-handed, from the fiasco of Cibola. Again he dreamed northward,
+and the name of his dream is Quivera. Between this city of illusion in
+the Mississippi Valley, and the city of enchantment which the Cæsars
+had reared on the edge of the Patagonian plain, it is six thousand
+miles in a straight line. These two capitals of the mirage are the
+farthest north and farthest south of Spanish fantasy.
+
+The conqueror of Cibola drifted into the Quivera adventure by degrees.
+There must be richer pueblos east of the seven towns, he thought, and
+went in search of them, discovering and occupying many. But he found
+New Mexico a sterile land. He became interested in the great buffalo
+herds that roamed the plains to the north and sent his lieutenant,
+Alvarado, on a hunt to secure meat. Alvarado took with him as a guide
+an Indian from somewhere far to the east whom he found living with
+the Pecos tribe and who figures in Spanish writings as El Turco, “the
+Turk,” which was what he looked like. The Spaniard did not stay long
+among the buffalos, for the homesick Turk had an exciting tale to tell.
+With it, Alvarado hastened back to his chief, and soon, with El Turco
+as pathfinder, the columns started toward the northeast and Quivera.
+
+This was another golden city in a prosperous land. Through the land ran
+a river two leagues wide in which swam fish as large as horses. There
+were great canoes upon the river, with as many as forty men to drive
+them, and these had golden eagles for figureheads. The native sovereign
+slumbered in the afternoons beneath a tree the branches of which were
+hung with golden bells, where the wind made music. The houses of
+Quivera were built of stone and were like those of the pueblos of New
+Mexico, but larger and fairer. The meats and drinks of its citizens
+were served in vessels of precious metals.
+
+Of this land the Turk himself was a native. But there was another
+Indian exile with the party. His name was Ysopete, and he, too, spoke
+of Quivera. It seemed to be a different place farther north.
+
+With one guide bent on leading him northward and the other eastward,
+the expedition which Coronado conducted toward Quivera moved like a man
+lost in the wilderness. It traveled to the right for thirty-seven days
+and partly returned on its tracks. Soon the Spaniards became confused
+and ill at ease. In the vast monotony of the staked plains they saw
+no marks by which they could guide themselves forward or find the way
+back. A sense of helplessness stole over them. The very bison that
+grazed around them excited a sort of fear. Their horses went wild with
+terror when for the first time they saw these huge, misshapen beasts,
+whose glowing eyes and hollow bellowing were calculated to inspire awe
+even in men.
+
+The wanderers were in latitudes less kindly to illusion than those
+where other men were seeking the Gilded King, and a glimmer of the
+scientific and reasoning spirit which weighs motives and scrutinizes
+facts was born in them. Was not this story of Quivera the Golden just
+a tale told by the settled Indians in order to get rid of them? Had
+not El Turco been instigated to lure them by confused trails into the
+wilderness and leave them to perish there? Had not one of them detected
+him talking to the devil in a pitcher of water?
+
+While they harbored these distrustful forebodings the Spaniards fell
+in with a party of plains Indians who knew Quivera. It was forty days’
+march ahead, they said, and the columns would die for lack of food
+and water upon the way. Stone buildings and plentiful provisions in
+precious vessels at the end of the way? The prairie nomads knew of none
+of these things. They spoke of an encampment where the houses were
+made of straw and skins, and a little maize in them, naught else. The
+shifty Turk changed his story. He had not told the truth, he admitted,
+as to the houses of Quivera, but it had a numerous population and a
+store of precious metals. In anger the Spaniards put shackles upon
+him. They were ready to go back, but Coronado was determined, without
+risking too many lives, at least to see for himself what lay at the end
+of the trail. He took twenty-nine horsemen, the manacled El Turco, and
+Ysopete, and rode northward with the plains Indians.
+
+After thirty days of hard riding through a great treeless plain dotted
+with buffalo herds and watered by a number of small streams, Coronado
+reached Quivera, where he stayed twenty-five days. He describes the
+region about it as a rich land in which grew plums like those of Spain,
+mulberries, and well-flavored grapes. But the settlement itself was
+merely the summer camp of an Indian horde that followed the buffalo and
+supplemented a beef diet with corn cakes, made from maize grown in the
+river bottoms.
+
+The explorer tells the story with rough candor. “I had been told,” he
+says, “that the houses were made of stone and were several stories;
+they are only of straw, and the inhabitants are as savage as any that I
+have seen. They have no clothes, nor cotton to make them out of; they
+simply tan the hides of the cows which they hunt, and which pasture
+around their village and in the neighborhood of a large river. They
+eat their meat raw, and are enemies to one another and war among one
+another. All these men look alike.”
+
+As Estevanico had met his fate at Cibola, so the Turk met his at
+Quivera. Its people did not know him, but they welcomed Ysopete, and
+for his sake the Spaniards. El Turco sought to lay the blame on the New
+Mexican Indians, who, he said, had engaged him to lead the Spaniards to
+their fate on the prairies. This tale failing to help his credit, he
+tried to raise Quivera against his masters, who incontinently hanged
+him.
+
+Before turning southward to rejoin his command and take it back
+to Mexico, Coronado set up a wooden cross which bore a soldierly
+inscription, “Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, leader of a campaign, came
+to this place.”
+
+Four states claim Quivera, and the blind wanderings of the Spaniards
+give conjecture a broad field to work in. One thing certain is that
+La Gran Quivera, the new Mexican mission, established after the
+suppression of the Indian uprisings in 1580, does not stand on its
+site. Bandelier thinks the site was in central Kansas about a hundred
+miles north of the Arkansas River. It has severally been contended that
+Quivera was a camp of the Wichita Indians; that it was in Nebraska not
+far from the state capital; and that the place the Spaniards reached
+was in the southwest corner of Missouri. Cyrus Thomas, who supports
+the latter view, holds that El Turco came from some tribe near the
+confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi, that the great stream of
+which he spoke was the latter river and Quivera a town on its banks,
+while the place seen by Coronado was simply the homeland of Ysopete.
+Whatever the region, it would be as vain to seek the site as to look
+for the camping ground in the desert where some forgotten Arab tribe
+pitched its tents for a night, and struck them at sunrise.
+
+
+_The Islands of Solomon_
+
+There came a time when the New World was too small to hold the visions
+of Spain. North and south the conquistadors had marched, seeking what
+they did not find. So they dreamed westward over the sea. They had
+plunged their hands in gold. They might yet bathe in it at the Baths of
+Sunset.
+
+As always, there were stories of islands in near-by waters where the
+superstition or simplicity of the natives had heaped up treasure
+that more deserving men might seize. The Spaniards went after it, at
+first from Mexico. Then from the harbors of Peru ships began to sail
+westward, and fantasies spread over the deep.
+
+These voyages add two titles to the dream quests of Spain--the
+Enchanted Islands and the Isles of Solomon--and the names may stand
+for one reality. About six hundred miles west of the mainland of South
+America, and on the line of the equator, lie the Galapagos, comprising
+five large and ten smaller islands. From the Peruvians the Spaniards
+learned of them, but for a while they could not find them. They were
+vaguely called the Islas Encantadas because they seemed to elude the
+search. The buccaneers used them later as sallyports from which to
+attack the Peruvian plate fleet. Still later whalers resorted thither,
+but not until 1832 did Ecuador occupy the group.
+
+This archipelago of the west may have been the basis of the legend that
+grew up among the seafaring folk of Peru. It was told that the Inca
+Tupac Yupanqui had made a voyage and come upon two islands which were
+called Nina-chumpi and Hahua-chumpi, or Fire Island and Outer Island.
+He brought back gold and silver, a throne of copper, black slaves, and
+the skin of an animal like a horse. Another account said the islands
+were distant a journey of two months, and one was so large it might be
+a continent. There were sheep, llamas and deer upon it and a bareheaded
+people who wore cotton and woolen garments. Although their king dwelt
+in a palace with mud walls, a frieze of gold ran around it.
+
+A later legend, purporting to tell of a Spanish discovery, is very
+definite: A long time before, a ship from Chile had been driven out
+of its course to a large island, which it coasted for fifty days. One
+of the seamen, Juan Montanes, went ashore and found a race of tall,
+bearded Indians and women whose braided hair reached to their ankles.
+They lived in communal houses four hundred feet long by one hundred
+feet wide. Numerous rafts and sumptuously decorated canoes thronged
+with people plied along the coasts. Because of his beard, the natives
+treated the Spaniard kindly and pressed a gold plate and emeralds upon
+him.
+
+The account continues with the exactness of a seaman’s chart: “These
+islands must be reached from Puerto de Arica, taking the volcano in the
+bay as a landmark, such being the custom of the Indians who come and
+go thither. As soon as the said volcano disappears, the desert islands
+are reached. Going in among them, after two days the large island which
+seems to be a continent is sighted, and what lies to the west is still
+to be discovered.”
+
+There are elements in this story, such as the communal houses and the
+ornate canoes, borrowed from actual expeditions to the South Seas which
+the earlier legend itself had launched. What these expeditions had
+set out to find was a continent about two thousand miles to the west,
+which stretched northward for three thousand miles from the latitude
+of Tierra del Fuego to 15 degrees south, or almost on a line with
+Callao; a domain about the size of that afterward discovered and named
+Australia, but lying on the near side of the Pacific. Rumors of such a
+continent passed from tavern gossip to palace conferences. Sarmiento
+de Gamboa had gathered and analyzed Inca traditions of Pacific islands
+and the learned men of the colony assumed that a continental mass lay
+behind them. So in 1567 the governor of Peru dispatched two small ships
+with one hundred and fifty men and put his youthful nephew, Alvarado de
+Mendana, in command.
+
+An incredible thing happened. These frail vessels, provisioned for a
+voyage of two thousand miles, drove westward without sighting land
+for seven thousand miles. In two months they crossed the width of the
+Pacific, making their land-fall in the East Indies. For six months the
+crews explored the capes, creeks, and jungles of a group of islands
+flanking New Guinea on the east. Then the ships started back and were
+off Callao twenty months after they had left it. They brought no
+gold, but stories of “a naked, cheerful people of a bright reddish
+colour”--in reality, head-hunting cannibals, to this day the most
+savage of men.
+
+Nearly thirty years went by before another expedition was undertaken,
+and meanwhile legend was at work. It gave the distant group the name
+it bears upon the map. These were called the Isles of Solomon, says
+Lopez Vaz, “to the ende that the Spaniards, supposing them to bee
+those Isles from whence Solomon fetched gold to adorne the temple at
+Jerusalem, might bee the more desirous to goe and inhabit the same.”
+But the Portuguese writer adds that because Drake and other raiders
+had entered the South Seas, it was determined not to settle them, so
+that interloping vessels Molucca-bound might have no succor on the way.
+
+In 1595 Mendana, now middle aged, undertook to colonize the islands,
+going out with four ships and 368 emigrants--men, women and children,
+his own wife among them. Then another amazing thing happened. The
+Spaniards could not find the Solomons. They discovered the Marquesas,
+and in the island of Santa Cruz founded a short-lived colony where
+Mendana died and whence the expedition went forth again to disaster.
+Quiros, Mendana’s great lieutenant, returning to Peru, represented to
+the viceroy that the islands come upon by his chief must screen an
+unknown continent, as in fact they did. In 1605 he was sent out to find
+them. He discovered the Society Islands, the Duff group and the New
+Hebrides, but nowhere was there trace of the Isles of Solomon.
+
+Dissolved into fable, for two centuries they were lost to geography. In
+the waterside taverns of Peru, people still talked of them. But it had
+become a maxim of the viceroys to treat the discovery as a romance, and
+learned men concurred. The group was erased from the maps of the world.
+Although it includes ten great islands stretching for six hundred
+miles in an almost unbroken barrier across the track of navigators,
+and although the first Spanish expedition brought back information
+so detailed that every headland and harbor which Mendana passed has
+since been identified, yet for two hundred years nobody could find the
+archipelago. When it was rediscovered it was from the other direction.
+Carteret and Bougainville, rounding Africa and entering the South Seas
+in the latter part of the eighteenth century, came upon islands which
+were found to be the lost lands of Spain.
+
+
+_The Sepulchers of Zenu_
+
+There are significant words in Raleigh’s _Discovery of Guiana_. Here,
+he says, “commanders that shoot at honour and abundance shall find
+more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with
+treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru.”
+Moreover, it is virgin soil: “the graves have not bene opened for
+golde, nor the Images puld downe out of their temples.” Spain’s hunger
+for gold pursued the Indians into their sanctuaries, and even into
+their graves.
+
+The Bachelor Enciso and Balboa, each in turn commander of Darien,
+sought golden treasures, which, as report ran, Indian piety had heaped
+in the wilderness.
+
+Enciso went forth to sack the Sepulchers of Zenu. This province lay
+some twenty leagues west of Cartagena. From its steeps the rains washed
+gold down in such profusion that the natives caught in nets nuggets
+as big as eggs. Zenu was also the cemetery for all the tribes of the
+country. For ages they had brought their dead thither for burial, and
+deposited golden ornaments with the bodies in the tombs. The soil, the
+Spanish lawyer thought, must have become incredibly rich from this long
+accumulation. It was no sacrilege to plunder the dead, for were these
+not pagans, buried according to the rites of an idolatrous faith?
+
+Landing on the coast of Zenu, Enciso found an army under two caciques
+drawn up to oppose him. The lawyer in him prompted him to put his
+opponents in the wrong before appealing to arms. So he had a formal
+statement read to the two chiefs. The colloquy which followed, and
+which he reports himself, is one of the most interesting incidents in
+all the contacts of white men with savages. The statement recited that
+there was one God who ruled in heaven, that in the Pope He had a vicar
+who ruled on earth, and that the latter had awarded Zenu to the King of
+Spain. The Indians replied that they accepted the sovereignty of God in
+heaven, but nothing further. The Pope, they said, must have been drunk,
+to give away what did not belong to him, and the King somewhat mad, to
+ask of him what was not his to give. If the King came to take it, they
+would cut off his head and set it on a stake; and they pointed to other
+stakes on which heads were set.
+
+Whereupon there was fighting, in which, Enciso says, the Indians had
+the worse of it. But two of his men, slightly wounded by poisoned
+arrows, died raving; the country was hostile beyond what he had
+anticipated, and his force small. He went away without rifling the
+sepulchers.
+
+
+_The Temple of Dobayba_
+
+Balboa, succeeding Enciso at Darien, heard of a province called Dobayba
+forty leagues away on the banks of the Atrato. It was named either
+from a goddess or from an Indian princess to whom, after death, divine
+honors were paid. Her worship was conducted in a great temple, whither
+natives came with their offerings. At stated times the caciques of
+remote provinces sent a golden tribute, together with slaves for
+sacrifice.
+
+Superstition and fear piled up treasure at this shrine. At one time its
+worship had been neglected. Then a great drought fell upon the land,
+the springs and rivers dried up, and a scourge of death was visited
+upon the neglectful nations. The survivors renewed their zeal and
+redoubled their offerings of slaves and gold. Thus from generation to
+generation the wealth of many peoples drained into the blood-stained
+temple. The prospect of spoiling a heathen shrine profaned by human
+sacrifice and piled high with idolatrous gold presented itself not as a
+desecration but as a duty.
+
+On his first journey Balboa mistook a deserted frontier village for the
+temple town. When he went again, it was at the behest of Pedrarias,
+who had been made governor of the colony, and whose jealousy prompted
+him to set Balboa a task that might bring disgrace. The quest of
+Dobayba was now deemed an enterprise of romantic promise but of high
+hazard. The way thither led through tribes of bold and crafty savages.
+In the dreary fens lurked animals to be dreaded, including monstrous
+importations from classic myth. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed above
+the stagnant water, sinister lizards crawled on the banks, crocodiles
+haunted the ooze. Dragons couched there, so said report, and huge bats
+flitted by on vampire errands. Peter Martyr even mentions two harpies.
+A later age was to discover the enigmatic White Indians. Rather than
+enter this accursed region, the coast natives were wont to shun the
+direct routes and travel the steep paths of the mountains.
+
+Balboa was to win neither gold nor glory upon his forbidding mission.
+Passing up the Gulf of Oraba and into the river Atrato with a fleet
+of canoes, the expedition was ambushed by Indian canoes, losing half
+its number. Its leader, wounded, made shore with the remainder and at
+sunset began a crestfallen retreat to Darien.
+
+The temple of Dobayba--if there was a temple--was left inviolate, to
+receive the gold and shed the blood of heathen until the tropical
+forest swept in and buried it in a green oblivion.
+
+
+_Other Quests_
+
+Of certain other Spanish quests less has been recorded, because they
+were incidental to larger undertakings or were conducted by small
+parties of adventurers, monks, or treasure-seekers, rather than by
+columns of troops sent out by provincial governments. Pious men sought
+the Terrestrial Paradise toward the headwaters of the Orinoco. From
+all points of the compass explorers hunted for the Kingdom of Women.
+Sometimes the conquistadors reiterated their own exploits, as when
+Federmann looked for the House of the Sun in the Colombian Andes,
+although under the name of the Temple of the Sun it had already fallen
+to Pizarro. The adventure of the Golden Chain was attempted on several
+occasions, parties of Spaniards undertaking to drain the crater lake of
+Urcos, into which, tradition said, had been flung a massive chain of
+gold long enough to encircle the great square at Cuzco.
+
+The quest of the Cradle of Gold is of the last century, and here the
+magic of a name again wrought its spell, two hundred years after the
+feet of the conquistadors had passed. Bingham, who climbed to this
+ruined mountain fortress a dozen years ago, believes that Choquequirau
+is just a name of Indian poetry, misunderstood. Seen from a distance,
+the ridge on which it lies resembles a hammock, and its only gold may
+be that which the setting sun flings upon it. But the name itself, and
+the vagueness of knowledge as to its last defenders, led to various
+attempts to reach the ruin from the valley below. One party brought
+back reports of rock-built “palaces, paved squares, temples, prisons
+and baths.” The prefect of the Peruvian department of Apurimac, using
+a company of soldiers and Indian carriers, built a way across the
+rocky gorges and up the steep mountain side to Choquequirau. This, it
+is thought, was the eyrie of the last Inca--neither temple town nor
+treasure house, but a frontier fortress of the long ago.
+
+The legendary Laguna de los Xarayes was indicated on the early maps
+of South America as lying at the sources of the Paraguay. In it was
+the splendid island home of El Gran Moxo. The imagery of the Hebrew
+prophets was borrowed to describe his palace with its golden and
+silvern vessels, its doors of bronze where living lions in chains of
+gold kept guard, its cloud-like tower where a disk of silver, in shape
+like the moon, shed light over the waters.
+
+Explorers sought this island magnificence in vain. When they came in
+the dry season, they could not find even the lake in which it swam, for
+what seemed to be a vast lagoon was merely high water on the Paraguay.
+
+One of the golden visions of Spain recoiled upon its head. The
+Spaniards would not have it that with a single blow they had struck
+down the power of the Incas and laid hold of all their riches. It
+seemed to them they had merely precipitated a dispersal and an
+exodus--the going out of Indian princes and property to found new seats
+elsewhere. One of these was the great city of Paytiti, also called
+the White House, which had risen near the confluence of the Huallaga
+and Marañon in the forests of Peru. The legend which the conqueror
+propagated of a fugitive dynasty grown strong in exile was cherished by
+the humbled Quichuas, and twice it roused them to arms.
+
+In 1740 Juan Santos assumed the name of Atahuallpa, raised an army from
+the uncivilized members of various tribes, drove out the missionaries,
+and for a space made the name and power of Paytiti a fact on the
+borders of Peru. Again, in 1780, Tupac-Amaru, a descendant of the
+Incas, appealed to the legend, aroused the country, abolished enforced
+mine service and ecclesiastical dues, and became master of most of
+the Peruvian plateau. The insurrection was put down and its leader
+executed, but the injustices he had fought were never restored in full
+vigor, and passed altogether when Peru rose against Spain in the War of
+Independence. The dream of Paytiti had become a vision of liberation.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIII. The Fabric of Illusion
+
+
+The traditional world, like the modern world, is a fabric woven of many
+stuffs and colors, and patched with strange materials, some old, some
+almost new. If one wonders how it was all thrown together, one must
+consider that the type of mind which collects and analyzes facts, which
+experiments in order to discard error, which defines terms and reasons
+from them, did not appear until late in the world’s history and even
+now is not common. Aristotle, the chief scientist of antiquity, debated
+why a dead kingfisher, suspended from a string, should foretell the
+direction of the winds by turning its bill toward that corner of the
+heavens whence they were to come. Sir Thomas Browne hung a kingfisher
+on a string, and found that it did not do this thing.
+
+Except when directed to its immediate problems of food and shelter,
+the antique mind thought in images, rather than in definite terms. Its
+processes were akin to dreams, in which one takes strange things for
+granted, nor seeks to verify anything. Save when they drove a bargain,
+men took one another’s statements for granted. Much the same thing is
+true of the savage to-day.
+
+The realms and races of prodigy form the main burden of travel tale.
+Except when travels took the form of commercial voyagings, or military
+expeditions, and with a few other exceptions, such as the journeys
+of Pytheas the Massilian and Marco the Venetian, their theme, almost
+until modern times, was wonder. Home-keeping folks wanted to hear, as
+still they do, of countries and customs, and men and animals, that were
+different. The myths of geography have come out of the contacts of the
+dreaming mind of savagery and early civilization with the unknown. They
+represent men in the process of getting acquainted with the world about
+them.
+
+For primitive man they began at the very boundary of his district.
+Mystery was there, and forbidding things were suspected; and if waste
+lands lay beyond, these got themselves uncouth populations. The
+stranger that crossed the boundary was dreaded and hated as something
+not quite human, or at least as wielder of a magic that might work
+harm. It is said of wild tribesmen in Borneo that when they meet a
+stranger they turn their backs and hide their faces because the sight
+of him makes them dizzy. “The stranger is for the wolf,” is an Arab
+saying, and the early rule of the world was that he must die in the
+interest of those upon whom he had thrust himself. “He had salt water
+in his eyes,” was the Fiji formula when castaways were clubbed to
+death. Many tribes call themselves by names which mean simply “men,”
+as distinguished from all other peoples, whose human nature is not
+conceded.
+
+But the cruel host of to-day might be the helpless guest of to-morrow.
+There came a time of toleration, the limited toleration recorded in
+the Slavic proverb, “A guest and a fish smell on the third day.” As
+men crossed and recrossed the tribal boundary its weird legends were
+shifted to remoter horizons, became things to gossip about rather than
+act upon, and might mellow into genial report. Even historical peoples
+living at a distance were swathed in horizon haze. The justice of the
+Indians, their freedom from bodily ailments, and their contempt of
+death are favorite themes of Ctesias. Herodotus spoke of the Egyptians
+as later ages have spoken of the Chinese. Adam of Bremen gave a
+fantastic picture of the peoples of the far north--small, sinister
+Finns, whose magic could wreck passing ships and draw the very fish
+out of the sea; cruel islanders colored bluish green by salt water,
+and the “most noble” Northmen, bravest, most loyal, most temperate of
+men. Above all other races in consideration, so the west agreed for
+some centuries of unwonted humility, were the Chinese. Among them, says
+Purchas, “is reported to be neither Thiefe nor Whore, nor Murtherer,
+nor Hailes, nor Pestilence, nor such like Plagues.” And they live to be
+two hundred years old.
+
+Travelers were the agents of distance, bringing the woof which the
+stay-at-home worked into the warp of his fancy. Until very recent times
+they were the world’s telegraph, mails and newspapers, all in one.
+Their coming was an event, and their going was remarked upon. Over
+rough ways, through countries where inns were not, among peoples who
+had instinctive dislike of a stranger and deemed it no fault to despoil
+or enslave him, the wanderer pursued his uncertain fates as merchant,
+pilgrim or mendicant. He paid his fare by the stories he took with
+him--winning a precarious hospitality in strange lands and an eager
+welcome when he reached home. The more curious the tale he told, the
+more kindly he was entreated--Ulysses repaid royal hospitality with
+royal guerdon--and in the ancient world so little was known that one
+might tell almost any tale he pleased. There was no means of checking
+up a report. Of course there were skeptics here and there, and there
+was, and is, a suspicion that old men and wanderers use rather more
+than the truth. The Ancient Mariner, being both old and traveled, had a
+great tale to tell.
+
+Whole races wandered as well as single individuals. The migrations of
+peoples, and most if not all of them have had a nomad period, have
+had something to do with bringing the more beautiful of their legends
+into being--the tales of ideal lands, abodes of the blest where their
+dead are, or whither their heroes are translated without dying. The
+journeys of the sun are tracked upon them and human wistfulness has
+builded there, but so has memory. The homeland which the ancestors of
+a people abandoned long before, driven out, it may be, by an invading
+host, lives in its legends as a region desirable above all others. The
+hardships of the exodus are remembered also, and tradition magnifies
+the cruel height of the mountains, the swiftness of deep, unfordable
+rivers, the terror of moonless trails and all the heavinesses of the
+way. When the dead go home, or the heroes pass to rest, the path of
+souls which they travel back is the path their forefathers followed
+and the one journey ends where the other began, in a land that is a
+province of the Golden Age.
+
+This hypothesis, which is Herbert Spencer’s, may not explain all the
+elysiums that a yearning fancy has created. Yet in the South Seas they
+lie in the direction whence the islanders came; the Hindu legend of
+the blissful Uttarakarus of the north is thought to hold the memory of
+a migration southward from some Himalayan valley; while the curious
+Persian legend of the enclosed garden of Yima, where was neither
+deformity nor iniquity, may be a note on the early movement of the
+Iranians from their cold ancestral home to the Azerbaijan region, and a
+halt there before renewing their march toward the sun and the sea.
+
+Though seldom we may follow the process, religion, and symbolism,
+which is its handmaiden, and magic, which is its elder brother,
+traced the outlines of most of the fabulous animals and peculiar
+peoples; human forgetfulness, savage logic and hearsay have filled
+them in. The natural history of the traditional world was in good
+part the contribution of the religions of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and
+India. The tribes of grotesque peoples, the dog-faced generations,
+the satyrs, the demons of the waste, the fowls with woman faces, the
+women with fish-tails, the winged quadrupeds, all seem more like the
+carven creatures which populate the walls and towers of mediæval
+cathedrals than breathing tenants of fields and waters. The seeming
+is significant. When the hunchback, Quasimodo, was on the roof of
+Notre Dame at night, “then said the women of the neighborhood, the
+whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible;
+eyes and mouths were opened here and there; one heard the dogs, the
+monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day,
+with outstretched necks and open jaws, around the monstrous cathedral,
+barking.” When the edifice took fire, continues Hugo, “there were
+griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied one
+heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques which
+sneezed in the smoke.”
+
+In the temples of the Middle Ages the fabulous birds of the traditional
+world came home to their roosts, and the fabulous animals to their
+dens. They had been taken from the temples of earlier religions and
+they found their way back through the medium of an art which did not
+know where these creatures came from. Nor did ancient travelers and
+geographers. These, they supposed, were real races of men, real beasts
+and birds. They had never seen them, for they roamed the outer spaces,
+but everywhere they saw their effigies--in the porches of palaces, upon
+the columns of imperial courts, and on the monuments of princes, as
+well as within the shrines of strange gods.
+
+Creatures of allegory these were, religious symbols, survivals of
+totemistic worship of beasts. Yet the entablatures on which their
+outlines were graven were mistaken for illustrated natural history,
+accepted as literal records of fact, like the columns which companioned
+them and which kings set up along the highways of the east to proclaim
+that hither they had come and here they had prevailed in battle.
+
+The imagery of all religions musters them. Eskimo mythology is a
+witch-haunted shore, Aztec mythology a charnel-house, Chilean mythology
+a forbidding menagerie. The Chiriqui of Panama have an alligator, a
+jaguar, and a parrot god, all with human bodies. In Egyptian myth one
+reads of the watch-dog of Osiris in the underworld--the Swallower
+of the West, mixture of crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus. On a
+man’s shoulders Anubis carried a jackal head; and half human were
+the bull-gods, hawk-gods, goat-gods, vulture-gods, cat-gods. The
+Ægean pantheon shows human figures with the heads of asses, lions,
+bulls, and birds. The god Brhaspati of Hindu myth was seven-mouthed
+and seven-rayed, beautiful-tongued, sharp-horned, blue-backed, and
+hundred-winged. Hanuman was a monkey-god. The goddess Kali was a
+dark-blue female with four arms and three eyes. Siva himself had four
+faces, which appeared in turn when a ravishing nymph created by Brahma
+walked quite around him to tempt him.
+
+The evolution of these divine beast-men, ancestors of the fabulous
+races of geography, begins with the annual sacrifice of a sacred animal
+and the preservation of its skin for the ensuing year. At first this
+was stored, then stuffed, then drawn over a wooden or stone image,
+to which, as worship lost its primal grossness, the human form was
+imparted. The result might be an ass- or goat-god, a centaur or satyr.
+Yet, with religious symbolism shaping it, evolution has operated also
+in reverse, dowering anthropomorphic deities with animal parts to
+signify typical qualities. This is seen even in Christian story. On
+the choir stalls of a Rhine church begging friars were depicted with
+the cowled head of a monk, but with a pig’s body and fox tail, while
+a Bible of the tenth century shows the evangelists as beast-headed
+men, and the four gospels as a four-headed composite animal called the
+tetramorph.
+
+[Illustration: THE GARGOYLES OF STONE WHICH KEPT WATCH DAY AND NIGHT]
+
+Out of the magic dances of men, as out of their temples, the races of
+fable have come trooping. By donning the heads and perhaps the tails
+of horses, bulls, asses, and goats, and treading certain measures,
+ritual mummers became, in the thought of the time, horse-demons,
+ox-demons, ass-demons, and goat-demons, and as such semidivine. They
+danced to bring fertility to the flocks and herds, while the god--it
+is Pindar speaking--“laughed aloud to see the romping license of the
+monstrous beasts.” The masks of wild animals and of reptiles and birds
+were worn also, and the motions of these creatures were repeated in
+other dances, as they are to-day, in order to propitiate dangerous
+beasts, or bring luck in the chase, or constrain heat and cold, sun
+and rain, through animals that were their symbols. Possibly the First
+People of Indian myth, equally with the satyrs of the classics, derive
+from rites in which dancers simulated beasts, and seemed, therefore,
+both human and bestial. Belief that ritual dancers donned the animal
+nature with their masks; travelers’ reports; the ambiguous records
+of pictograph and frieze, and tribal forgetfulness of the meaning of
+long-abandoned rites--all were avenues by which the mummers passed out
+of the atmosphere of a naïve township magic into the spacious precincts
+of marvel. Greek tragedy and Greek comedy grew up in their steps,
+flourished for some splendid moments, and died out. But the ritual
+mime, whence these came, is still danced by peasants clad in skins.
+
+If, as pragmatism claims, the intellectual world is “pervaded and
+perverted by errors, lies, fictions, and illusions”--things real only
+in the sense that they can be talked about--it could not be otherwise
+than that the folk-mind would throng the galleries of fable with its
+cruder creations. Was it not a slighter thing to picture “gorgons,
+hydras, and chimæras dire” than to give the wood its guardian deity, or
+to reach the poetry of Indian belief that the echo is the Lizard-Man
+telling back? The night terrors of the savage, the dream figures of an
+age when dreams were very real, the hallucinations of medicine-men,
+the deep reactions of the imagination to what seems abnormal but
+is merely strange, even the easy success of the alarming masks and
+deforming paraphernalia of tribesmen on the warpath--all contributed
+to the fabulous populations. In the house of the mind, one chamber is
+a museum where it strives to improve on nature’s handiwork. It invents
+no new thing, but it shifts familiar combinations, exaggerating,
+deforming, recombining. The product is either a caricature or a
+composite, a grotesque or a chimæra. Nature itself has set a pattern
+in the bat, which the Persians say is compounded of bird, dog, and
+muskrat, since it flies like a bird, has dog teeth and lives in holes
+like a muskrat.
+
+By his own handiwork has man been misled, or led away into curious
+valleys of vision. Savage art seems constrained by some obscure law
+of the mind to give its subjects, be they god, man, or beast, a
+grotesque delineation. It may be that primitive drawing was evolved
+inversely from the drawing of children, whose first animals are usually
+horizontal human beings; the first men pictured by the cave artists
+were more like erect animals. Paleolithic man, so Luquet thinks,
+learned how to represent animals before he did men, and gave the latter
+beast countenances and misshapen members in his early attempts to
+represent them. The stuff of myth is in the rock drawings. In sculpture
+itself its influence is clearly marked.
+
+On the evidence of broken statues, desert peoples based tales of
+forgotten races that had been turned into stone. On the evidence
+of wooden idols, snow-mantled in the land of the Samoyeds, their
+neighbors based tales of a northern nation frozen into immobility with
+each recurring winter and thawed out by the sun’s return. There were
+sculptures and bas-reliefs in Egypt which ministered to the pride of
+kings by picturing them several times as large as their subjects and
+vassals; and these were evidence to the stranger that he had come
+into a country which held both giants and dwarfs. Primitive drawings
+betray ignorance of perspective, and this archaic style was retained by
+religious conservatism after art had found itself. The sculptures that
+show Egyptian countenances in profile, with eyes as long as in the full
+face, also show profiles of quadrupeds having but two legs and a single
+horn. Here, and not in “the wild, white, fierce, chaste moon, whose
+two horns are indissolubly twisted into one,” may be the secret of the
+unicorn.
+
+The power to evoke myths of the living has been in marble statues and
+wooden images from the beginning, for in the beginning they were
+wrought in the thought that life would enter them. A passage in _The
+Flame of Life_ reveals the creative quality in D’Annunzio reacting
+to their spell: “In the fruit orchards, in the vineyards, among the
+vegetables, among the pastures, rose the surviving statues. They
+were numberless like a dispersed people. Some still white, some gray
+or yellow with lichens or greenish with moss, or spotted; in all
+attitudes, with all gestures, goddesses, heroes, nymphs, seasons,
+hours, with their bows, with their arrows, their garlands, their
+cornucopias, their torches, with all the emblems of their riches,
+power, and pleasure, exiled from fountains, grottos, labyrinths,
+harbors, porticos; friends of the evergreen, box, and myrtle,
+protectors of passing loves, witnesses of eternal vows, figures of a
+dream far older than the hands that had formed them and the eyes that
+had seen them in the ravaged gardens.”
+
+Sovereign reason itself has sent emissaries to the courts of fable.
+Science is tolerant and until it knows it speaks the language of
+Montaigne, “It is a sottish presumption to disdaine and condemne that
+for false, which unto us seemeth to beare no show of likelihood or
+truth.” Empedocles, precursor of physical scientists, and perhaps first
+to glimpse the doctrine of evolution, provided the classic world with
+a working explanation of the prodigious animals and peoples and gave
+a law to the menageries of myth. He thought that the various parts of
+men and animals were separately created by the elements, which were
+his deities. There were heads without necks, arms without shoulders,
+eyes without sockets; and as they wandered about in space these members
+united, forming man-headed beasts, beast-headed men, and various
+bizarre beings which because of their maladjustment did not survive in
+competition with normal men and animals. The doctrine has been echoed
+in modern times in the contention that the composite creatures of
+fable--part reptile, part bird, and part beast--represent intermediate
+forms, experiments which nature inaugurated and abandoned in evolving
+higher types of life. The marsupial kangaroo, the duck-billed platypus,
+and the flying lizard are surviving testimony to such experiment.
+
+A kindred philosophy may be discerned here and there in the folklore
+of aboriginal Americans. In the deluge legend of the Pimas, Fox and
+Sister, escaping in two arks, set to work to fashion a new world of
+men out of mud; Fox molds manikins with one arm, one leg, one eye, but
+Sister derides these and tells him to put his journeyman’s product
+away behind the ocean in another world; then she breathes into her own
+better handiwork the breath of life; these deformed folk are still
+living somewhere, the Pimas think. The haunting Indian myth of a First
+People, who had the human form but the beast nature, and from whom
+the animals derive, and the companion myth of a First People who had
+the brute form, but discarded it for the human, are things with the
+Empedoclean quality, but reach deeper; and a true note of observation
+is in them. Somewhere in every man one catches a glimpse of some
+animal. All created things are reflected in his form, his gait, his
+face. “Somewhat of me down there?” was the question of Emerson when he
+caught a dog’s understanding glance; and in men’s countenances he had
+seen, he thought, “the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat,
+and the barnyard fowl.”
+
+Thus the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid take on a tinge of plausibility.
+“What keeps these wild tales in circulation for thousands of years?”
+asks Emerson. “What but the wild fact to which they suggest some
+approximation of theory!” In lighter vein in _Penguin Island_ Anatole
+France sketches the metamorphosis of birds into men: “Immediately the
+penguins were transformed. Their foreheads enlarged and their heads
+grew round like the dome of St. Maria Rotunda in Rome. Their oval eyes
+opened more widely on the universe; a fleshy nose clothed the two
+clefts of their nostrils; their beaks were changed into mouths, and
+from their mouths went forth speech; their necks grew short and thick;
+their wings became arms and their claws legs; a restless soul dwelt
+within the breast of each of them. However, there remained with them
+some traces of their first nature. They were inclined to look sideways;
+they balanced themselves on their short thighs; their bodies were
+covered with fine down.”
+
+There is good terrestrial history as well as the dreams and guesses of
+the mind hidden in travel tales, and in them are embalmed some of the
+oldest memories of mankind. Paleolithic man found various subraces of
+men in Europe when he came there, savage prowlers from whose skeletal
+remains modern science has restored the outlines of squat, ape-necked,
+beetle-browed human beings, crudely formed as a heathen idol. Against
+these he waged the relentless war of one species against another--a
+war of extermination. The memory of their odious appearance would
+survive longest in the stories told to entertain or frighten children.
+As Sir Harry Johnston has suggested, “the dim racial remembrance of
+such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy
+bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the
+germ of the ogre in folklore.”
+
+It is certain that folklore shows the traces of other and less
+frightful races of men who in turn were driven off the European
+scene. The giants of nursery tales are identified by Tylor with Stone
+Age heathen, shy of the conquering tribes of men, loathing their
+agriculture and the sound of their church bells. When the Scandinavian
+sagas speak of dwarfs, furtive and cunning, garbed in reindeer kirtle
+and colored cap, hiding in caves, and armed with bone-tipped arrows,
+they are picturing the persecuted and once widely spread Lapp race.
+
+It may be that a vague recollection of now extinct animals has survived
+in legend. There is an Iroquois story recorded by Father Charlevoix of
+a great elk which stood so high that eight feet of snow did not impede
+his movements, and with “a sort of arm which comes out of his shoulder
+and which he uses as we do ours.” Kaska tribesmen speak of a large,
+hairy, tusked animal which roamed their land long ago. The Indians
+of North America must at some time have seen living members of the
+elephant family. It has been suggested that the tortoises of Hindu myth
+which bear the world on their backs are a memory of the huge Himalayan
+tortoise.
+
+There are legends that are true myths of observation, exercises not
+of memory, but of primitive logic. They disclose man pondering the
+ruinous records of the past and satisfying the necessity for a theory
+that shall explain them. The diminutive burial cysts and dolmens made
+by departed races and scattered over the world were thought to be the
+graves of dwarfs, or their houses, or their treasure places. Fossil
+bones have produced a veritable cycle of these philosophic myths. The
+frozen mammoths and fossil bones of Siberia have been known to man
+from earliest times and have produced a stock of legends as well as
+an immemorial trade in ivory. Some of these, reciting the battles of
+prehistoric animals with one another and with men, have almost the
+dignity of epics.
+
+The mistaken logic that produced the creatures of legend has had
+at various points a sort of whimsical confirmation. Save for his
+fiery breath, the dragon of fable mirrors the leathern-winged,
+serpent-tailed, crocodile-bellied saurians that haunted the marshes of
+the ancient world and passed from the scene ages before man is supposed
+to have come upon it. There are living things as weird of aspect as
+any created by the unbridled imagination of man, but most of them are
+small. Such are the vampire bat, the dragon fly, and the so-called
+fiend fly, the black face and curved horns of which gave it in the
+Middle Ages a diabolic name. Seas and fresh-water streams and marshes
+all contain creatures which so much resemble, and so much differ from,
+the familiar land animals as to seem the product of a conscious venture
+into the grotesque. With a fish net and microscope one might bring to
+view an array of animals that in everything save size would rival the
+exhibits of fable. The wildest dream of man has not pictured anything
+so beautiful and strange as the life-drama of the little creature that
+is first a larva, then a chrysalis, and then the butterfly of a single
+summer.
+
+There are words in which the germinal idea has been so enveloped in
+wrappers of metaphor and inference, so incased in concentric shells of
+rationalization, so burdened with borrowed significances, so freighted
+by sentiment and reflection, and so enriched by art and historical
+accretion that they may be called microcosms of the world of fable; the
+proper noun, Babylon, is one of these. In large measure the peoples of
+prodigy and in some measure the lands of legend owe their being to a
+search for causes confined within the domain of etymology. They may be
+called a literary phenomenon, a product of words and the ways of words,
+and a by-product of libraries. Words breed myths. Given a Rome, people
+will invent a Romulus. Given the ancient Britons and Celts, people will
+invent a Britannus and a Celtus, their eponymous chiefs. The theory of
+totemism--supposed descent from an animal ancestor--arose, as Spencer
+thinks, from the efforts of savages to explain the animal names which
+they bore.
+
+When the meaning of words becomes forgotten or their form corrupted, a
+myth follows. Mediæval Spain, for example, believed that Jews were born
+with tails, confusing the word rabbi with rubo (a tail). Château Vert
+in England has become Shotover, and peasants have it that Little John
+shot over a high hill near by. Maid Marian of the Robin Hood ballad
+cycle is the Mad Morion of the Morris dance, a boy who whirled through
+its measures wearing a morion or helmet.
+
+How names can become corrupted the public-house signs of England will
+attest. The Bag O’Nails should be the Bacchanals; the Bully Ruffian
+should be the ship Bellerophon; the Cat and Wheel should be St.
+Catherine’s wheel; the Goat and Compasses should be God Encompasses Us;
+the Iron Devil should be Hirondelle (the swallow), and the Queer Door
+should be the Cœur Doré (the golden heart). The effigies of bags of
+nails, cats, goats, and doors under these uncouth names are pictorial
+fables based upon bad etymology.
+
+In like fashion Pliny confused the name of the Canaries with the Latin
+_canis_ (dog) and says these islanders are called thus because, like
+dogs, they devour the entrails of wild beasts. Similar confusions
+of words have brought legendary islands upon the maps. Avalon, the
+Celtic paradise in the west, whither Arthur was ferried unto peace, is
+Apple Island of the classics, the place of the golden, dragon-guarded
+apples of the Hesperides. Antilia, mystic mediæval island of the
+remote Atlantic, is perhaps Ante-ilya, or island off the Portuguese
+coast. Milton’s “cold Estotiland” and Estland, islands which held
+their place for centuries on the maps of the northern seas, are
+probably misreadings for Scotland and Iceland, transferred from faded
+sketch-maps to a Venetian chart of the sixteenth century.
+
+“Not Angles, but angels,” said a punning ecclesiastic when he saw
+fair-haired Saxon captives in the slave markets of the Mediterranean.
+So the Greeks and Romans gave to savage tribes the names that in their
+own tongues sounded most like what these tribes called themselves. A
+myth might result--a record of some deformity, or some inhuman custom.
+A larger number of myths arose from men’s giving a literal meaning
+to figurative terms in their own language. To speak in riddles was
+more than a social game with the ancients, is more than a social game
+now with various peoples. There were certain things which must not be
+named, but only referred to indirectly. There were times when riddles
+must be propounded and times when they must not; and riddle-time, says
+Frazer, was usually in the presence of a dead body or at a sacrifice.
+
+What might follow, a glance at a few Finnish riddles will show. One
+of them runs, “Beyond the great water a large old man shouts,” and
+another, “A cry from the forest and light from the hill.” In each case
+thunder is the answer. The sky is described as a blue field strewn with
+silver. “A child looks through the hedge” means the sunrise. “A red
+cock springs from house to house” means fire. “A small white man was
+sowing, he became very mischievous,” means snow. As Müller remarks,
+here are elements which in the mind of a poet or a grandmother would
+soon create a number of delightful myths.
+
+In its contacts with enigmatic language the end of literalism is
+fable. Speak of fleet horses as children of the wind, and you have the
+story of Iberian mares impregnated by the west wind. Speak of swift
+runners as shadow-footed, and there appears on the canvas of Ind the
+silhouettes of natives asleep under the shade of their gigantic feet.
+“We are a people without a head,” said the kingless Turkomans, and the
+Headless People shouldered their way into the map of fable. “Their
+shoulders are where our heads are,” Indians of Guiana told Raleigh,
+describing a tall neighbor race, and artists delineated them with eyes,
+noses, and mouths where their breasts ought to be. Sometimes savage
+tribes stretch their ears by attaching weights to them; hence, perhaps,
+the tale of folk who used one ear as mattress, the other as coverlet.
+As to the people whose feet were turned backward, may these not be,
+Tylor asks, the Antipodes on the other side of the globe, whose feet,
+surely enough, are planted “the opposite way” every time they set them
+down?
+
+The method explains much, although care must be taken that it be
+not made to explain too much. The germ of fable is found in such
+figurative epithets as bull-browed, long-headed, horse-faced, ox-eyed,
+lion-hearted, bird-witted. But for these phrases to fructify in
+marvel, it would need that in a time more naïve and among a people who
+knew neither the ends of the world nor the ways of speech, men of one
+race should use them in telling another the manners and customs of
+a third. For cultivated minds these conditions cannot be reproduced
+except in the magic and make-believe of poetry. For the unlettered,
+alike in lands of culture and of barbarism, they still exist.
+
+The power of wish and the power of words are chief gods in the world of
+fable.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXIV. The Travel Tales of Mankind
+
+
+When the travel stories of mankind were first set down in writing the
+list was already nearly complete. Little was added afterward until the
+modern age began the systematic collection of a mass of folklore which,
+with all its significance, had scant literary backgrounds and less than
+the old geographical quality. This is a strange thing. From generation
+to generation men increased their stores of knowledge, but from century
+to century they neither greatly increased nor greatly reduced their
+stock of fables. There were periods when men forgot the wisdom of the
+ancient world, but they remembered and repeated its pleasant marvels.
+
+These have had a long journey down the ages. The Greek had them from
+the Persian, Indian, and Egyptian; the Roman had them from the Greek;
+the Arab merchant and Christian pilgrim had them from the Roman;
+the Celtic monk and the viking had them alike from Roman, Arab, and
+Christian; and the Spanish explorer had them from every mediæval
+source. In the Spanish Americas of the sixteenth century the Age of
+Fable blazed forth again and then grew dark.
+
+The things added in this journey to the original stock of travel
+tales were mainly local legends and variations on older themes. The
+grasshoppers in one province chirped or were silent in obedience to
+provincial ordinance, the fountains of another had curative properties,
+there was an enchanted forest in a third. Celtic glamour passed a wand
+over familiar material and it yielded the veiled or sunken islands of
+the western ocean. The quest of El Dorado came out of a Spanish dream.
+Nearly all other travel tales are found in the earliest literature. It
+must be that men told them to one another ages before writing was known.
+
+Various of the older books record them. They are interwoven with myths
+of the supernatural in epic poetry. They are included in accounts of
+countries and peoples in histories, encyclopædias, and guide-books.
+They decorate the narratives of ancient and mediæval travelers. They
+are compiled in volumes of mirabilia. Instances of these several
+records are the Odyssey of Homer, the _History_ of Herodotus, the
+_Travels_ of Marco Polo, and the _Collecteanea_ of Solinus.
+
+The special type of letters which travel tales have developed is
+the collections of mirabilia. Most, perhaps all, of these have been
+library pilferings and borrowings. Photios culled from the _Indika_
+of Ctesias everything that was difficult to believe, and the rest of
+this survey of ancient India is lost. Solinus won the name of Pliny’s
+Ape by extracting the curious things from the writings of the Roman
+encyclopædist and combining them in a work which was standard for a
+thousand years.
+
+The very skepticism of other writers evidences the industry of the
+historians of marvel. In his _Attic Nights_, Gellius, a Roman of
+the second century A.D., tells of a bundle of musty books which he
+bought for a few coppers in Brundusium. “They were all in Greek,”
+he says, “and full of wonders and fables, containing relations of
+things unheard of and incredible, but written by authors of no small
+authority--Aristeas of Proconnesos and Isogonos of Nicæa, and Ctesias
+and Onesikritos and Polystephanos and Hegesias.” Swiftly he lists their
+races of dog-headed, one-legged, headless, and feathered mortals.
+“As we perused them,” says the practical but too-scornful Roman, “we
+felt how wearisome a task it is to read worthless books which conduce
+neither to adorn nor to improve life.”
+
+When Huc was ascending a Chinese river in the middle of the last
+century his native servant used to go ashore at every stopping place
+and bring aboard a stock of pamphlets to read. These products of the
+ready pens of the literary class included fantastic stories of various
+kinds, some of them very coarsely written. Says Huc: “The Greeks fixed
+the abode of their monsters and ephemeral creatures in the east, and
+the Chinese have returned the compliment by placing theirs in the west,
+beyond the great seas. There dwell their dog-men, their ears long
+enough to trail on the ground as they walk; there is the Kingdom of
+Women, and of the people with a hole right through them at the breast.”
+
+Best of all skeptical discussions of prodigy is the _Enquiries into
+Vulgar and Common Errors_ (1646), which bears the high name of Sir
+Thomas Browne. Its author challenges the entire array of travel
+tales, closes his eyes to the truth hidden in many of them, recites
+the means by which impostors fabricate imaginary animals, denounces
+“saltimbancoes, quacksalvers, charlatans, astrologers, fortune tellers,
+jugglers, geomancers and the like incantatory impostors,” and sounds
+a warning against Herodotus, Ctesias, Maundeville, Pliny, Ælian,
+Solinus, Athenæus, Philes, Tzetzes, and “even holy writers such as
+Basil and Ambrose and Isidore, Bishop of Seville, and Albertus, Bishop
+of Ratisbone.” Preachers and moralists, he says, have made occasion for
+error by using for illustration the fables of the phœnix, salamander,
+pelican and basilisk. The root of the matter, he concludes, is the
+“deceptible condition” of men, of which Satan took advantage in the
+beginning.
+
+In whatever books one finds these pictures of strange lands and races
+they have the effect of cameos, in that they are miniatures, and the
+outlines are not subject to change. The description is always brief,
+and next to nothing is added to it from age to age. The griffin has
+no new habits, the dog-faced men lived under the old law, the pygmies
+of the Middle Ages have not yet won the battles with the cranes which
+they were waging in the time of Homer. If a traveler sees these strange
+creatures he has nothing fresh to say of them. The main thing that
+happens is that they shift their places on the map, retiring always
+before the advance of knowledge. Æthicus of Istria contributes almost
+the only really novel touch in a thousand years. He saw, so he says,
+the Amazons in the region north of the Caspian suckling the centaurs
+and minotaurs.
+
+That these fables came down through the centuries unchanged is a
+tribute to the hold of tradition, to men’s reverence for the written
+word. It is also a revelation of the way natural histories and
+encyclopædias were compiled until about the time of Buffon and Cuvier.
+When a thing got itself said, it had a good chance of surviving,
+provided it was interesting. Other men copied it out of a book without
+demanding proofs, authority taking the place of research. The ancient
+geographers cited the very poets as authorities.
+
+Because they passed through endless compilations the fables remained
+brief, or became so. Despite its vigor and penetrating quality, even
+the _Geography_ of Strabo rests for its main facts on a multitude of
+travel books whose statements it abridged. What the Greek writers could
+not wholly avoid was too much for the Roman encyclopædists. They were
+note-takers, compilers, abridgers, and they tried to make all learning
+their province. The encyclopædias of Varro, Verrius, Flaccus, Pliny,
+Suetonius, Pompeius Festus, and Nonius Marcellus were the product
+not of a staff of experts, but in each case of a single mind. The
+editors epitomized everything. They made extracts from books, extracts
+from extracts, abridgments of abridgments. The original works they
+consulted were lost, and only fragments of the mental inheritance of
+the Roman world were transmitted from age to age. Under the modern
+system of specialized inquiry the frontiers of knowledge press ever
+outward. Under the old encyclopædists they drew inward and the body of
+known facts shrank continually. This tendency culminated in Isidore,
+Bishop of Seville in the seventh century, last of the Roman, first of
+the Christian, encyclopædists. He devotes two sentences to the small
+island of Thanet, now a part of Kent. He gives three sentences to Great
+Britain; “jet is very common there, and pearls,” he says.
+
+From works prepared under such conditions one must be content with a
+treatise as brief as this in Isidore’s _Etymologies_: “The Cynocephali
+are so called because they have dogs’ heads and their very barking
+betrays them as beasts rather than men. They are born in India.”
+
+The ideal lands, the prodigious races, and the fabulous animals were
+first made known to the world by the Greeks. Few of the classic travel
+tales, however, originated with them. Most of them trace back to Egypt
+and India; if their sources are still more remote, the track has been
+lost. The mythical peoples and animals dwelt in the deserts of Africa
+and the deserts and mountains of Asia. India, even more than Egypt, was
+their home. The mighty mountains that bordered it, the multitude of
+peoples that inhabited it, the strong touch of the grotesque in their
+art and ritual, and their curious sense of kinship with the elephant,
+the tiger, the snake, and the jackal made theirs the native soil of
+marvel. Many of the singular creatures that peopled the hinterlands of
+Africa seem to be emigrants from India and beyond.
+
+The earliest travel tales in Greek literature are found in Homer’s
+Odyssey commingled with accounts of places and peoples that are not
+of the earth. These stories of the tenth century before Christ look
+westward from Greece. In the poems of Pindar the strange outlines of
+eastern marvel appear on the Mediterranean scene and a new aspect
+of reality animates them. With the history of Herodotus, written in
+the fifth century before Christ, the invasion is well-nigh complete.
+Imbedded in the greatest of all histories, passages about the griffin,
+the phœnix and kindred creatures are scattered through volumes that
+contain the high story of the Persian attempt upon Greece, and the best
+accounts which the Mediterranean world had of the back lands of the
+earth. Herodotus had heard of so many wonderful things which were true
+that he made it a rule to report what he heard even where he doubted
+its truth; and to this rule the world owes much. The Halicarnassian
+doubted the existence of a sea north of Europe, or of the Tin Islands,
+but he gave them a place in his pages. He could not believe that
+the Phœnicians had circumnavigated Africa, but his record of their
+incredible assertion that as they sailed they “had the sun on their
+right” is evidence that the thing was done.
+
+Herodotus was attacked as untruthful by Ctesias and the
+Pseudo-Plutarch, and his monument at Thurium in Italy recites that
+he removed thither to escape ridicule; but in the main this was the
+ridicule of men who accepted his pleasant stories and doubted his
+history, and who were offended because with too candid a pen he
+sketched faction and faint-heartedness in the Greek states when Xerxes
+led his host across the Hellespont.
+
+After Herodotus the chief sponsor for antique marvel is Ctesias the
+Cnidian, whose work falls in the following generation. If the one
+history was the product of travel, the other was the product of
+prolonged residence abroad, Ctesias having been stationed as physician
+for seventeen years at the Persian court. He gave the Greeks their
+first special treatise on India, introduced the Deformed Folk to the
+west, and pictured the peninsula as a preserve of curious peoples
+and animals. So he made a notable book of his _Indika_, but among
+the learned it had small credit. “A writer not to be depended on,”
+Aristotle calls the author, and where Herodotus was accused of
+credulity, Ctesias was assailed for mendacity. Modern criticism,
+however, has identified several of his monstrous races with tribes
+still inhabiting Hindostan and partly excused other fables on the
+ground that he never saw India and put in his book only what the
+Persians told him of their neighbors to the east. When one people tells
+another the ways of a third, the theme is marvel.
+
+What was denied to Ctesias was vouchsafed to Alexander in the next
+generation. With his own eyes he saw India. The European race before
+which the east unveiled was the most gifted, curious, and imaginative
+of all peoples, and the east beheld it personified in the captivating
+figure of Alexander. The expedition brought legends back with it, and
+left other legends behind. Indian and Afghan and Turkoman and Arab
+never forgot the great Macedonian, while the whole literature of the
+west was colored by this eastern contact.
+
+A few other Greek names are linked with the travel tale. Scylax of
+Caryanda taxed credulity with his fabric of wonder. Aristotle examined
+reports of fabulous creatures, and fables as to actual species, and
+rejected most, but not all, of them. The study of anthropology,
+developed at Alexandria, found its harvest in the geography of Strabo
+and in the survey of the Erythræan Sea by Agatharcides. Both works
+contain curious accounts of curious tribes of men.
+
+Pausanias the Lydian, who lived in the second century of the Christian
+era, is better remembered than men with better title to remembrance,
+because his work happened to survive. His _Description of Greece_ has
+been compared to an old shoe flung high on the beach of time. An old
+man wrote it, interested in old things. Pausanias has much to say
+of the wonders of sacred grottos, trees, and springs. His method of
+taking a road and describing everything along it was copied by pilgrim
+writers, who clogged the paths of Palestine with their marvels. Modern
+criticism has discovered that he repeats as interviews with natives
+statements he had read in local handbooks, and that, betrayed thereby,
+he tells of seeing cities as flourishing places which had been in
+ruins for centuries. Yet Pausanias was a real traveler, although at
+times a luckless compiler.
+
+Lucian the Samosatan was his contemporary, but his contribution to
+marvel is a satire on the credulity of all travelers, among whom he
+arraigns Homer, Herodotus, and Ctesias. His _True History_ relates an
+imaginary voyage to the moon, and thence to the Fortunate Isles, where
+Ulysses entrusts him with a letter to Calypso. In the belly of a whale
+nearly two hundred miles long, which had swallowed his ship, he finds
+lakes, woods, and strange races of living men. It was the singular
+fortune of this travesty to provide material for epics which the Celts
+accepted as history and for adventures which were foisted on the
+narrative of Baron Munchausen.
+
+The Latin mind was inferior to the Greek chiefly in that it was
+deficient in curiosity. The Romans were content to rule the world
+rather than to understand it. It was enough that amber and silk and
+incense and spice should come to them from the four corners of the
+earth without their following the trade routes back to find what manner
+of people sent these things. Yet legend was active among the mariners
+and camel-drivers and porters of the races that served the Roman on the
+fringes of his empire. The fables of these porter-nations were passed
+on to the Arab and are preserved in the _Thousand and One Nights_.
+
+Rome, however, performed a service to the traditional world by
+producing the elder Pliny and his amazing _Natural History_. Pliny has
+not the charm, narrative gifts, or historical genius of Herodotus,
+but he comes half a millennium afterward and has more to report. He
+lacks the comprehensive and penetrating intelligence of Aristotle, but
+he knows more--of things that are so, and of things that are not so.
+His great work is perhaps the most impressive monument to industry
+raised by a single mind. The entire body of learning of the ancient
+world passed through his mind and came out again in the volumes which
+he calls a natural history but which are in fact an encyclopædia.
+These thirty-seven books record twenty thousand matters of importance
+collected from about two thousand volumes, only a few of which have
+survived. As his nephew, the younger Pliny, recites, it was his maxim
+that “there is no book so bad but some good may be got out of it.”
+
+To get it Pliny made notes, even in the bath. When he traveled, his
+secretary was by his side with a book and tablets, and if it was winter
+the scribe took dictation with his gloves on. In Rome Pliny never moved
+about except in a litter, reading while he was being carried through
+the streets. Once he rebuked his nephew for walking and “losing all
+those hours.”
+
+While tracing the courses of the stars, the description of countries,
+plants and animals, the anatomy of man, the properties of drugs, the
+nature of gems, the uses of metals, the science of farming and the
+fine arts, Pliny contrives also to sketch the geography of marvel. “It
+is really wonderful,” he declares, “to what a length the credulity of
+the Greeks will go.” Yet he draws most of his material from them, and
+whatever his own attitude toward the things he recites, the result of
+the recital was to give credulity its own text-book for a thousand
+years. Cynical as was his point of view, Pliny was yet a lover of
+marvel and searched it out and set it forth in his pages whether he
+believed it or not. It was enough that it was interesting.
+
+His was the journalistic angle. The _Natural History_ is in effect
+a vast newspaper report of the world of about A.D. 77. The columns
+of curious miscellany which newspapers print sometimes under such
+headings as “Oddities in the Day’s News” are legacies of his spirit.
+The monument to his immense industry and reportorial instinct is a
+work which fabulists of all succeeding ages used as a quarry for their
+own building materials. Had his been the questing mind of the Greek,
+instead of the drag-net intelligence of the journalist of an incurious
+but marvel-loving world, the view of the central countries of culture
+and of the horizon lands presented in the _Natural History_ would have
+less the aspect of a main circus tent surrounded by side shows.
+
+Solinus, surnamed Polyhistor or the Varied Narrator, distilled the
+marvels from Pliny, making some seven hundred extracts, adding to them
+from other sources, and producing a work which supplanted the older
+writer in the affections of the multitude throughout the Middle Ages.
+His _Collecteanea_ appeared in the third or fourth century of the
+Christian Era, and although he seems to have been a pagan grammarian,
+he had mainly Christian readers. St. Augustine quotes him four times
+in his _City of God_, and Isidore uses no less than two hundred
+extracts in his _Etymologies_. The pagan’s work was both a symptom and
+a cause of the intellectual decline in the Middle Ages. Other men did
+as he did, or accepted the results of his labors as sparing them its
+pains. What he did, and what Europe did after the breakdown of the old
+order of things, was to forget ancient wisdom and hold fast to ancient
+wonder. Solinus was spiritual father of the Christian fabulists, mentor
+of the Christian pilgrims.
+
+What Pliny wrote, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, Solinus copies
+with mouth agape. The world is become a playhouse, a curio hall, a
+province of faerie. One learns that, like man, the quail suffers from
+the falling sickness and that the cranes of Thrace travel southward
+in ballast, stuffing their craws with sand and pebbles. In the
+Mediterranean islands there is a “sardonic” plant, on eating which
+one grins horribly and dies of lockjaw. In Germany are the Hercynian
+birds whose feathers give light in the dark. Here also is a mule-like
+pastoral beast with so long an upper lip that he “cannot feed except
+walking backward.” In Africa are jovial apes which rejoice in the new
+of the moon and lament in its wane, and sphinxes and satyrs “easily
+taught to forget their wildness, very sweet faced, and full of toying
+continually.” There are no snakes in Ireland--and no sense of right and
+wrong.
+
+The _Physiologus_, an Alexandrian compilation, companions the
+_Collecteanea_, but introduces a moralizing note and thereby
+ushers a rabble of real and fabulous animals into the symbolism of
+ecclesiastical architecture. Isidore of Seville is a desiccated
+Solinus, dried out by theology and the specialized pursuits of the
+grammarian. He wrote at the opening of the seventh century. His
+_Etymologies_ has already been cited as that irreducible minimum of
+knowledge to which the epitomizing habit of Roman encyclopædists tended
+always. It shows also the Roman dependence on authority as a substitute
+for research, and the Roman worship of words. Easy it was for early
+Christian writers to take up the tradition of the encyclopædists, for
+it needed only that the authority of the pagan be replaced by that of a
+purer faith. The pagan marvels were accepted almost in a body and many
+of them are briefly recited by Isidore.
+
+How words breed legend is disclosed in the very title of the
+_Etymologies_. Carrying a little further the tradition of the Romans,
+with whom philology was almost as old as poetry and more important than
+natural science, Isidore seemed to think that when he had given the
+derivation of a term he had accomplished a complete description of the
+thing that bore its name. Words themselves were things transcendental.
+Thus he defines Barbarism as “the uttering of a word with an error
+in a letter or in a quantity.” _Nox_, the Latin word for night, “is
+derived from _nocere_ (to injure) because it injures the eyes.” “_Homo_
+is so named because he is made of _humus_ (earth), as it is told in
+_Genesis_.” “_Corpus_ (the body) is so called because being corrupted
+it perishes.”
+
+Isidore writes the texts for the chapter in the history of marvel that
+deals with Christian fabulism, pilgriming, and cosmography. It is
+Christian only in the sense that Christians of the earlier centuries
+tell the tales, make the journeys, and construct the world theories.
+Its subject matter is Jewish and pagan, with the two elements sometimes
+in an artless, sometimes in a forced, combination; it presents one
+side of that contact and conflict between Aryan and Semitic cultures
+which is the history of the last nineteen centuries. For the first part
+of the period the result of the conflict in the field of geography,
+travel, and tradition was what might be expected where simple-witted
+peoples, lately emerged from barbarism and not yet nationally minded,
+meet a race of ancient culture and intense national spirit. Jewish
+conceptions prevailed. It was thought that children, if taught no other
+tongue, would naturally speak Hebrew. Europe accepted as a literal
+recital of fact the Sumerian legend preserved in Hebrew Scriptures
+that the human race began with Adam--“the mean, toolless and frivolous
+Adam,” as Andrew Lang calls him--and his consort in the Garden of Eden;
+and from Hebrew chronology it figured that the earth must be about
+four thousand years old. It made over its geography to conform to Old
+Testament texts, and, discarding the world-knowledge of the classic
+civilizations, it made over its maps to show Jerusalem in the center of
+a flat earth.
+
+When pilgrims to Palestine had visited the scenes of the birth and
+passion of Christ they proceeded to explore the Jewish background for
+memorials of Old Testament history, with side trips into the realm of
+pagan marvel. All of them looked for the pillar of salt by the Dead
+Sea in which Lot’s wife was entombed; for centuries this column comes
+and goes in their narratives. Silvia of Aquitaine, whose journey falls
+in the fourth century, says there was no pillar there--the sea had
+engulfed it--but others saw it later. Theodosius says it waxed and
+waned with the phases of the moon. Antoninus denies the report that
+pasturing sheep had diminished its size by licking it. A fragment of
+this marvel is in the Library of Congress at Washington, together with
+the report of an American traveler who measured the pillar and found it
+sixty feet high and forty feet around, larger than he believed Lot’s
+wife could have been.
+
+Other of the earlier pilgrims are said to have gone into Arabia to see
+the dunghill where Job contended with his comforters. The pyramids,
+some thought, were the barns of Joseph. The Apples of Adam still showed
+the marks of his teeth. The Jordan halted its waters at the time of
+the Epiphany. Devils were seen on Mount Gilboa. The torments of hell
+lay under the Sea of Sodom and Abbott Daniel had a whiff of them from
+its surface. In Samaria, Paula, friend of Saint Jerome, saw “devils
+writhing and yelling in different kinds of torture, and men before the
+tombs of the saints, howling like wolves, barking like dogs, roaring
+like lions, hissing like serpents, bellowing like bulls.” One pilgrim
+writer copied another, few took any note of the natural features of
+Palestine, most of them were of primitive culture, and the women had a
+wider outlook than the men.
+
+The Jew, Rabbi Moses Petachia, made a pilgrimage, reporting among other
+things that the wind which blew from the shallow parts of the Sea of
+Azov, the Stagnant Sea of old geography, was fatal to passers-by; he
+saw on the Euphrates a flying camel which could go a mile in a second.
+Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela undertook a remarkable journey in the twelfth
+century to learn the condition of the Jewish communities of the east.
+He brought back valuable information, but said he could not approach
+the vast ruins of Babylon because of the scorpions and serpents that
+haunted them, located mythical Jewish states in the deserts of Arabia,
+and repeated numerous fables on hearsay. If he ever took this journey,
+says the elder Disraeli, it must have been with his nightcap on.
+
+How the new peoples of the west lost the sense of historical
+perspective under the Jewish impact is shown in the long speculation
+over the whereabouts of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Classic learning
+was dismissed as “windy babble.” The fate of the peoples of the
+great monarchies of antiquity aroused no curiosity. But everywhere
+were sought the footsteps of the vanished Israelites. They were
+imprisoned in the Caucasus, they had become Afghan mountaineers, they
+were privileged subjects of Prester John, they were settled in the
+Canaries, they had reached China, they had colonized Peru, they were
+the progenitors of the British and American peoples, they were the
+ancestors of the North American Indian, and the first Mormons.
+
+While Europe was curious about the shrines, landmarks, and legends of
+Asia, and held it to be the continent of wonder, Asia did not return
+the interest. It had few travel tales to tell of the peoples of the
+west, few reports of any kind. The Chinese saw little of note in
+the Roman Empire, “Great China,” save that it had good jugglers and
+asbestos cloth and that the eastern gate of Constantinople was covered
+with shining gold leaf and was two hundred feet high. India ignored the
+sea, and was self-contained in its life and legends; the fabulous and
+felicitous peoples of the Puranas dwell in trans-Himalayan valleys.
+Arab sailors were carriers of Indian fables and may have taught them to
+the Chinese; a large part of Chinese marvel has a quality suggesting
+importation. Yet the superior historical sense of the Chinese,
+preserving almost intact marvel tales that were brought to them, made
+the rest of the world their debtor. Their encyclopædias and classics
+are quite in the style of Pliny, as, for example, the _Shan Hai King_,
+or _Wonders by Land and Sea_, to which the dates of B.C. 2700, 2205,
+and 222 have been severally ascribed, and which is also alleged to be a
+Taoist forgery of the fourth century A.D. Monster peoples and animals
+are in this work, and one of its early prefaces relates the journey of
+a king to the Halls of the Giants in the east, to the mansions of the
+Fairy Queen in the west, across a bridge of tortoises in the south and
+over streets made of feathers in the north. It is also recited that by
+imperial decree nine urns were set up in various parts of China on
+which, to the fear of the people, the common and the strange animals of
+each region were pictured.
+
+Religious fervor at length set the feet of Chinese upon paths along
+which wonder grew. Buddhist priests and scholars went east to teach and
+west to learn. If the annals of the Middle Kingdom are to be credited,
+a fair interpretation of the record is that the Chinese reached the
+coast of North America in A.D. 499 and again in 502 and 556. They
+found countries which they described as the Land of Marked Bodies and
+the Great Han country. The natives of the former had horses and draft
+deer with great horns (reindeer) and esteemed copper more than gold. A
+thousand furlongs east was the Kingdom of Women--erect, white-skinned,
+hairy, timorous, subsisting on a salt plant like wormwood. The
+residents of the Land of Marked Bodies, supposed to be the Aleutian
+Islands, were tattooed, joyous, rich in gold and silver. Eastward was
+Great Han, possibly British Columbia, the wild beasts of which devoured
+guilty criminals, but spared persons falsely accused. There was also a
+country of dog-headed men.
+
+These lands have been identified with regions of northeastern Asia,
+and because of their climate and products with American regions as far
+south as California and Mexico.
+
+The westward journeys of Buddhist scholars are historical and
+important. They went to India at various periods from the beginning of
+the fifth to the latter part of the seventh century of our era to study
+the Law of Buddha, to visit the sites associated with Sakya Muni and
+to collect sacred books and relics. One Chinese work has a record of
+fifty-six of these worthies. The Buddhist pilgrims were men of higher
+intelligence and still greater credulity than those who at about the
+same time were journeying out of Europe to the shrines of Palestine.
+Their largest figure, and one of the world’s greatest travelers, is
+Hiouen Thsang, who left China in A.D. 629 and returned seventeen years
+later.
+
+In the desert of Gobi, Hiouen saw spectral armies charging down upon
+him and at night the flare of spectral torches, but at a word of
+scripture the glamour faded. In the T’sung-ling mountains Fa-hien found
+poison dragons that spat the storm and avalanche; here, says Hiouen,
+one should not wear red garments nor carry loud-sounding calabashes.
+The pass of Varasena was so high that birds could not fly over it,
+but crossed the summit afoot. Report had it that in the deserts of
+Turkestan a sandstorm covered in a single day as many cities as there
+were days in the year.
+
+The India that Hiouen traversed was a land of ruins and marvels.
+He tells of demon women and miracle gold and wonder-working Buddha
+teeth; of a shepherd that became a dragon; of a roe that brought forth
+a beautiful girl with deer feet; of a risha that could fly until a
+princess touched him, and thereafter he merely walked; of a holy man
+whose sanctity made light in a dark wood. There are elephants in his
+pages that tend shrines with flowers and perfumes, and wild asses
+that protect an altar, and desert ants as large as hedgehogs. There
+are dragon domains and serpent palaces underground, and aboveground a
+Buddhist tower made of cows’ dung. There is a City of Hump-backed Women
+and on a distant island the Kingdom of Western Women who traffic in
+gems with Byzantium and accept lovers from there.
+
+Most of these things of Chinese report the west knows also from
+Herodotus and Pliny and Polo. Out of India, marvel.
+
+The Nestorian chapter in the joint history of religion and wonder bears
+a twelfth-century date, but deals with the inheritance of classic
+fable. Although the mediæval legend of a powerful Christian monarch
+named Prester John, who reigned amid pagan enemies somewhere in the
+heart of Asia, was based on rumors of the eastward spread of the
+Nestorian faith, the Christian element in it is weighted with all the
+pagan wonders of an earlier time. The realm of Presbyter John is the
+range of strange animals and stranger men. Thus the apocryphal letter
+bearing his signature which reached the west declares: “Our land is the
+home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum,
+cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears,
+white merles, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses,
+wild oxen, and wild men, men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes
+before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high
+giants, cyclopes, and similar women; it is the home, too, of the
+phœnix, and of nearly all living animals.”
+
+Here, continues the royal letter writer, are the accursed Gog and
+Magog, and the Lost Israelites, and the worm Salamander, and Amazons
+and Brahmans, and paradise and pearls and pepper. And when John goes
+to war a million and a half soldiers follow him. The epistle is pagan
+marvel’s broadest gesture over lands unknown.
+
+With differences of Oriental temperament and cast of thought, Arab
+geography and travel parallel every phase of the west except the Age of
+Ignorance. The Arabs escaped a Lactantius and a Cosmas, but they had
+their Plinies and Ptolemies, their own sea epic, and in Ibn Batuta a
+traveler second only to Marco Polo. Until the Middle Ages were ending
+the centers of world culture were at Bagdad and Cordoba. If Christendom
+accepted the ancient fables and rejected the ancient learning, Islam
+embraced both.
+
+The great Arab geographers blended in their works the methods of
+Ptolemy and Pliny, together with a story-telling strain from the
+coffee-houses of the east. The very titles of their works suggest
+this--Aljahedh’s _Book of the Cities and Marvels of Countries_,
+Massoudy’s _Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones_, Al
+Istakhri’s _Book of Climates_, Ibn Haukal’s _Book of Roads and
+Kingdoms_, Ibn Khordadbeh’s _Principal Trade Routes_, Abulfeda’s
+_Encyclopædia_, and Idrisi’s _The Delight of Those Who Seek to Wander
+Through the Regions of the World_. These are treatises such as would
+be expected from a race which had found its destinies in trade routes,
+which had pitched its tents in the seats of the ancient culture, and
+which took its ease in coffee-houses. They show Ptolemy’s sense of
+distances and measurements, Pliny’s note-taking habits and appetite for
+marvel, the bazar instinct for entertaining stories, and the Arab’s
+poetic fancy. Massoudy’s is the typical product of his race. It is a
+vast and glittering collection of history, science, travel, and legend,
+thrown together by an imagination to which the varied and shifting
+shows of life and nature were perpetual delight. What mainly it and
+its companion works lack is the Greek sense of form and capacity for
+precise thinking.
+
+Arab geography and marvel are best to be studied in the seven voyages
+of Sindbad the Sailor. These are true travels, tricked out with
+legendary travel tales, taken by a number of men, notably the Two
+Mussulman Travelers of the ninth century, and all ascribed to one man
+in order to give them the epic quality. Sindbad is the Arab Ulysses and
+this the Arab Odyssey. The theater of the eastern epic is the Indian
+Sea, rather than the Mediterranean, it is well-nigh free from myths of
+the supernatural, and its geographical notes, although disguised, are
+definite. One can trace, and Beazley has done so, the itineraries of
+the much-buffeted merchant-wanderer, and identify the material of many
+of his adventures.
+
+Wak-wak, the destination of the first voyage, is perhaps Japan; the
+island of mysterious nightly music is an echo of Solinus; the adventure
+of the whale’s back is repeated by St. Brendan’s companions, and the
+owl-headed fish are borrowed from Khordadbeh. The accounts of the roc
+of Zanzibar and the Indian valley of diamonds in the second voyage are
+to be found also in the _Travels_ of Marco Polo. The third voyage is
+lifted from Homer; the hairy, ugly little dwarfs are the pygmies of the
+Iliad, and the one-eyed giant who ate Sindbad’s companions is a negro
+Polyphemus out of the Odyssey. The fourth voyage, with its incidents
+of cannibal ghouls and their reason-destroying herbs, the burial of
+Sindbad alive with his deceased native wife, and his encounter with
+pepper-gatherers, is a distorted narrative of Indian races, customs,
+and products. The Old Man of the Sea, or Sheikh of the Seaboard, in the
+fifth voyage is the orang-utan of Sumatra. The sixth voyage is mainly a
+description of Ceylon. In the seventh voyage the account of elephants
+that transported Sindbad to their cemetery, where without killing them
+he could have all the ivory he required, is about as Pliny would have
+written it.
+
+Into this east of glowing sorceries came two men of the west in the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the one to traverse Asia from end
+to end, and see more of wonder than any man had seen before, the other
+to roam still farther, for his journeys were in his imagination and
+had only its limits. The _Book of Diversities_ of Marco Polo is the
+greatest of all narratives of wanderings. The _Marvellous Adventures
+of Sir John Maundeville_ is the wildest of all romances that purport
+to be fact. The two works may be considered together if for no other
+reason than the ironic comment they afford on popular judgments before
+time redresses them. The facts of Polo were long treated as fables.
+The fables of Maundeville were accepted as facts. Sir John’s book was
+translated into every European tongue and passed through hundreds of
+editions. Because of his reports on the wealth of Kublai Khan, Marco
+was nicknamed Il Milioni; he was asked on his deathbed if he would
+not recant some of the things he had said, and after his death there
+figured in Venetian masques a comic character who told unbelievable
+tales to guffawing street crowds and was called Marco Milioni.
+
+The Venetian spent twenty-four years in Asia, most of the time in the
+service of the philosopher-monarch, Kublai Khan, and returned to his
+native city in 1295. There are fables in his book, hearsay statements
+usually reported as such; but their effect of illusion is slight
+compared with the staggering and splendid realities which the narrative
+unfolded before eyes unprepared for them. Marco drew aside the curtain
+of Asia. It was as if the spectators in some provincial theater,
+used only to the antics of vagrant mountebanks and the crudities of
+folk-drama, saw for the first time one of those extravaganzas of
+music, movement, and color, built around a tale of the Orient, which
+tax even the dramatic resources of world capitals to produce. Sitting
+in their own darkness, the simpler peoples of the west saw on a stage
+hung with costly draperies and dim with clouds of incense, a stage of
+vast spaces and long perspectives, the civilizations of the venerable
+east--India, dreaming in the sun with its jeweled rajahs and naked
+fakirs; China, with its teeming populations, its immense inland fleets,
+its wisdom and its riches; Burma, serene amid the clang of its temple
+bells; the golden roofs of Japan rising out of cherry blossoms; Tibet,
+wrapped in a vision; the Indian Archipelago, with its spices, pearls,
+and cannibals. Other figures less clearly defined appeared in the
+background--nomads of the steppes, fur-hunting Samoyeds of the tundras,
+mountain tribes that pressed their women upon stranger guests; glimpses
+even of farthest Africa, of a Christian Ethiopia, of the Zanzibar of
+negroes, ivory, and ambergris, and of Madagascar, past which the sea
+bore relentlessly southward.
+
+Of many of these things Europe heard for the first time from Marco,
+of all of them his was the first illuminating report, and most of them
+his own eyes had seen. Here Truth is the stuff of Illusion. Though
+Marco speaks of dog-faced Andamanese, and islands of Amazons, and Lop
+with its evil spirits, and the storm-raising witches of Socotra, and
+the roc, it is not on these, but on his verities, that wonder waits.
+The center of the wonder is Kublai Khan, who built the pleasure-dome
+in Xanadu. Greatly is he beholden to the traveler, who came to him
+one morning out of the unknown. But for Marco, as Masefield finely
+says, this lord of lords, ruler of so many cities, so many gardens, so
+many fish pools, would be only a name, an image covered by the sands.
+Remembrance is with those who see, and write.
+
+Though he did not see, Maundeville wrote. The author of the volume
+that bears this name may have seen Syria, but he claims to have been
+everywhere. He served the Sultan of Egypt against the Bedouins and
+declined his daughter’s hand in marriage. He drank of the Well of
+Youth. He served the emperor of China in his war against Mancy. He took
+astronomical observations in the Indian Ocean. He traversed Russia,
+Livonia, Asia Minor, Amazonia, Persia, India, Tartary, China, Arabia,
+Libya, Ethiopia. One great thing his humility forbade him to essay, and
+that was the Terrestrial Paradise. “I was not worthy,” he says.
+
+The fabricator of the Maundeville narrative seems to have been Jean de
+Bourgogne, a physician of Liège, who died there in 1373, long enough
+after his book appeared for it already to have won reputation; on his
+deathbed he was proud to avow his authorship, though not his imposture.
+It is to be inferred that he appropriated his pen name of Maundeville,
+knight of St. Albans in England, from the title of a romantic satire
+by Jean du Pin published a few years before, in which the writer is
+conducted in a dream through a world of allegory by a knight named
+Mandevie whose home was on a white mountain--Mons Albus or St. Albans,
+as has been suggested. Where the adventures of Maundeville came from is
+not in doubt. Friar Odoric, a great but credulous traveler, had spent
+fourteen years in Asia, largely in India and Cathay, and had written
+out his story on his return to Italy in 1330. Maundeville, whose book
+is perhaps of twenty years later, looted his predecessor so thoroughly
+that the friar was deemed the copyist of the knight; Samuel Purchas
+thought that “some later fabler,” like Odoric, had stuffed the knight’s
+tale. Maundeville raided also the fables of Solinus, the forged letter
+of Prester John, the travels of King Hayton of Armenia, and the varied
+lore and legend of all lands and times collected in the preceding
+century by the great encyclopædist of the Middle Ages, Vincent of
+Beauvais. Apparently he never heard of Polo.
+
+The bogus knight won a wide and fascinated audience by throwing his
+marvels into a tale of which he is the hero. His own adventures, his
+travels from land to land, his comments on countries and peoples, give
+his book unity, movement, and the narrative interest which is lacking
+in the works of Ctesias, Pliny, Solinus, and their school. Ctesias
+writes of India, but never professes to have been there, and Pliny and
+Solinus sit afar and look over the world. Maundeville comes out of
+the library and crosses the earth, staff in hand, in an earlier, and
+unhallowed, _Pilgrim’s Progress_. His is the method, and his almost was
+the vogue, of the Odyssey and of the Sindbad saga. The classic brevity
+and sterility in recounting mirabilia, he escapes in some measure,
+robbing several fables to enrich one. It happened that an early
+rendering of his work into English was done when the island tongue was
+in a fluid state, and done with such sense of idiom that he has been
+called, although falsely, the father of English prose.
+
+Maundeville is most interesting when he is most audacious, or when
+he stumbles most. At Joppa he transposes the figures of a classic
+myth, and reports seeing a rib forty feet long of “Andromeda a great
+giant,” chained there before Noah’s flood. The chameleon (chamois?) is
+“a little Beast, as a Goat.” In Pathen the giant tortoise of Odoric
+becomes “a kind of Snails that be so great that many Persons may lodge
+them in their Shells.” The rats in the Isle of Charia are “as great as
+Hounds here.” There are wool-bearing hens in Mancy. The manna in the
+Land of Job “cleanseth the Blood and putteth out Melancholy.” Chaldea
+is a country of fair men and evil women. In the Pepper Country “the
+Women shave their Beards and the Men not.”
+
+The author scatters his mythical islands even over the mainland of
+Asia. Yet his sense of the shape and rotundity of the earth was far
+in advance of his time. In the midst of romancings, one finds this,
+the clearest word of his century, and in the field of exploration the
+most constructive: “I say to you certainly that Men may environ all the
+Earth of all the World, as well underneath as above, and return again
+to their Country, if that they had Company and Shipping and Conduct;
+and always they should find Men, Lands and Isles, as well as in this
+Country.” For this declaration, for the vision of the Valley of the
+Shadow of Death which Bunyan took from him and he from Odoric, for
+the delight that his fictitious narrative still conveys, and for the
+English prose which is its vehicle, one may half forgive the physician
+of Liege his pose of a gouty English knight, dictating the true story
+of adventurous years to ease hours of broken rest, and ending it with a
+benediction, followed, anthem-wise, by a chorus of amens.
+
+The remainder of the story of marvel, so far as it is a literary
+phenomenon, is a sea tale told by men of the west, for Prince Henry
+the Navigator was born a few years after Jean de Bourgogne died, and
+with his manhood there opens the era of maritime discovery. Meanwhile
+the northwest of Europe had entered the record with Norse and Irish
+chapters. Though maps of the early Middle Ages placed the griffins and
+the cynocephali in the north of Europe, the north knew them not. Giants
+and trolls it knew, and the Iceland sagas tell of vampires that hid in
+heaps of stockfish, and monster men, dragons, and bulls that guarded a
+haunted shore. The inevitable compilations came later. The history of
+Norway written by Pontoppidan in the eighteenth century is a brief for
+Scandinavian waters as the habitat of prodigious things.
+
+The Celts neither robbed nor traded on the sea, and the very ports of
+Ireland were opened by Northmen; yet one of the three great epics of
+the deep, the _Voyage of St. Brendan_, is Irish, and monks are its
+heroes. The five Irish _Imrama_ or sea tales, of which this is the
+chief, weave a spell beyond any other woven upon the deep, because they
+look westward toward hidden continents that presently were to loom
+through the mists, and track with spectral craft the very seas that
+foamed erelong around the prows of Spain. Working with bits of old
+beliefs, as a craftsman with bits of broken glass, the Celt fashioned
+an oriel window through which he glimpsed the lands of dream. It was
+magic like that of Gwyn ab Nudd, King of Faerie, who spread before St.
+Collen the semblance of a feast in a great court. “I will not eat the
+leaves of trees,” said the saint, and flung holy water about him, and
+“there was neither castle, nor troops, nor maidens, nor music, nor the
+appearance of any thing whatever, but the green hillocks.”
+
+Fables of old time which had smoldered through the later Middle Ages,
+and which were rekindled by fresh contacts with classic marvel in the
+revival of letters, blazed into fierce life in the age of discovery.
+When new continents swam into ken, and hidden empires showed themselves
+for a moment on distant mountain sides, only to crash down at the onset
+of a handful of adventurous men, nothing seemed incredible. A world
+which had denied its own shape awoke to the fact of antipodal lands and
+peoples and was prepared to believe anything. The extravagant things
+it credited--and herein is palliation for its credulity--were yet
+small beside the wonders with which reality smote it in the face. The
+prodigious races of antiquity that had retreated before the traveler
+seemed at last to have been run to cover in those parts of the New
+World whither Spanish explorers penetrated. South America presented
+itself as a fulfillment of classic wonder and a proof of the unity of
+the human story.
+
+Mythical America was in part a projection of the dreaming mind of
+Spain upon the sensitive consciousness of savages. There are stories
+that have a way of taking root as soon as they are transplanted, and
+by the incorporation of native elements of accommodating themselves
+so completely to new surroundings as to deceive the very men who had
+loosed them. Hence the mingling of Old and New World elements in
+the tales of giants, pygmies, Amazons, satyrs, and acephalites. The
+conquistadors put leading questions, and had the answers they wanted.
+If they were deceived, yet there was more of the scientific spirit in
+the men who set out in search of Paradise or El Dorado, than in all the
+generations of encyclopædists who copied down incredible things and
+never went forth to find them.
+
+One may trace the outlines of Mythical America in the journals of
+Columbus; in the writings of Peter Martyr and Garcilaso de la Vega;
+in the monographs of conquistadors like Coronado; in the _History of
+the Indies_ by Oviedo, which Las Casas unjustly declares is “as full
+of lies almost as pages,” and in Hakluyt’s _Principal Voyages_, justly
+called the English prose epic. For the most fabulous and fascinating
+picture one turns to Raleigh’s account of his expedition to Guiana in
+1595. It is at once a collection of mirabilia, a story of adventure, a
+courtly address to the “Lady of Ladies” (Queen Elizabeth), a commercial
+prospectus, and the brief of a man on the defensive. In its pages the
+southern coasts of the Caribbean are as rich in marvel as the southern
+coasts of the Mediterranean in the pages of Pliny.
+
+Earlier travelers had found it well to secure specimens of ores,
+plants, and savages as vouchers for their credit among skeptical
+stay-at-homes, and the Spaniards took the precaution of carrying
+notaries in their ships to attest their statements. In the eighteenth
+century a more effective check was developed for travel tales.
+The science of criticism superseded the habit of compilation. The
+reports of travelers were examined, sifted, and compared by closet
+philosophers. French savants like Buache, Delisle, and Fleurieu
+challenged the realms of prodigy and had no answer from them.
+Humboldt’s great journey into Spanish America at the end of the century
+is the recessional. Through the lands of legend he wends his way, a
+patient, sometimes a pensive, observer, and puts Atlantis, El Dorado,
+the Amazons and the wild men of the woods to the question. His report
+is the most tolerant, suggestive, and illuminating document in the
+literature of marvel. Soon afterward began the scientific study of
+European folklore with the brothers Grimm as pioneers.
+
+The remarkable things which the North American Indian had to tell,
+most of them, were not assayed until after Humboldt’s time. Save where
+the Spaniard had been, they have the undiluted aboriginal quality;
+yet a bookish note, which has been imputed to Viking influence before
+Columbus, is in eastern Algonquin and Eskimo sea lore and giant lore.
+These tales of the northern continent did not launch expeditions, nor
+enter the great narratives of travel, and they have yet to win their
+indicated place in literature. There is wonder in them, and poetry, and
+the deep reflection of untutored minds; though crude the backgrounds
+and the figures that animate them, they parallel almost the entire
+array of legendary lands and peoples which the classic world assembled.
+Skillful old story-tellers--“delight-makers” they were called--told
+them at night about a dim fire in the ceremonial roundhouses. Winter
+was the time, for then, says Schoolcraft, the strange beings that might
+be underground or in the lakes and streams could not hear through the
+frozen surfaces the merry tales that the Indian dared tell about them,
+and the laughter of the roundhouse.
+
+Rude are these records of a people whose trickster-hero might be the
+obscene and ofttimes ridiculous coyote instead of Ulysses; who spoke
+of caribou back-fat and not of the lotus, and who had “the sacred
+groaning stick” rather than the lyre of Hermes. Their myth-figures, no
+demigods of marble perfection, are the coyote, the buzzard, the hare,
+the loon, the lizard--in reality the Indian in his nakedness; and their
+evil beings are flint people and awesome rolling skulls. Yet they could
+see in the stars the light of lodge fires, speak of the rainbow as the
+road of the dead, picture the whirlwind as the dance of a ghost, find
+a relation between a gust and the flutter of a moth’s wings, trace the
+drift of spirits down the wind, and catch on the throat of the humming
+bird a gleam of the fire it stole in a Promethean adventure. No weary
+Titan upholds the Indian sky, but in Tlingit story an old woman stands
+under the earth with a mighty post and supports it.
+
+Shape-shifting is at the basis of North American myth, and the
+substantial identity of men and animals is proclaimed by it. “Baalam’s
+ass,” says Leland, “spoke once for every Christian; every animal spoke
+once for the Indian.”
+
+If one marvels how the fabric of fable held together so long alike
+in classic and savage lands, one has only to make some change in a
+familiar bedtime story told to children. Their protest is instant; they
+want the tale as they have heard it. So do men.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXV. The Gains of Fable
+
+
+It has been well for men that they have been citizens of two
+worlds--the traditional world and the world of reality. Whatever harm
+they have suffered in either has come from but two things. These things
+are fear and selfishness, wherein are all the frustrations and all the
+cruelties. The rest has been good.
+
+The myths of fear kept men from sailing west and south. Until a few
+centuries ago the imaginary terrors of the Atlantic and of the tropics
+hid from them the knowledge that men like unto themselves lived in
+all parts of the earth, and that the winds would waft them to these
+along smooth pathways of the sea. The myths of selfishness--the tales
+that maritime nations told of evil things in waters and upon coasts
+which they would close to the enterprise of others--wrought the same
+mischiefs that greed and falsehood work anywhere. They retarded the
+advance of learning, restrained the intercourse of nations, and
+recoiled at last on the heads of those who invented them.
+
+The gains of fable are writ large in the history of modern exploration.
+Error was the guiding star of discovery. A vain fancy was the most
+precious cargo of the caravels, as it was the keenest weapon of the
+conquistadors. The coasting voyages around Africa into the eastern
+world would have been longer deferred if men had known that the Dark
+Continent reached so far to the south. The discovery of America was due
+to three stupendous mistakes--the belief that Asia stretched thousands
+of miles farther eastward than it does; the belief that Japan was
+a thousand miles farther from Asia than it is; the belief that the
+circumference of the earth was three thousand miles less than its true
+dimension. The total of these mistakes was so great that the whole of
+the New World lay concealed within it. Had Columbus known that he must
+sail due west for nearly twelve thousand miles to reach Cathay, he
+would have foregone his enterprise.
+
+Because the Spaniards made marvels the text for launching expeditions
+instead of telling or compiling stories, their delusions as to the
+Americas of the sixteenth century constitute the strangest chapter of
+travel tale. But “he that would bring home the wealth of the Indies
+must carry the wealth of the Indies with him”; the illusory expeditions
+of Spain had results that were denied to the more pedestrian
+adventuring of other nations. One of these led Cabeza de Vaca across
+the territory of the United States from Atlantic to Pacific, as early
+as 1539. It was not until 1805, in the Lewis and Clark expedition,
+that the cooler advance of the Anglo-Saxon matched this feat. In their
+search for illusive golden cities the countrymen of the Cid explored
+the mountains and savannas of South America, the American Southwest,
+and even the South Seas, and did it all so far ahead of the English
+and American penetration of the northern continent that the story of
+their adventures was an old tale before the Saxon had entered the Great
+Plains, or climbed the Great Divide, or dropped down to the Pacific.
+
+Such is the service of dreams. They fire the mind and make the feet of
+young men restless. The province of wonder has been to rescue men from
+their heaviness. They settle down in one place, and their children and
+chattels tie them there, but the nomad in them droops within unchanging
+horizons and sickens down in dullness. No report of other lands like
+their own and other peoples like themselves will arouse them. They want
+to hear of marvels, and every tale of them is a pleasant tale even if
+it is of one-eyed cannibal giants, or malignant dwarfs, or headless
+men, or the storm-winged roc, or the Swallower of the West. At least
+it opens new vistas, and peoples them with creatures such as cannot be
+seen at home. So it was that William of Wykeham instructed the scholars
+of New College, Oxford, to occupy the long winter evenings in the
+Middle Ages with “singing, or reciting poetry, or with the chronicles
+of the different kingdoms, or with the wonders of the world.”
+
+The spirit that leads men to seek distant markets, or dig for gold in
+mines, or search for raw materials on the other side of the earth, is
+modern, and still only a few have it. Through most of the story of man
+it has seemed a better thing to hunt for hidden treasure, to seek for
+the Golden Fleece or a golden city, to set out for the Terrestrial
+Paradise, to win to the back of the north wind. Even now, report that a
+prehistoric monster haunts a lake in Patagonia, or that an expedition
+will hunt pirate gold on an island of the Pacific, stirs pulses
+that would not respond to the news that a great coal field had been
+uncovered in Alaska or China.
+
+Imagination and curiosity, whence have come most of the travel tales,
+have builded where building was needed to fill in empty places whereon
+men refused to rear the structures of reality, or to replace what
+they tore down. In their passages from age to age and in their long
+migrations, men have been constantly forgetting things, carrying over
+long stretches of the sea such memorials of the heliolithic culture as
+a particular process of mummification, but not the arts and sciences
+that had gone with it. They have discovered lands only to lose track
+of them. Authentic notes of distant countries and customs they would
+not credit; there has been ignorant incredulity as well as ignorant
+credulity. The true things in geography to which men have shut their
+eyes are no more than countervailed by the vain things they thought
+they saw. The tales of afternoon lands and the singular peoples of
+the mountains and deserts widen, if only with the shifting contours
+of legend, horizons which had been narrowed by forgetfulness and a
+perverse refusal to believe.
+
+Nor have even these tales been enough to satisfy with their close
+likeness to realities. Men have played with the thought of other
+countries above the clouds or in far-off seas, imagining things which
+none was expected to believe, and yet which copyists repeated and
+literal-minded men accepted sometimes as having basis of fact. Such
+are Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun.
+Aristophanes pictured a Cloud-Cuckoo Town, which the birds built
+between earth and heaven to bring the gods to terms, and filled it
+with the trillings and pipings of feathered creatures. The satirist
+who wrote of Lilliput, Brobdingnag and Laputa had read Lucian’s _True
+History_. In Ariosto’s Limbo of the Moon were stored such treasures as
+time misspent in play, vain efforts, good intentions, unpaid vows, the
+promises of princes, and deathbed alms.
+
+Three of these imaginary countries were sketched with such fidelity to
+detail, poetic or grotesque, that they lived in the thought of men
+with almost a sense of the actual. Scobellum was a fruitful land, the
+people of which went beyond the cannibals in cruelty, the Egyptians in
+luxury, the Persians in pride, the Cretans in falsehood, the Germans in
+drunken license. Whereupon the gods turned the drunkards into swine,
+the lecherers into goats, the gamblers into asses, the idle women
+into milch cows, and the misers into moles. The Land of Cockaigne was
+a country of luxury and high feeding where the houses were built of
+barley sugar and the streets were paved with pastry and goods were free
+in the shops. Fiddler’s Green is a place where always the fiddlers are
+fiddling and the pipers piping, and the dancers dancing; it lies on the
+other side of hell.
+
+Travel tales that purport to be true have a way of rebuking unbelief
+with their half triumphs. Noting only the impossible items in a
+tradition, learned skepticism has opened itself to discomfiture by
+rejecting the whole. The two outstanding figures of fable, the pygmy
+and the Amazon, point the moral. In the more grotesque forms may be
+found notes on forgotten history and on palæontology. Those tales for
+which no basis of fact can be discerned are yet projections of the
+minds of primitive men on the clouds, seen after the men themselves
+have dropped below the horizon, like the red in the sky after sunset.
+At least their colors illumine the manuscript of antiquity and the rude
+scroll of savagery.
+
+Though fantastic fables were bred thereof, it has been loss and not
+gain that the old sense of kinship with the fowls of the air and the
+beasts of the field is no more. There were compassions and tolerances
+in this imagined relation, with just a hint of deep insight. Before the
+brotherhood of man became so much as a phrase, the brotherhood of all
+created things was a fact. Killing for the mere stupid sake of killing
+had no place in a world in which men believed that the first men were
+ants; in which they made the hare, the coyote, and the raven heroic
+figures of their epics; in which they celebrated the piety of the oryx,
+the elephant, and the llama; in which they acclaimed the strength of
+the lion, the keen sight of the eagle, and the sagacity of the fox,
+and in which they spared the bear, the deer, and the parrot because
+it seemed to them that these were ancestral folk. Were these savages
+farther from the truth than men of the present day whose interest is
+not in the lives but in the deaths of beasts, and who rob the woods and
+fields of half their beauty and significance by their senseless pursuit
+of the pathetic, defenseless, and yet kindred beings that harbor there?
+“My sister the swallow” is the chant of St. Francis. In a better time
+when wild life will be cherished and not hunted, it will be remembered
+that the dawn-peoples had a vision which was not all vanity.
+
+The world of reality wears a rich garb that was woven for it by the
+world of tradition ages ago. Shifting lands of legend have become solid
+ground. There was no island of Brasil, but the country of Brazil bears
+its name. There was perhaps no Antilia, domain of the Seven Bishops,
+but the Antilles stretch their veritable ramparts across the Caribbean.
+The Amazons are commemorated by the earth’s greatest river. There are
+beasts and birds which perpetuate the names of the dragon, the harpy,
+the sea horse, the unicorn, the satyr. The pity of the pelican lives
+in Christian symbolism. The wisdom of the brute runs through Æsopian
+fables and mediæval bestiaries. The creatures of classic prodigy--the
+griffins, the phœnix, the dragon--animate the blazons of heraldry.
+The ideal lands and marvelous peoples of ancient story lend a strange
+beauty to the romances of chivalry. Half of the appeal of cathedrals is
+in the monstrous figures--bestial, grotesque, devilish--which proclaim
+from their roofs and buttresses and sculptured walls a paradox which
+is no paradox at all, that the sanctuaries of the spirit are set among
+the perilous ways of the world. The old credulities are enshrined in
+the language of every people, in the imagery of the arts, and in the
+bedtime tales that follow the settings of the sun from station to
+station around the earth.
+
+These things have spoken neither the last nor the greatest word they
+are to utter. The fruitful use of the collections of savage myth and
+peasant lore is yet to come, when classic legend will take its place as
+but a chapter in the volume of fantasy. What will be revealed therein
+is the mind of man in the presence of the spectacle of beauty and
+terror which is the world. Here the themes of poetry, painting, and
+the plastic arts await a new treatment. Not so much the councils of
+the gods, the myths of creation and of natural forces, as the simpler
+travel tales that are close to the soil will be drawn upon. Olympus
+towers afar with its divinities. Nearer to the earth, for example, is
+the mountain of San Francisco in Arizona, which the Navahos say was
+“bound with a sunbeam, decked with haliotis shell, clouds, he-rain,
+yellow maize, and animals, nested with eggs of the yellow warbler,
+spread with yellow cloud and made the home of White-Corn Boy and
+Yellow-Corn Girl.” However high their spirit soars, men’s feet are
+on the ground. If it is the limitation of their nature it is the
+liberation of their art that their interest is more in quests of the
+Terrestrial Paradise than in myths of things unearthly.
+
+It was the first belief of man that with a thought he could change
+the outer world. What was it, indeed, but the projection of his
+own soul--the demons that were his evil thoughts, “the savage and
+voluptuous beasts that were the emblems of his folly,” the ideal lands
+that were the dawn and afterglow of his own days? The beginning of art
+was magic, alike in the chants of rainmakers, the cave paintings of the
+Dordogne, and the sculptures of Egypt; and magic is its end. Still may
+the artist soul of man fashion its own realities.
+
+While he builds the pleasant marvels of his yesterdays into habitations
+of fancy, he will rear other structures of the like insubstantial stuff
+and deem them the abiding places of reality. The shows of nature are
+a pageant through which man moves in a dream of his own making. The
+piling and passing of the clouds, the fog’s oblivion, the sunset, the
+night and the stars, work their spells about him, masking, concealing,
+revealing. With the harmless revel of fireflies in the dew and dusk,
+fairy locks unbolt for him. He cannot look upon life save as a drama or
+an allegory, with the earth as the stage and the sky for its hangings.
+By the law of his being he must be maker of myths.
+
+Only a divine animal could question what was behind the hills, win the
+vision of unconjectured oceans, hear the note of eternity in the sound
+of running water, and, flashing into a brief ecstasy, sink back again
+with the cry of Eheu Fugaces. The brute-gods of his myths, are they
+not man himself with his animal routine and his divine moments? When
+he crosses the barrier of dreams, when he sits at the gates of memory,
+when contemplation holds him motionless “like a flame in a windless
+spot,” in his Dionysian intoxications, in the very dances wherein he
+merges the god and the brute, he creates worlds that ensphere his every
+mood. The Iranian who calls the abode of the blest the House of Song,
+and the Mongol whose official scrolls speak of the continents as the
+Golden Surface have made a new heaven and a new earth.
+
+It is not given man to envisage reality. His is the greater gift to
+brood over Chaos and shape it as he will.
+
+
+
+
+Bibliography
+
+
+In preparing this book the works most frequently consulted have been
+Pliny’s _Natural History_, Browne’s _Enquiries into Vulgar and Common
+Errors_, Beazley’s _Dawn of Modern Geography_, Frazer’s _Golden Bough_,
+Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_, Hakluyt’s _Principal Voyages of the
+English Nation_, and Pinkerton’s _Collection of Voyages and Travels_.
+Both the Hakluyt and Pinkerton collections are libraries in themselves,
+each with some hundreds of titles, and the travel narratives they
+contain will not be separately listed here.
+
+Following are the main sources drawn upon for the materials of this
+study:
+
+ ABERCROMBY, JOHN. _The Pre- and Proto-historic Finns._
+
+ AELIAN. _De Natura Animalium._
+
+ ADAMS, CYRUS C. “The Sargasso Sea,” in _Harper’s Monthly_ for 1907.
+
+ ALBERTUS MAGNUS. _Egyptian Secrets._
+
+ ALDROVANDI. _Opera Omnia._
+
+ ALLEN, PAUL. _History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition._
+
+ ALEXANDER, HARTLEY BURR. _North American Mythology_; _Latin-American
+ Mythology_.
+
+ “ARABIAN NIGHTS.” Burton Edition.
+
+ ANUTSCHIN. Interpretation of old Russian manuscript on “_The Unknown
+ Peoples of the East_,” translated by Dr. H. Mirchow in proceedings of
+ the Anthropological Society of Vienna, 1910.
+
+
+ BABCOCK, WILLIAM H. _Legendary Islands of the Atlantic_; “Atlantis and
+ Antillia,” in _Geographic Review_ for 1917.
+
+ BALCH, EDWIN SWIFT. “Atlantis, or Minoan Crete,” in _Geographic
+ Review_ for 1917.
+
+ BANDELIER, A. F. _The Gilded Man._
+
+ BATES, HENRY WALTER. _The Naturalist on the River Amazons._
+
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+
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+
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+
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+
+ “JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLK-LORE,” 1901 to date.
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+
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+
+ LOWER, MARK ANTONY. _The Curiosities of Heraldry._
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
+ POLO, MARCO. _Travels._
+
+ PONTOPPIDAN, RT. REV. ERIK. _The Natural History of Norway._
+
+ POWELL, TALCOTT. “Lumberjack Legends,” _New York Herald-Tribune_, 1924.
+
+ PRESCOTT, WILLIAM H. _Conquest of Mexico_; _History of the Conquest of
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+
+ PURCHAS, SAMUEL. _Purchas, his Pilgrims._
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+
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+
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+
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+
+ WILLIAMS, ARCHIBALD. _The Romance of Early Exploration._
+
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+
+
+ XENOPHON. _Anabasis._
+
+
+ ZAHM, J. A. _Along the Andes and Down the Amazon_; _The Quest of
+ Eldorado_; _Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena_; _Through South
+ America’s Southland_.
+
+
+
+
+Index
+
+
+  A
+
+  Aaf Mountains, 207
+
+  Abarimon, 114
+
+  Abbadie, 130
+
+  Abchaz, 220
+
+  Abdallah of the Land, 3
+
+  Abdallah of the Sea, 3
+
+  Aberdeen Almanac, 102
+
+  Abodes of the Blest, 257-261, 262, 336-337
+
+  Abomey, 180, 183, 188
+
+  Absalom, 188
+
+  _Abu baraquish_, 60
+
+  Abul Abbas, 61
+
+  Abulfeda, 362
+
+  Abyssinia, 38, 54, 74, 75, 76, 130, 178, 239
+
+  _Academy of Armory_, 66
+
+  Acephalites, 109, 346, 349, 368, 372
+
+  Acheron River, 262
+
+  Achilles, 152, 153
+
+  Acoloro, island of, 158
+
+  Acoma, 323
+
+  “Acorn-eaters,” 247
+
+  Acridophagi, 198-199
+
+  Acroconopes, the, 103
+
+  Actæon, 28
+
+  Actium, 97
+
+  Adam assayed, 357
+
+  Adam of Bremen, 160, 268, 335
+
+  Adam’s footprint, 8
+
+  Adam’s Peak, 8
+
+  Addison, Launcelot, 42
+
+  Aden, 267;
+    Gulf of, 233
+
+  Adriatic Sea, 249
+
+  Ægean Sea, 186, 187
+
+  Ægipans, 206
+
+  Ælian, 39, 53, 55, 56, 81, 96, 123, 286, 350
+
+  Æneas, 76
+
+  _Æneid_, 75
+
+  Æschylus, 96, 194, 202, 207
+
+  Æsculapius, 84
+
+  Æsop’s fables, 375
+
+  Ætas, the, 137, 148
+
+  Æthicus of Istria, 138
+
+  _Æthiopica_ of Marcellus, 286
+
+  _Æthiopis_, 152
+
+  Afer, Dionysius, 8
+
+  Afghans, 353, 359
+
+  Africa, 2, 49, 78, 105, 122, 125, 134, 143, 145, 147, 153, 196, 199,
+          206, 207, 211, 263, 270, 351, 364
+
+  Africa’s warrior women, 178-184
+
+  Age of Fable, 348
+
+  Agate, 24
+
+  Agatharcides, 199, 353
+
+  Age of Ignorance, 362
+
+  Agira, 163
+
+  Agostina, 174
+
+  Agriophagi, 199
+
+  Aguirre, 304
+
+  Ahacus, 320
+
+  Aigamuxa, 115
+
+  Aigiarm, 170
+
+  Aikeambenanos, 166
+
+  Ajasson, 90
+
+  Akbar, 237
+
+  Akkas, the, 132, 144, 145, 147, 149
+
+  Alabama, 319
+
+  Aladdin, 72, 73, 218
+
+  Alani, the, 193
+
+  Alarcon, 321
+
+  Albany, land of, 194
+
+  Albatross, 74
+
+  Albertus Magnus, 140, 350
+
+  Albinos, 193-194
+
+  Alciphron, 60
+
+  Aldrovandi, 79, 140, 212
+
+  Aleutian Islands, 106, 255, 360
+
+  Alexander, 19, 63, 81, 91, 232, 235, 236, 237, 259, 353
+
+  Alexandria, 223, 353, 354
+
+  Algonquins, 81, 118, 119, 303, 369
+
+  Al Istakhri, 362
+
+  Aljahedh, 362
+
+  Allerion, 66
+
+  Alligator god, 338
+
+  Alps, the, 80, 191, 203
+
+  Altai Mountains, 55, 117
+
+  Alton, 80
+
+  Alvarado, 323, 324
+
+  Alvares, Father, 178
+
+  Amazons, 2, 84, 118, 151-189, 207, 237, 362, 365, 368, 369, 375
+
+  Amazon march, 177
+
+  Amazon stone, 24
+
+  Amazons, River of the, 161, 300, 304, 312
+
+  _Amazuni_, 167
+
+  Amber, 105, 201, 229, 264
+
+  Ambergris, 364
+
+  Ambrose, 350
+
+  America, dragon in, 85;
+    Lucian’s reference to, 275;
+    Plato’s reference to, 287;
+    claim that St. Brendan discovered it, 259;
+    Chinese Buddhists reached it, 360;
+    Norse discovery of, 267;
+    discovery of by Columbus, 272-3, 371
+
+  American Bureau of Ethnology, 323
+
+  American Indian myths, 65, 117-120, 368-370
+
+  American Museum of Natural History, 146
+
+  American southwest, Ararats in, 292
+
+  Amerigo Vespucci, 191, 315
+
+  Amethyst, 24
+
+  Amiens, cathedral at, 47
+
+  Ammon, Abbot, 45
+
+  Amoy, 244
+
+  Amycteres, the, 108
+
+  Anahuac, plateau of, 318
+
+  Anamba Islands, 129
+
+  _A’nasa_, 54
+
+  Ancient Mariner, 336
+
+  Andaman Islanders, 106, 147, 148, 365
+
+  Andari, 144
+
+  Andes Mountains, 139, 149, 192, 290, 300, 305, 316, 332
+
+  “Andromeda, a great giant,” 366
+
+  Angola, 102, 125, 179
+
+  Anguilla, 96
+
+  Animal kingdom, 27-48
+
+  Animals, Avenue of, 54
+
+  Animals, criminal trials of, 31
+
+  Animals, their names borne by men, 29;
+    taking human form, 29;
+    politics of, 42
+
+  Annam, 149, 199
+
+  Annwfir, 260
+
+  Ant, 42, 43, 217, 253, 303, 361;
+    gold-guarding, 62-64
+
+  _Antennarius marmoratus_, 279
+
+  Anthropology, 291, 353
+
+  Anthropophagi, 114, 117, 128, 196, 207, 237
+
+  Antichrist, 239
+
+  Antigon, 28
+
+  Antilia, 252, 345, 375
+
+  Antilles, the, 163, 292, 296, 375
+
+  Antiope, 153
+
+  Antipodes, 9-10, 346
+
+  Antoninus, 358
+
+  Antony, Mark, 97, 246
+
+  Anubis, 338
+
+  Anuradhapura, 214
+
+  Anutschin, 115
+
+  Ape, 48, 121, 356
+
+  Aphrodisiacs, 20, 22
+
+  Apollo, 201, 203
+
+  Apple Island, 345
+
+  Apples of Adam, 358
+
+  Apurimac, valley of the, 314
+
+  Arab geography, 269, 362-363
+
+  Arabia, 1, 2, 50, 69, 95, 104, 171, 195, 224, 229, 231, 234, 245,
+          358, 365
+
+  _Arabian Nights_, 3, 16, 63, 74, 110, 159, 251, 354
+
+  Arabian Sea, 261
+
+  Araby the Happy, 232
+
+  Arachne, 28
+
+  Arapahoes, the, 139
+
+  Arawaks, the, 292
+
+  Arcadia, 1, 77, 246-248
+
+  Arctic night, 221
+
+  Arctinus, 151, 152
+
+  Ardnainiq, the, 112
+
+  Aretias, island of, 77
+
+  Argensola, 206
+
+  Argonauts, 75, 77
+
+  Argos, 174
+
+  Ariana, 197
+
+  Arimaspians, 55, 107
+
+  Arinadillo, 218
+
+  Ariosto, 373
+
+  Aristeas of Proconesus, 107, 349
+
+  Aristophanes, 285, 373
+
+  Aristotle, 12, 16, 39, 50, 51, 59, 135, 334, 353, 354
+
+  Arjuna, Rajah, 156, 157
+
+  Ark, 87, 292
+
+  Arkansas River, 326
+
+  Armada, the, 306
+
+  Armenia, 60, 100, 113, 151, 171, 185, 195, 238, 258
+
+  Aromatic Cape, 10, 231
+
+  Arngrim, 92
+
+  Arrian, 154, 196, 197, 225
+
+  Artemidorus, 81, 195
+
+  Artemis Stymphalia, 77
+
+  Arthur, King, 64, 256, 259
+
+  Art’s beginning in magic, 376
+
+  Aryan culture, 357
+
+  Asafœtida, 94
+
+  Asesa, 143
+
+  Asia, 1, 2, 109, 135, 136, 148, 196, 211, 212, 213, 267, 351, 364
+
+  Asia Minor, 135, 153, 169, 186, 281, 283, 365
+
+  Ass, 46, 48, 122, 338, 361, 374;
+    Feast of the, 48;
+    Baalam’s, 370
+
+  Ass-bittern, 67
+
+  Assuan, 143
+
+  Assyria, 56, 66, 169
+
+  Astarte, 186, 187
+
+  Astolpho, home of, 76
+
+  Astomi, the, 107-108
+
+  Astrakhan, 237
+
+  Astronomy, Maya, 293, 294
+
+  Asuang, 111
+
+  Asuncion, 300, 311
+
+  Aswamedha quest, 156, 157
+
+  Atahnallpa, Inca, 313, 333
+
+  Atbara River, 199
+
+  Athenæus, 350
+
+  Athens, 83, 281, 286
+
+  Athos, Mount, 193
+
+  Atlantes, 194
+
+  Atlantic Ocean, 1, 104, 252, 256, 261, 262-273, 277, 278, 287,
+                  289, 291
+
+  Atlantis, 1, 252, 254, 255, 266, 274, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281-297, 369
+
+  _Atlantis: The Antediluvian World_, 288
+
+  Atlas Mountains, 140, 206, 264, 282, 290
+
+  Atrato River, 331
+
+  Attica, 122, 152, 153, 154
+
+  _Attic Nights_, 349
+
+  Augustus, 90, 96, 236
+
+  Aurochs, 55
+
+  Aurungzebe, 170
+
+  “Austin the monk,” 128
+
+  Australia, 11, 255, 328, 329
+
+  Autolycus, 249
+
+  Avalon, isle of, 259, 345
+
+  Avernus, lake of, 262
+
+  Ayamanes, 139
+
+  Azerbaijan, 337
+
+  Azores, the, 12-13, 255, 271, 275, 277, 280, 287, 288, 289, 290
+
+  Azov, Sea of, 154, 156, 358
+
+  Aztecs, 189, 204, 292, 338
+
+
+  B
+
+  Baalam, 53
+
+  Baalim, 185
+
+  Baboons, fear of, 126
+
+  Babylon, 122, 204, 238, 260, 358
+
+  Babylonia, 85, 87
+
+  Bacchus, 203
+
+  Bactrians, 55
+
+  Badger’s legs, 44
+
+  Bagdad, 362
+
+  Bagrada River, 37
+
+  Bahama Islands, 278, 314
+
+  Bailey, 128
+
+  Baker, Sir Samuel, 36, 135
+
+  Ba-Kwamba tribe, 130
+
+  Balasses, 244
+
+  Balboa, 76, 330, 331-332
+
+  Balm of Gilead, 230
+
+  Baltic Sea, 100, 114, 151, 160, 254
+
+  _Bamboo Books_, 71
+
+  Bancroft, 307
+
+  Banda, 206
+
+  Bandelier, 322, 326
+
+  Bangkok, 177
+
+  Banshee, 99
+
+  Bantam, 177, 184
+
+  Bantu, the, 149
+
+  Barbarism defined, 357
+
+  Barbarossa, Frederick, 220
+
+  Barcelona, 174
+
+  Barentz, 41
+
+  Barns of Joseph, 358
+
+  Basil, 20, 350
+
+  Basilisk, 2, 78
+
+  Bassorah, Hassan el, 159
+
+  Bastards of the Kalahari Desert, 146
+
+  Bat, 76, 77, 217, 245, 331, 340, 344
+
+  Bates, 75, 76, 126
+
+  Battalion of Death, 154, 156, 174-177
+
+  Batu, 106
+
+  Batwas, the, 145
+
+  Baurded, Treasurer, 143
+
+  Bears, 43, 65, 118, 128, 374;
+    as men bewitched, 29
+
+  Beasts, fabulous, 49-67
+
+  Beasts of Revelation, 65
+
+  Beazley, 363
+
+  Becket, Thomas à, 128
+
+  Bede, 6
+
+  Bedouins, 365
+
+  Bedtime stories, 370, 375
+
+  Bee, 44
+
+  Beelzebub, the fly god, 30
+
+  Beetle, 217, 218, 303
+
+  Beeton, 193
+
+  Behrs, the, 184
+
+  Belalcazar, 299, 301
+
+  Bellerophon, 152
+
+  Belloc, 216
+
+  Belzoni, 18
+
+  Benjamin of Tudela, 108, 238, 243, 358
+
+  Bennu, 70
+
+  Benzom, gum, 230
+
+  Berber rock-towns, 195
+
+  Bermuda Islands, 101, 278, 288
+
+  Bernier, 170
+
+  Bertinoro, 17
+
+  Beryl, 25
+
+  Bes, 150
+
+  Bestiaries, 46, 375
+
+  Bezoar, 24, 38
+
+  Bible, 83, 86, 122, 185, 192, 213, 338
+
+  Bibliography, 378-383
+
+  Bielovodye, 222
+
+  Big-footed men, 2
+
+  Billdad, 66
+
+  Bimini, 314, 315
+
+  Bird of paradise, 43
+
+  Birds, 373
+
+  Birthstone, 24
+
+  Bishop-fish, 100
+
+  Black River, 136
+
+  Black Sea, 135, 151, 153, 187, 268
+
+  Black Side of Cathedral, 204
+
+  “Black Virgin,” 171
+
+  Bladder as sky, 119
+
+  “Blameless” peoples, 203
+
+  Brazil, 95, 123, 126, 188, 193, 218, 299, 375
+
+  Blefkens, 133
+
+  Blemmyes, the, 109
+
+  Blessed Islands, 258-261, 262
+
+  Bloodstone, 24
+
+  Blue-land, 268
+
+  Boadicea, 169
+
+  Boccias Islands, 102
+
+  Bogaz Keni, 186
+
+  Bogota, 301, 304
+
+  Bohemia, 171, 248-250
+
+  Bokhara, 240
+
+  Bolivia, 294, 299, 311
+
+  Bongo tribe, 129
+
+  _Book of the Cities and Marvels of Countries_, 362
+
+  _Book of Climates_, 362
+
+  _Book of Diversities_, 363
+
+  _Book of Roads and Kingdoms_, 362
+
+  Books, virtue in all, 354
+
+  Borneo, 94, 129, 158, 159, 335
+
+  Bororo Indians, 27
+
+  Bosman, 179
+
+  Bossewell, 66
+
+  Boston Linnæan Society, 94
+
+  _Botanic Garden_, 58
+
+  Botchkareva, Maria, 156, 174-177
+
+  Bothnia, Gulf of, 93
+
+  Bo-tree, Sacred, 216
+
+  Bottle-imps, 22
+
+  Bouchey, Margaret, 23
+
+  Bougainville, 138, 329
+
+  Boundary between Old and New World, 277
+
+  Bounteous Isle, 253
+
+  Bourbourg, Abbé Brasseur de, 293
+
+  Bourgogne, Jean de, 365, 367
+
+  Boys, maiming of, 172
+
+  Bradamante, 172
+
+  Bragman, isle of, 260
+
+  Brahma, 205, 338
+
+  Bran, 89
+
+  Breadfruit, 260
+
+  Breezes, generative, 50
+
+  Brest, 289
+
+  Brhaspati, 338
+
+  Bridge of tortoises, 359
+
+  Bridinno, dwarf land of, 138
+
+  Britannus, 344
+
+  British Columbia, 360
+
+  British Isles, 9, 203, 254, 263, 264, 274, 290, 296, 351
+
+  Brittany, 256
+
+  Brobdingnag, 373
+
+  Bronze Age, 294
+
+  Browne, Sir Thomas, 23, 39, 44, 53, 69, 78, 99, 140, 334, 350
+
+  Bruce, 71
+
+  Brundusium, 349
+
+  Brushwood Town, 128
+
+  Brusilov, 175
+
+  Brynhild, 79
+
+  Buache, 369
+
+  Bucephali, 103
+
+  Buchanan, 125
+
+  Buddha, 215, 361
+
+  Buddhism, 188, 240, 261, 360
+
+  Buenos Aires, 311
+
+  Buffalo, 6, 318, 319, 323, 324, 325;
+    Caffrarian, 56
+
+  Buffon, 33, 35, 43, 77, 111, 140, 141, 192, 350
+
+  Bull, 81, 338, 342, 367
+
+  Bulotu, 260
+
+  Bunyan, 262, 367
+
+  Bunyan, Paul, 66
+
+  Bunyip, 95
+
+  Buried cities, 213-215
+
+  Burma, 269, 293, 364
+
+  Burrowing creatures, 218
+
+  Burton, Lady, 180
+
+  Burton, Sir Richard, 159, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183
+
+  Busbequins, 63
+
+  Bushmen, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 227
+
+  Bustard, 210
+
+  Butterfly, 344
+
+  Buzzard, 370
+
+  Byssus silk, 59
+
+  Byzantium, 361
+
+
+  C
+
+  Cabeza, de Vaca, 319, 372
+
+  Cabul, 62
+
+  Cadiz, 224, 306, 308
+
+  Cæsaristas, the, 317
+
+  Cæsars of South America, 317
+
+  Calabash, 159, 321, 361
+
+  Caldilhe, 58
+
+  Caliban, 104
+
+  California Indians, 8
+
+  California, island of, 158
+
+  California, State of, 127, 283, 360
+
+  Callao, 328
+
+  Calypso, 354
+
+  Cambodia, 195, 269
+
+  Cambyses, 15
+
+  Camel, 42, 50, 62, 63, 81, 210, 232, 361;
+    flying, 358
+
+  Cametennus, 361
+
+  Campanella, 373
+
+  Camulatz, the bird, 293
+
+  Canada, 290
+
+  Canary Islands, 258, 265, 270, 287, 290, 345, 359
+
+  Canelas, 300, 301
+
+  Cape Bojador, 272
+
+  Cape Cod, 289
+
+  Cape of Good Hope, 270, 278
+
+  Cape Guardafui, 10, 156, 231
+
+  Cape Hatteras, 288
+
+  Cape Santa Elena, 192
+
+  Cape of Spices, 231
+
+  Cape Verde Islands, 287, 289, 290
+
+  Cappadocia, 185, 186, 195
+
+  Capricorn, 67
+
+  Caqueta River, 302, 303
+
+  Carbuncle, 24
+
+  Carchemish, 185
+
+  Cardan, 140
+
+  Cardinal Points, 203-205
+
+  Caribbean Sea, 160, 290, 291, 296, 299, 300, 369
+
+  Carib, island of, 160
+
+  Caribs, the, 166, 217, 291, 292
+
+  Caribou, 29
+
+  Carlyle, 172
+
+  Caroline Islands, 158
+
+  Caroni River, 305, 311
+
+  Carp, 81
+
+  Carpini, 104, 106, 113, 194, 258
+
+  Cartagena, 330
+
+  Carteret, 329
+
+  Carthage, 123, 263, 264, 271, 274
+
+  Cartooning humanity, 103
+
+  Caspian Sea, 237
+
+  Cassia, 231, 233, 234, 243
+
+  Cassiquiare River, 304
+
+  Cassiterides, the, 263
+
+  Castaneda, 322
+
+  Castelnau, 125, 130
+
+  Castor, 94
+
+  Cat, 253, 338
+
+  Cataclysm in New World myth, 292, 294
+
+  Catalan map, 90, 160
+
+  Cat-fish, 6, 67
+
+  Cathay, 106, 113, 222, 240, 312, 365
+
+  Cathedrals, animal symbolism in, 46-48, 375
+
+  Catoblepas, 36
+
+  Caucasus Mountains, 72, 114, 153, 171, 193, 194, 195, 207, 235, 237
+
+  Cave drawings, 340
+
+  Celtic glamour, 256, 348
+
+  Celts, 83, 367
+
+  Central America, 77, 291-294, 297
+
+  Celebes, 242
+
+  Cellar strain in human nature, 217
+
+  Cellini, Benvenuto, 38
+
+  Centaur, 66, 114, 361
+
+  Central point of earth, 7
+
+  Cephalopod, 95
+
+  Cercopes, the, 125
+
+  Cerne, 275
+
+  Ceylon, 42, 157, 160, 258, 363
+
+  Chalcedony, 25
+
+  Chaldea, 98, 159, 366
+
+  Chambers’ _Journal_, 142
+
+  Chameleon, 366
+
+  Chamlakhu, 127
+
+  Chains of Indo-China, 31
+
+  Chao Fu-Kua, 137
+
+  Chaos, 86
+
+  Chardin, 171
+
+  Charia, Isle of, 366
+
+  Charlemagne cycle, 56, 75, 76, 95
+
+  Charles III of Spain, 318
+
+  Charles V of Spain, 317
+
+  Charlevoix, Father, 343
+
+  Charon’s ferry, 262
+
+  Chassenée as rat advocate, 31
+
+  Chatan, pygmy city of, 138
+
+  Chelonophagi, the, 96, 198
+
+  Chenoos, the, 119
+
+  Cherokees, the, 217
+
+  Chestnuts, 283
+
+  Chiau Yau, 136
+
+  Chibcha Indians, 301, 312
+
+  Chichen Itza, 291
+
+  Childbirth, a means of promoting, 24
+
+  Chilean mythology, 338
+
+  Chimæra, 66
+
+  China, 59, 60, 72, 73, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 113, 137, 147, 203, 218,
+         230, 259, 267, 269, 318, 335, 349, 359, 360, 364, 365
+
+  China seas, 74
+
+  Chinese discovery of North America, 360
+
+  _Chinese Encyclopedia_, 57, 107
+
+  Chinese wall, 139, 237
+
+  Chiquitos, the, 139
+
+  Chiriqui Indians, 338
+
+  Choquequirau, 314, 332
+
+  Choromandæ, the, 104
+
+  Chrism, devil’s, 78
+
+  Christ symbolized by unicorn, 53;
+    called the phœnix, 69
+
+  Christian fabulists, 356
+
+  Christian pilgrims, 356, 357-358
+
+  Christian symbolism, 375
+
+  _Chronicle of the Cid_, 177
+
+  Chrysolite, 25, 207
+
+  Chrysoprase, 24
+
+  Churchward, 149
+
+  Cibola, 303, 312, 314, 318-323
+
+  Ciconian coast, 228
+
+  Cilician pirates, 265
+
+  Cimarron republics, 165
+
+  Cimbri, the, 3
+
+  Cinnabar, 33
+
+  Cinnamon, 231, 233, 234, 243;
+    Land of, 301, 312
+
+  City of Brass, 110
+
+  City of God, 356
+
+  City of Hump-backed Women, 361
+
+  City of Mexico, 312, 321, 322
+
+  City of the Sun, 2, 69, 373
+
+  Classic myth, 375
+
+  Claudius, 69
+
+  Closet philosophers, 369
+
+  Clothing, origin of, 87
+
+  Cloud-centaurs, 103
+
+  Cloud-Cuckoo Town, 285, 373
+
+  Clouds of Magellan, 311
+
+  Cloves, 230, 243, 245
+
+  Coast Range, 283
+
+  Coata, 124
+
+  Cobra, 112
+
+  Cochin-China, 137, 243
+
+  Cock, 30, 44
+
+  Cockaigne, Land of, 374
+
+  Cockatrice, 66, 77-78
+
+  Cock’s egg, 78
+
+  Cocytus River, 262
+
+  Cod, 96
+
+  Colic, a cure for, 24
+
+  Coligny, 306
+
+  _Collecteanea_, 355, 356
+
+  Colombia, 207, 300, 301, 302, 311, 312
+
+  Colorado River, 318, 321
+
+  Columbus, 10, 12, 102, 130, 151, 160, 161, 167, 242, 258, 270, 271,
+            274, 277, 279, 368, 371
+
+  Comedy, Greek, 339
+
+  Commercial subtlety, 244
+
+  Communal houses, 303, 327
+
+  Comorin, Cape, 149
+
+  Compass, 7
+
+  Composite creatures, doctrine of, 341
+
+  Concepcion, 316
+
+  Condor, 74
+
+  “Conflict between Horus and Set,” 86
+
+  Confucius on jade, 24
+
+  Congo, 178, 179
+
+  Conquistadors, 299-333, 368, 369
+
+  Constantinople, 359
+
+  Constellations, animal forms of, 30
+
+  Conway, 206
+
+  Cook, Capt., 124
+
+  Cool Lake, 7
+
+  Coos Bay giants, 192
+
+  Copper, 327;
+    Age, 294;
+    Mountains, 207
+
+  Coptic Christians, 239
+
+  Cordilleras, 207, 273, 300, 301
+
+  Cordoba, 60, 362
+
+  Corentyne River, 167
+
+  Cornelius Nepos, 228
+
+  Corn spirit, 30
+
+  Cornwall, 255, 263, 309
+
+  Coromandel Coast, 196
+
+  Coronado, 320, 321-326, 368
+
+  Corsali, 74
+
+  Cortez, 188, 292, 329
+
+  Corvo, 271
+
+  Cosmas, 6, 34, 52, 362
+
+  Cossack colonel a woman, 177
+
+  Costa Rica, 127
+
+  Cotton-plant, 59
+
+  Cotzbalam, the bird, 293
+
+  Cougnantainsecouima, the, 164
+
+  Council of Virgins, 172
+
+  _Country of the Dwarfs_, 142
+
+  Country of Widows, 158
+
+  Country of Women, 156
+
+  Court of the Universe, 284
+
+  Cow, 257, 374
+
+  Cowry shell, 87
+
+  Coyote, 106, 118, 370, 374
+
+  Crab, 30, 43, 61, 97
+
+  Cradle of Gold, 312, 332
+
+  Cramps, a cure for, 24
+
+  Crane, 2, 42, 118, 350;
+    war with pygmies, 141
+
+  Crantor, 286
+
+  Crayfish, 245
+
+  Creative caricature, 340
+
+  Credulity of Greeks, 353
+
+  Crete, 287
+
+  Cricket, 81, 361
+
+  Crimean war, 171
+
+  Criminal courts of birds, 42
+
+  _Critias_, the, 281, 282, 285
+
+  Crocker Land, 255
+
+  Crocodile, 36-37, 45, 47, 338, 361
+
+  Cromagnons, the, 190
+
+  Crow Indians, 139
+
+  Crusaders, 186
+
+  Ctesias, characterized, 352-353;
+    cited, 18, 19, 25, 35, 37, 51, 52, 55, 57, 63, 105, 106, 109, 113,
+           133, 135, 191, 193, 335, 349, 350, 352, 353, 354, 366
+
+  Cuatas, the, 123
+
+  Cuba, 130
+
+  Cuchiviro, Rio, 166
+
+  Cuckoo, 44
+
+  Cundinamarca, plateau of, 298, 300, 301
+
+  Cupidity, a cure for, 24
+
+  Curupira, 126, 127
+
+  Cush, 17
+
+  Cushing, 323
+
+  “Customs” of Dahomey, 179
+
+  Cuttlefish, men mistaken for, 27
+
+  Cuvier, 36, 54, 140, 141, 142, 144, 350
+
+  Cuzco, 314, 316, 332
+
+  Cybele, 186
+
+  Cyclopes, 253, 361
+
+  Cyme, 153, 187
+
+  Cynocephali, 105, 351, 367
+
+  Cyrenaica, 212
+
+  Cyrene, 78, 134
+
+  Cyrne, 193
+
+  Cyrus the Great, 169
+
+  Czecho-Slovakia, 248
+
+
+  D
+
+  Da Gama, 242, 244
+
+  Dahomey, 179-183
+
+  Dahut, Princess, 256
+
+  Dalay River, 138
+
+  Damastes, 202
+
+  Dampier, 77, 198, 245
+
+  Dance macabre, 47
+
+  Dancing negresses, 182
+
+  Dandini, 25
+
+  Daniel, Abbott, 358
+
+  D’Annunzio, 341
+
+  Danube River, 153, 203
+
+  Dardæ, 63
+
+  Darkness, legends as to, 220-221
+
+  Darwin, Charles, 112, 316
+
+  Darwin, Erasmus, 58
+
+  David, 226
+
+  Davy, 102
+
+  De Acunha, Father, 163
+
+  Dead Sea, 358
+
+  Deadly upas tree, 20
+
+  De Arguello, 316
+
+  Death-watch, 44
+
+  De Berreo, 305, 306, 308
+
+  Deccan, 177
+
+  De Chaves, 311
+
+  Dee, River, 102
+
+  Deer, 81, 127, 327, 374
+
+  Deformed Folk, 352
+
+  De Gamboa, 328
+
+  De la Mare, 255
+
+  De Leon, Diego Flores, 317
+
+  De Leon, Ponce, 314, 315
+
+  Delicious Isle, 253
+
+  Delight-makers, 370
+
+  _Delight of Those Who Seek to Wander Through the Regions of the
+  World_, 362
+
+  Delisle, 369
+
+  Delos, 201
+
+  Delphi, 201
+
+  Deluded Folk, eight, 270
+
+  Deluge, 87, 292, 297
+
+  Delusive water, 312
+
+  De Maillet, 89
+
+  Demons, 376
+
+  De Ortribia, 315
+
+  De Proveda, 304
+
+  Derbent, 237
+
+  Derceto, 98, 186
+
+  Descouret, 130
+
+  _Description of Greece_, 353
+
+  Desert, 2, 199, 209-215
+
+  De Silva, 300, 304
+
+  “Destruction of Mankind,” 86
+
+  Deucalion, 292
+
+  De Urreta, 15
+
+  De Ursua, 304
+
+  Devil, cult of in Florida, 4
+
+  Devil-fish, 67
+
+  Devil-mask of the Jurupary, 163
+
+  De Weltheim, 64
+
+  Diable Borteux, 126
+
+  Diamond, 24, 87, 244
+
+  Diana of the Ephesians, 186
+
+  Diana in Autun, 215
+
+  Dicuil, 8
+
+  Digby, Sir Kenelm, 212
+
+  Dinosaur, 82
+
+  Diodorus Siculus, 25, 35, 43, 49, 77, 96, 153, 165, 185, 197, 198,
+                    199, 202
+
+  Dionysus, 122
+
+  Disappearing Islands, 1, 256-257
+
+  Disraeli, 359
+
+  Ditter, island of, 251
+
+  Dobayba, temple of, 76
+
+  Dodona, oak of, 215
+
+  Dog, 30, 49, 56, 64, 89, 293, 340;
+    husbands, 29
+
+  Dogfish, 87
+
+  Dog-headed people, 105-107, 349, 351, 360, 367
+
+  Dog-ribs, the, 106
+
+  Dog Star, 14, 233
+
+  Dolmen, 343
+
+  Dolphin, 90-91, 103
+
+  Dondun, 109
+
+  Donnelly, Ignatius, 278, 294
+
+  Don steppes, 156
+
+  D’Orbigny, 139
+
+  Dordogne cave paintings, 376
+
+  Dos Santos, 35, 73
+
+  Doughty, 210
+
+  Doul-Karnain, 236
+
+  Dove, 47
+
+  Dowarnenez, Bay of, 256
+
+  Dragon, 2, 32, 45, 47, 53, 56, 58, 65, 66, 79-88, 98, 268, 331, 344,
+          360, 361, 367, 375
+
+  Dragonfly, 217, 344
+
+  Dragon-tyger, 67
+
+  Dragon-wolf, 67
+
+  Drake, 3, 245, 277, 306, 329
+
+  Dravidians, 146
+
+  Drawings, Primitive, 340
+
+  Dread of thick foliage, 216
+
+  Dream Quests of Spain, 312-333
+
+  Dreams, 339, 372
+
+  Dromedary, 361
+
+  Druids, 257, 265, 296
+
+  Drums, magic, 241
+
+  Drunkards, 374
+
+  Dryads, 216
+
+  Du Chaillu, 142
+
+  Duck, 30
+
+  Duff Islands, 329
+
+  Duirs, the, 129
+
+  Dumb-barter, 15, 104
+
+  Dunashki, 137
+
+  Du Pin, Jean, 365
+
+  Dutch East India Company, 245
+
+  Dwarf-gods of Egypt and Phœnicia, 150
+
+  Dwarfs, 268, 343, 363, 372
+
+  Dyaks, the, 36
+
+
+  E
+
+  Eagle, 47, 56, 81, 374
+
+  Eagle-stone, 24
+
+  Earth, size and shape of, 5-13
+
+  Earth-holders, 6, 30, 370
+
+  East, 204-205
+
+  East African islands, 96
+
+  Easter Island, 255
+
+  Eastern Roman Empire, 239, 265
+
+  East Indies, 79, 328
+
+  Ecbatana, 238
+
+  Ecclesiastical suits against vermin, 31-32
+
+  Echo, the, 339
+
+  Eclipses, 30
+
+  Ecuador, 13, 302
+
+  Edam, 100
+
+  Eden, 87, 257, 258, 357
+
+  Eden, Richard, 241
+
+  Edom, land of, 224, 226
+
+  Eel, 43, 96;
+    “eel-mother,” 96
+
+  Eel-like men, 112
+
+  Egede, Hans, 94
+
+  Egypt, 2, 69, 85, 142, 143, 144, 169, 186, 204, 210, 230, 281, 286,
+         340, 351, 365
+
+  Emmet valley, 63
+
+  Elbe River, 248
+
+  Elders, Animal, 65
+
+  El Dorado, 161, 298-310, 348, 369
+
+  Elephant, 32-34, 43, 46, 51, 57, 109, 284, 291, 343, 351, 361, 374;
+    tower, 33
+
+  Elephantine, 143
+
+  Elephantophagi, 199
+
+  Eleusinian mystery, 184
+
+  El Gran Moxo, 312, 333
+
+  El Gran Paititi, 312, 333
+
+  Elixir of life, 88
+
+  Elizabethan age, 305
+
+  Elizabeth, Queen, 306, 307, 369
+
+  Elm’s refreshing shadow, 19
+
+  El Turco, 324, 325, 326
+
+  Elysium, 217, 220, 257-261, 262
+
+  Emerald, 24, 318
+
+  Emerson, 342
+
+  Empedocles, 341
+
+  Enchanted City of the Cæsars, 312, 316-318
+
+  Enchanted Islands, 327
+
+  Enchantments, a defense against, 24
+
+  Enciso, Bachelor, 330
+
+  Encyclopædia Britannica, 79, 144, 242
+
+  Encyclopædists, 350, 351, 356
+
+  Engano, 158
+
+  English Channel a ferry of souls, 266
+
+  Englishmen, tailed, 128
+
+  Enmities of birds, 44
+
+  Enotocoitae, the, 109
+
+  _Enquiries of Browne_, 350
+
+  Ephesus, 153, 186, 187
+
+  Epilepsy, treatment of, 24, 56
+
+  Epiphany, 358
+
+  Equatorial Current, 278
+
+  Equestrian statues, Carthaginian, 271
+
+  Eratosthenes, 10, 263
+
+  Ericson, Thorwald, 113
+
+  Eriphia, 20
+
+  Error the guiding star of discovery, 371
+
+  Erythræ, 63
+
+  Erythræan Sea, 353
+
+  _Esdras_, books of, 11
+
+  Eskimos, 4, 106, 108, 110, 112, 141, 145, 338, 369
+
+  Essay-writing, a dragon diet for, 81
+
+  Estevanico, 319, 320, 321, 323
+
+  _Esther_, book of, 187
+
+  Estland, 345
+
+  Estotiland, 345
+
+  Etearchus, 134, 135
+
+  Ethnography, 291
+
+  Ethiopia, 68, 104, 108, 113, 178, 193, 203, 235, 364, 365
+
+  Etymology as source of myths, 344-347
+
+  Eudoxus, 113
+
+  Euphrates River, 7, 185, 358
+
+  Euripides, 263
+
+  Europe, 106, 202, 264
+
+  Evangelists as beast-headed men, 339
+
+  Evans, 47
+
+  Eve, 84, 87, 112
+
+  Evolution of divine beast-men, 338
+
+  Evolution of the Dragon, 84
+
+  Ewaipanoma, 110
+
+  Expedition Island, 255
+
+  _Ezekiel_, book of, 235, 236
+
+  Ezion-geber, 224, 227
+
+
+  F
+
+  Fabric of Illusion, 334-347
+
+  Fabulous winged creatures, 68-78
+
+  Fa-hien, 360
+
+  Fairies, 150;
+    queen of, 359
+
+  Falcon-fish, 67
+
+  Falcon-man, 159
+
+  Falconry, 133
+
+  Familiars, 99
+
+  Fang-chang, 82
+
+  Farissol, Abraham, 17
+
+  Faroes, the, 93
+
+  Fatephur Sikri, 33
+
+  Father John, bird called, 71
+
+  Faun, 122, 361
+
+  Fayal, 306
+
+  Fear, myths of, 371
+
+  Feast of Reason, 173
+
+  Feast of the Valiant Women, 174
+
+  Feathered men, 349
+
+  Febrifuge, a, 24
+
+  Federmann, 301, 303, 332
+
+  Felfel Mountain, 206
+
+  _Fen-shu_, 57
+
+  Female Crusade, 172
+
+  Female incense, 233
+
+  Fertility emblems, 30
+
+  Festus Avienus, 275
+
+  Fezzan, 195
+
+  Fiddlers’ Green, 374
+
+  Fiend fly, 344
+
+  Fijis, 335
+
+  Filipinos, 127
+
+  Finland, 240, 335
+
+  Finn-folk, 242
+
+  Finnish magic songs, 241;
+    riddles, 346
+
+  First People, Indian, 28, 118, 119, 339, 342
+
+  Fish, a polygamous, 43
+
+  Fish-eating races, 196-198
+
+  Flaccus, 351
+
+  _Flame of Life_, 341
+
+  Flavianus, 90
+
+  Fleurieu, 369
+
+  Flint people, 370
+
+  Florida, 53, 102, 315, 319
+
+  Flying Dutchman, 276
+
+  Foersch, 20
+
+  Folk of Tradition, 190-200
+
+  _Fonte perenni_, 315
+
+  Forest, beliefs as to, 215-217
+
+  Formosa, 129
+
+  Fortunate Isles, 257-261, 262, 354
+
+  Fossils as source of myths, 295, 343, 344
+
+  Fountain of the Sun, 18
+
+  Fountain of Youth, 15, 312, 314-315, 365
+
+  Fouqué, 99
+
+  Fox, 29, 47, 342, 374
+
+  Fragrant Mountains, 7
+
+  France, 249, 255
+
+  France, Anatole, 342
+
+  Frankincense, 231
+
+  Franks, the, 266
+
+  Frazer, 187, 346
+
+  French Amazons, 172-174
+
+  Friar-fish, 67
+
+  Friars, begging, 338
+
+  Friedemann, 139
+
+  Friendly Islanders, 260
+
+  Friendships of birds, 44
+
+  Friesland, West, 100
+
+  Frobisher, 52
+
+  Frog, 30, 118
+
+  Fu-lin, 61
+
+  _Fung-wang_, 70
+
+  Furies, the, 265
+
+
+  G
+
+  Gadarenes, country of the, 44
+
+  Gaditanian Sea, 92
+
+  Gains of Fable, 371-377
+
+  Galen, 24
+
+  Galvano, 129
+
+  Gambia River, 263
+
+  Gamblers, 374
+
+  Gamphasantes, the, 199
+
+  Ganges River, 7, 203, 267
+
+  Garcias ab Horto, 53
+
+  Garcilaso de la Vega, 212
+
+  Gargoyles, 337
+
+  Garnet, 24, 244
+
+  Garuda, 134
+
+  Gaul, 9, 90, 203, 265
+
+  Geese, wild, 41-42
+
+  Gélélé, King, 179
+
+  Gellius, 349
+
+  _Genesis_, book of, 7, 22, 83, 224, 235, 282
+
+  Genghis Khan, 237, 239
+
+  Geographers, ancient, 350
+
+  Geography of Scents, 230-231
+
+  Gerini, 17, 129, 136, 269
+
+  Germain, Louis, 289, 290, 291
+
+  German Hydrographic Office, 278
+
+  Germany, 83, 96, 97, 99, 156, 356, 374
+
+  Gesner, 79
+
+  Gessi, 275
+
+  Getæ, the, 3
+
+  Ghauts, the, 149
+
+  Ghosts, merriment of, 4
+
+  Ghouls, 363;
+    isle of, 251
+
+  Giants, 190-193, 257, 268, 343, 361, 367, 368, 372;
+    stone, 117, 119
+
+  Gibbon, 240
+
+  Gibraltar, 1;
+    Straits of, 265, 267, 287, 288
+
+  Gihon, 7
+
+  Gila Canyon, 139
+
+  Gilbert, 306
+
+  Gilboa, Mount, 358
+
+  Gilded Man, the, 298-310
+
+  Gindanes, land of the, 227
+
+  Ginger, 243
+
+  Ginseng, 22, 23
+
+  Giraldus Cambrensis, 217
+
+  Glistening Heath, 79
+
+  Glooskap, 91, 119
+
+  Glow-worms, 245
+
+  Gnomes, 150
+
+  Gnu, 36
+
+  Goat, 30, 43, 122, 235, 338, 374
+
+  Gobi, Desert of, 2, 214, 360
+
+  Goddess of Liberty, 173
+
+  God-man, 188
+
+  God’s land of the Celts, 217
+
+  Gog and Magog, 1, 9, 207, 235-238, 362
+
+  Gold, 229, 244, 284, 327;
+    origin of use as money, 87;
+    Spanish quest of, 298-333
+
+  Gold Coast, 272
+
+  Golden Age, 208, 287, 336
+
+  Golden Apalache, 319
+
+  _Golden Bough_, 187
+
+  Golden Chain, adventure of, 332
+
+  Golden Chersonese, 12, 224, 230
+
+  Golden Fleece, 372
+
+  Golden Surface, the, 377
+
+  Goliath, 192
+
+  Good intentions, 373
+
+  Goodwin Sands, 255
+
+  Goose, 30
+
+  Gonges, Olympede, 173
+
+  Gorgons, 153, 212, 213
+
+  Gorilla, 123
+
+  Goths, 169
+
+  Gould, Baring, 98, 130
+
+  Gould, Charles, 54, 82
+
+  Gradlon, King, 256
+
+  Grand Lama of Tibet, 187
+
+  Grapes, 284
+
+  Grasshoppers, 38, 348
+
+  Grasshopper-eaters, 198
+
+  “Grasshopper warriors,” 144
+
+  Gravelly Sea, 211
+
+  “Great China,” 359
+
+  Great Han Country, 360
+
+  Great Mother, 186, 188
+
+  Great Saracen Land, 268
+
+  Great Syrtis, 194
+
+  Great toe, peculiar formation of, 199
+
+  Great Year, 70
+
+  Greece, 90, 100, 246, 247, 262, 352
+
+  Greenland, 94, 106, 133, 290
+
+  Green Sea of Gloom, 1, 269
+
+  Grenada, island of, 245
+
+  Gribble, 80
+
+  Griffin, 2, 55-56, 63, 64, 66, 67, 152, 253, 337, 350, 361, 367, 375
+
+  Grimm Brothers, 22, 193, 369
+
+  Guacaris, the, 163
+
+  Guadeloupe, 160
+
+  Guatemala, 118, 127, 293
+
+  Guatavita, Lake, 298, 299
+
+  Guaviare River, 302, 304
+
+  Guiana, 3, 110, 163, 292, 309, 310, 311, 346
+
+  Guillim, 52, 66
+
+  Gulf of California, 320, 321
+
+  Gulf of Mexico, 315, 319
+
+  Gulf of Oraba, 331
+
+  Gulf of Paria, 13
+
+  Gulf Stream, 278
+
+  Gulfweed, 280
+
+  Gumberoo, 66
+
+  Gum camphor, 20
+
+  Gum-tree country, 260
+
+  Gunhild, 241
+
+  Gwenland, 160
+
+  Gwyn ab Nudd, 368
+
+  Gymnetæ, the, 193
+
+  Gypsies, 222, 248, 249
+
+
+  H
+
+  Hacus, 320
+
+  Hadam, Eldad, 17
+
+  Hahua-chumpi, island of, 327
+
+  Haida, 6
+
+  “Hairy ones,” 122
+
+  Haiti, 260
+
+  Hakluyt, 3, 20, 34, 37, 101, 251, 307, 369
+
+  Halcyon, 43
+
+  Half-men, 111-112
+
+  Halls of the Giants, 359
+
+  Hamam Meskouteen, 212
+
+  Haman, 187
+
+  Hand of Satan, 272
+
+  Hanno, 123, 263
+
+  Hannum, 187
+
+  Hanuman, 124, 338
+
+  Hanyson, 220
+
+  Happy hunting grounds, 217
+
+  Harald Hardrada, 268
+
+  Hardouin, 70
+
+  Hare, 81, 374
+
+  Harem of a queen, 179
+
+  Harpies, 2, 66, 75-77, 375
+
+  Hart, 47
+
+  Hathor, 85, 87
+
+  Hatusapur, 156
+
+  Havaika, 260
+
+  Hav-fruen, 101
+
+  Havilah, 1, 7, 9, 223, 224, 225, 226
+
+  Hav-manden, 101
+
+  Hawk, 78, 338
+
+  Hawkins, 52, 252
+
+  Hawks, Henry, 322
+
+  Hayton, King, 106
+
+  Headless People, 109, 346, 349, 368, 372
+
+  Hebrew the natural speech, 357
+
+  Hecatæus, 202
+
+  Hedgehog, 47
+
+  Hedin, 208, 214
+
+  Hedjaz, 138
+
+  Hegesias, 349
+
+  Heifer, 28
+
+  _Heimskringla_, 267
+
+  Heine, 314
+
+  Helicon, Island of, 251
+
+  Heliogabalus, 69
+
+  Heliolithic culture, 373
+
+  Heliopolis, 69, 70
+
+  Hellebore, 204
+
+  Hellespont, 352
+
+  Hell-way, 204
+
+  Helyon, 52
+
+  Hen, 27, 245, 293, 366
+
+  Henry VII, 99
+
+  Henry the Navigator, Prince, 199, 225, 270, 271, 367
+
+  Heraldry, 2, 66-67
+
+  Herbenstein, 102
+
+  Hercules, 38, 77, 132, 152, 153, 202, 205
+
+  Hercynian birds, 356
+
+  Herkhuf, 143
+
+  Hermes, 96, 246
+
+  Hermits, beasts of, 45
+
+  Herodotus, characterized, 352;
+    cited, 14, 26, 55, 62, 63, 71, 72, 77, 104, 107, 123, 132, 134,
+           151, 154, 155, 193, 194, 195, 196, 202, 207, 228, 230, 231,
+           233, 234, 335, 349, 350, 353, 354, 361
+
+  Heroes of beast epics, 29
+
+  Heron, 70
+
+  Herrera, 191
+
+  Hesiod, 75, 202, 263, 287
+
+  Hesperides, the, 345
+
+  Hibernating Samoyeds, 116-117
+
+  Hiddekel, 7
+
+  Hierro, island of, 20
+
+  _Hill and Sea Classic_, 136
+
+  Hill of Little Devils, 208
+
+  Himalayas, the, 135, 149, 336, 343
+
+  Himantopodes, the, 114
+
+  Himilco, 263, 274
+
+  Himyarites, the, 226
+
+  Hionen Thsang, 157, 219, 360, 361
+
+  Hippocampus, 67
+
+  Hippo Diarrhytus, 90
+
+  Hippogrif, 56
+
+  Hippogypi, the, 103
+
+  Hippolyte, 153
+
+  Hippopotamus, 34-35, 338
+
+  Hiram of Tyre, 223
+
+  _History of the Indies_, 369
+
+  Hittites, 185-187
+
+  Ho-lao-lo-kia, vanished city of, 214
+
+  Holland, 245
+
+  Holme, 66
+
+  Holstein coast, 254
+
+  Holy Roman Empire, 99, 220, 248
+
+  Homer, 5, 7, 22, 132, 133, 140, 141, 199, 202, 227, 252, 287, 349,
+         352, 354, 363
+
+  Homocane, 67
+
+  Homunculus, 22
+
+  Hopi towns, 323
+
+  Horizon Lands, 201-222
+
+  Horned hogs, 245
+
+  Horned men, 361
+
+  Horneman, 130
+
+  Horse, 30, 51, 56, 122, 156, 157, 324
+
+  Hörselberg, 219
+
+  Horus, 86
+
+  Hospitality, proverb on, 335
+
+  Hottentots, 131, 146, 225, 227;
+    “click” of, 105
+
+  House of Song, 377
+
+  Houses of the Sun, 161, 332
+
+  Huallaga River, 333
+
+  Huanacos, 316
+
+  Huc, 115, 349
+
+  Hudson Bay Company, 221
+
+  Hugag, 66
+
+  Hugo, Victor, 249, 337
+
+  Huguenots, 306
+
+  Humboldt, characterized, 369;
+    cited, 26, 42, 126, 165, 166, 207, 271, 278, 288, 311
+
+  Humming bird, 30, 370
+
+  Hungarian Plain, 156
+
+  Huns, 154, 239
+
+  Hurakan, 293
+
+  Hyderabad, 177
+
+  Hydra, 66
+
+  Hyena, 35-36, 361
+
+  Hyparkhos River, 105
+
+  Hyperboreans, 201-203, 261
+
+
+  I
+
+  Ibanez, 169
+
+  Iberia, 203, 286
+
+  Ibis, 43, 71
+
+  Ibn Batuta, 42, 95, 106, 196, 243, 269, 362
+
+  Ibn Haukal, 362
+
+  Ibn Khaldun, 269
+
+  Ibn Khordadbeh, 137, 206, 362, 363
+
+  Iceland, 101, 289, 345
+
+  Ichthyophagi, 196-198
+
+  Ideal lands, 2, 257-261, 336-337, 351
+
+  Ideal states, 251
+
+  Idrisi, 8, 137, 270
+
+  Ignatius, 81
+
+  Iguanodon, 81
+
+  Iliad, 81, 133, 152, 363
+
+  Illampu, peak of, 207
+
+  Imaus, Mount, 114
+
+  Immaculate Conception, 42
+
+  _Imrama_, 258, 367
+
+  Im Thurn, 207
+
+  Incas, fugitive, 305, 333
+
+  Incense Country, the, 1, 229-235;
+    Route, 233;
+    battles, 230
+
+  Incontinency, how discovered, 24
+
+  India, 9, 55, 57, 64, 85, 104, 105, 106, 109, 113, 122, 124, 128,
+         133, 136, 141, 148, 188, 193, 203, 216, 219, 230, 261, 269,
+         351, 353, 359, 361, 364, 365
+
+  Indian Archipelago, 364
+
+  Indian Ocean, 1, 89, 91, 93, 196, 226, 231, 255, 263, 363, 365
+
+  _Indika_, 349, 353
+
+  Indo-China, 106, 136, 267
+
+  Indonesia, 135
+
+  Indus River, 7, 224
+
+  Inis Fitæ, 255
+
+  Inishbofin, 257
+
+  Insanity, a cure for, 24
+
+  Institute of Oceanography, 288
+
+  _Insula de ben faminill_, 160
+
+  _Insula mulierum_, 160
+
+  _Insula virorum_, 160
+
+  Insurrection of Women, 172
+
+  Intoxication, a preventive of, 24
+
+  Io, 28
+
+  Iran, 214, 337, 377
+
+  Ireland, 95, 99, 254
+
+  Irijo River, 165
+
+  Irish sea epics, 65, 252-253, 258, 367
+
+  Iron city, 157
+
+  Iroquois, 119, 343
+
+  Irving, 26
+
+  Is, sunken city of, 255-256
+
+  _Isaiah_, book of, 30, 77, 122
+
+  Isidore, characterized, 356-357;
+    cited, 121, 350, 351, 356
+
+  Iskander’s wall, 237
+
+  _Isla de beimeni parte_, 315
+
+  _Isla de Mugeres_, 160
+
+  Islam, 171, 233, 269, 270
+
+  Island of Death, 261
+
+  Island of Females, 158
+
+  Island of Life, 261
+
+  Island of Males, 158
+
+  Island of the Seven Cities, or of the Seven Bishops, 252, 259, 271,
+                                                       319, 375
+
+  Islands, number of, 8
+
+  Islands of Enchantment, 251-261
+
+  Islands of the Sun, 271
+
+  Islas Encantadas, 327
+
+  Isle of the Blessed, 91
+
+  Isle of the Double Towers, 253
+
+  Isle of Finn, 253
+
+  Isle of Fire, 252
+
+  Isle of Flowers, 252
+
+  Isle of Gems, 158
+
+  Isle of Laughter, 253
+
+  Isle of a Saint, 253
+
+  Isle of Sheep, 253
+
+  Isle of Shouting, 252
+
+  Isle of witches, 253
+
+  Isogonus, 193, 349
+
+  Israel, 207, 226
+
+  Issedones, the, 107, 196
+
+  Istakhri, 60
+
+  Ister, the, 26
+
+  Istria, 249
+
+  Italy, 9, 129
+
+  Itys, 28
+
+  Ivan the Terrible, 241
+
+  Ivory, 57, 364
+
+  Ivory, apes and peacocks, 224
+
+  Ivory Coast, 179
+
+
+  J
+
+  Jacinth, 244
+
+  Jackal, 29, 338, 351
+
+  Jade, 23-24, 87, 162, 164;
+    Gate, 24
+
+  Jaguar god, 338
+
+  Jaitwas, 124
+
+  Janaidar, 208
+
+  Japan, 12, 97, 148, 259, 363, 364, 371
+
+  Jasconius, 91
+
+  Jason, 75
+
+  Jasper, 24
+
+  Java, 106, 158, 230, 242, 244, 260
+
+  Jehovah, 125, 236
+
+  Jenkinson, Anthony, 212
+
+  Jerba, 229
+
+  Jerusalem, 125, 238, 267, 282, 328, 357;
+    center of the earth, 7
+
+  Jesuits, 102, 317
+
+  Jet, 351
+
+  Jews, 47, 185, 244, 357, 358;
+    legendary kingdoms of, 18, 238;
+    with tails, 345;
+    black pygmy, 138
+
+  Jew’s-harps, 110
+
+  Jinga, Queen, 179
+
+  Joan of Arc, 169;
+    and bottle imp, 23
+
+  Job, 46;
+    his dunghill, 358
+
+  _Job_, book of, 223
+
+  John of Herse, 52
+
+  Johnson, Doctor, 50
+
+  Johnston, Sir Harry, 126, 150, 343
+
+  Joliet, 80
+
+  Joppa, 366
+
+  Jordan, River, 315, 358
+
+  Jordanus, 104
+
+  Josephus, 7, 17, 22, 71
+
+  Judas on his rock, 253
+
+  Judy, the, 100
+
+  Jujube, 229
+
+  Julian, Emperor, 22
+
+  Julius Cæsar, 236, 246, 265
+
+  Juno, temple of, 123
+
+  Jupiter Ammon, oasis of, 18
+
+  Juruena River, 124
+
+  “Just” peoples, 203
+
+  Justin, 165
+
+
+  K
+
+  Kabyles, the, 206
+
+  Kadesh, 186
+
+  Kaidu, 170
+
+  Kali, 338
+
+  Kalm, 40
+
+  Kanakas, the, 260
+
+  Kangaroo, 341
+
+  Kansas, 326
+
+  Karabel, Pass of, 186
+
+  Kara-Khitai, the, 113
+
+  Karaya myth, 292
+
+  Karelian, 149
+
+  Kasil, island of, 206
+
+  Kaska tribesmen, 343
+
+  _Kataphugia_, 195
+
+  Kathkuri, 124
+
+  Kazwini, 60, 104, 114
+
+  Keane, 199, 226
+
+  Kent, 128
+
+  Kerensky, 175
+
+  Kerner, Justinus, 25
+
+  Kibu, island of, 260
+
+  _Ki-lin_, 54
+
+  Kilsapheen, Lost, 256
+
+  Kine of Cibola, 318
+
+  King of Faerie, 368
+
+  Kingdom of Dogs, 107
+
+  Kingdom of Women, 349, 360, 361
+
+  Kingsley, 45
+
+  Kinship with animals, 374-375
+
+  Kirata, the, 134, 136
+
+  Kirghiz, the, 208
+
+  Klebermeer, 16
+
+  Kobolds, 150
+
+  Kohistan, 211
+
+  Koliwan, Lake, 117
+
+  Kollman, 148, 150
+
+  Komana, 186
+
+  Koran, 235, 236, 269
+
+  Kordofan, 54
+
+  Korean tradition of inhabited lands, 8
+
+  Kors Trold, 92
+
+  Korwars, the, 200
+
+  Kraken, 2, 92-93
+
+  Krokottas, 35
+
+  Krümmel, 278
+
+  Kublai Khan, 12, 73, 364, 365
+
+  Kukulcan, 292
+
+  Kurdistan, 171, 240
+
+  Kwan-lun hill, 81
+
+  Kyffhäuser Berg, 220
+
+
+  L
+
+  _Lachryma Crocodili_, 37
+
+  La Condamine, 164, 165, 166
+
+  Lactantius, 10, 362
+
+  Ladanum, 231, 234
+
+  Ladrones, the, 158
+
+  Lafitan, Père, 121
+
+  La Gran Quivera, 326
+
+  Laguna, 323
+
+  Lahore, 177
+
+  La Maillard, 173
+
+  Lamary, land of, 124
+
+  Lamb of Revelation, 59
+
+  Lamberti, 171
+
+  Lambri, 128
+
+  Lamias, 361
+
+  Lamprey, 44
+
+  Lampridius, 55
+
+  Lamya, 67
+
+  Land of Darkness, 221
+
+  Land of Fair Women, 259
+
+  Land of Ghosts, 143
+
+  Land of Job, 366
+
+  Lands of Legend, 223-250
+
+  Land of Marked Bodies, 360
+
+  Land of the Living, 259
+
+  Land of Promise, 253, 259
+
+  Land of Truth, 259
+
+  Lane, 159
+
+  Lang, 357
+
+  Lanuvium, 81
+
+  Laos, 136
+
+  Lapis lazuli, 24
+
+  Lapland, 101, 141, 145, 147, 149, 272, 343
+
+  Laputa, 373
+
+  Large-eared men, 2
+
+  Las Casas, 369
+
+  Las Jurdes, 147
+
+  Lassen, 25
+
+  Last of the Incas, 314
+
+  Latin mind, 354
+
+  Laufer, Berthold, 59
+
+  Laurel-tree and lightning, 19
+
+  La Vieja Islands, 315
+
+  Lecherers, 374
+
+  Leems, Knud, 101
+
+  Legion’s winter camp, 30
+
+  Leigh, 78
+
+  Leland, 118, 149, 370
+
+  Le Maire, 191
+
+  Lemuria, 1, 296
+
+  Lenin, 177
+
+  Leopard, 49, 65
+
+  Le Plongeon, 291
+
+  Leptus, 213
+
+  Lesiy, the, 127
+
+  _Les Merveilleuses_, 173
+
+  Lestai, the, 195
+
+  Lethe, fountain of, 18
+
+  Leuke, isle of, 153
+
+  Leviathan, 91
+
+  Levine, 174
+
+  Lewis and Clark expedition, 372
+
+  Lhasa, 188
+
+  Library of Congress, 358
+
+  Libussa, 171
+
+  Libya, 2, 134, 135, 153, 235, 281, 283, 365
+
+  Liège, 365, 367
+
+  Lilliput, 373
+
+  Limbo of the Moon, 373
+
+  Limpopo River, 225, 226
+
+  Linnæus, 43
+
+  Lion, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 51, 55, 58, 65, 66, 338, 361, 374
+
+  Lipo district, 128
+
+  Lisbon earthquake, 296
+
+  Lisbon Wanderers, 270
+
+  Little Black Men, 145
+
+  Livonians, 3, 365
+
+  Lizard, 82, 118, 341, 370
+
+  Lizard-Man, 339
+
+  Llama, 302, 305, 327, 374
+
+  Lliuga, Princess, 178
+
+  Lobo, 38, 54
+
+  Locris, 38
+
+  Locusts, 44, 65
+
+  Lodestone, Mountain of, 16-17, 276
+
+  Lofoden, 93
+
+  Logic, Indian, 330
+
+  Lok, John, 32, 104, 199
+
+  _London Graphic_, 142
+
+  Long, 146
+
+  Loon, 370
+
+  Lop, desert of, 210, 365
+
+  Lopez, 179
+
+  Lord of the Hollow Tree, 292
+
+  Lord of the Two Horns, 236
+
+  Lords of the Field, 61
+
+  Lotophagi, 199, 227, 229
+
+  Lot’s wife, 358
+
+  Lotus-land, 227-229
+
+  Louhiatar, 241
+
+  Louisiana, 319
+
+  Lucan, 81
+
+  Lucayos, the, 315
+
+  Lucca, Gaudentio di, 211
+
+  Lucerne, 80, 190, 209
+
+  Lucian characterized, 354;
+    cited, 103, 252, 258, 275
+
+  Lucknow, 177
+
+  Lucky-stone in toad’s head, 44
+
+  Ludolf, 37
+
+  Lumberjack legends, 65-66
+
+  Lusignan, house of, 99
+
+  Lusitania, 50, 263
+
+  Lust, ritual, 187
+
+  Luxembourg family, 99
+
+  Lydia, 186
+
+  Lynn, vessels from, 269
+
+  Lyonesse, 255
+
+  Lyon-poisson, 66
+
+
+  M
+
+  Macassar poison, 20
+
+  Macatoa, 303
+
+  McCrindle, 64
+
+  Mace, 244
+
+  Macrobians, the, 193
+
+  MacGregor, 214
+
+  Madagascar, 73, 74, 106, 138, 159, 225, 227, 364
+
+  Madanino, 160
+
+  Madeira Islands, 252, 258, 287, 288
+
+  Mældune, 89
+
+  Maelstrom, 93
+
+  Magellan, 138, 191, 242, 270
+
+  Magh Mell, 259
+
+  Magic dances as sources of the races of fable, 339
+
+  Magic Food, 259
+
+  _Mahabharata_, 156
+
+  Maid Marian, 345
+
+  Maidu Indians, 127
+
+  Maimonides, 238
+
+  Majorca, 174
+
+  Malabar, 112, 125, 233, 243
+
+  Malacca, 149, 159
+
+  Malatu, Sea of, 158
+
+  Malays, 9, 57, 129, 145, 244
+
+  Malay Peninsula, 124, 145, 147, 149, 199, 224, 260, 269
+
+  Maldive Islands, 95
+
+  Male incense, 233
+
+  Male infants, killing of, 178
+
+  Malory, 64
+
+  Mambuti, 144
+
+  Mammoths, frozen, 344
+
+  Mamore River, 139
+
+  Manannan, 89
+
+  Manatee, 102
+
+  Manco Capac, 314
+
+  Mancy, 365
+
+  Mandrake myth, 21-23, 87
+
+  Mangi, 130
+
+  Mangou, 130
+
+  Manhattan Island, 304
+
+  Manikins, 122, 342
+
+  Manioc, 291
+
+  Manlius, 69
+
+  Manoa, 300, 305, 307, 310, 311
+
+  Man of the Mountain, 61, 62
+
+  Manticora, 57
+
+  Maps, mediæval, 11
+
+  Mara River, 52
+
+  Maranon River, 333
+
+  Marata, 320, 323
+
+  Marcasite, 309
+
+  Marcellus, 286
+
+  Marco Milioni, 151, 364
+
+  Marcos, Friar, 318, 320, 321, 322, 323
+
+  Mare, 50, 221, 346
+
+  Mareb, 125
+
+  Mar Eldorado, 311
+
+  Marignolli, 8, 244
+
+  Marining animals, 67
+
+  Market of the Sea, 89
+
+  Markets, Night, 200
+
+  Marquesans, the, 260
+
+  Marquette, 80
+
+  Marseilles, 216
+
+  Martikhora, 57-58
+
+  Martinez, 305
+
+  Martlet, 66
+
+  Martyr, Peter, 331, 368
+
+  _Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundeville_, 363
+
+  Mascardi, 317
+
+  Masefield, 365
+
+  Mashona region, 225
+
+  Massagetæ, the, 169
+
+  Massoudy, 269, 362
+
+  Masu, Mountains of, 260
+
+  Matabele region, 225
+
+  Mather, Increase, 190
+
+  Matriarchate, 185
+
+  Matrimonio, island of, 161
+
+  Ma Tuan-Len, 128
+
+  Maundeville, characterized, 365-367;
+    cited, 19, 25, 55, 58, 61, 63, 68, 104, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114,
+           115, 119, 124, 130, 133, 138, 151, 159, 191, 211, 220, 237,
+           251, 258, 259, 276, 350, 363, 364
+
+  Mauretania, 275
+
+  Mayas, the, 292, 293, 294
+
+  May Day, 187, 188
+
+  Mead, 259
+
+  _Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Stones_, 362
+
+  Mecca, 138, 233
+
+  Mediæval Trade, 243
+
+  Medicine bag, 30
+
+  Medicine men, 321
+
+  Medina, 233
+
+  Mediterranean Sea, 89, 90, 93, 199, 227, 251, 263, 267, 281, 282,
+                     290, 296, 356, 369
+
+  Megasthenes, 108, 109, 114, 133, 184
+
+  Mergui archipelago, 158
+
+  Megon, plain of, 221
+
+  Meir, Rabbi, 621
+
+  Mekong River, 136
+
+  Mekran, 196
+
+  Melanesia, 148
+
+  Melons, 283
+
+  Melusina, 99
+
+  Memphis, 143
+
+  Mendana, 328, 329
+
+  Menendez, 318
+
+  _Mercurius Politicus_, 212
+
+  Merfolk, 89, 98-102, 257
+
+  Mericourt, Theroigne de, 172, 173
+
+  Merles, 361
+
+  Mermaids, 2, 66
+
+  Merodach, 187
+
+  Merolla, 101, 105
+
+  Meropis, island of, 286
+
+  _Merveilles de L’Inde_, 128
+
+  Mesa Encantada, 323
+
+  Mesha, 223, 225, 226
+
+  Mesopotamia, 169
+
+  Meta-collinarum, 361
+
+  _Metamorphoses_, 125, 342
+
+  Metamorphosis, 28
+
+  Meta River, 305
+
+  Mewan Indians, 74, 118
+
+  Mexico, 83, 160, 188, 291, 360;
+    calendar of, 292
+
+  Mezzoramia, 211
+
+  Miami River, 102
+
+  Miaotze, 128
+
+  Micmacs, the, 118
+
+  Middle Comedy, 247
+
+  Midgard serpent, 83
+
+  Midian country, 224
+
+  Midsummer Eve, 187
+
+  Miletus, 152
+
+  Miltiades, 171
+
+  Milton, 345
+
+  Minæans, the, 226, 233
+
+  Mincoupies, 148
+
+  Mindanao Island, 242
+
+  Mingrelia, 171
+
+  Ming tombs, 54
+
+  Mink, 342
+
+  Minocane, 67
+
+  Minotaur, 152
+
+  Mirabeau, 172
+
+  Mirabilia, 349
+
+  Mirage, 199, 210
+
+  Misers, 374
+
+  Mississippi River, 326
+
+  Missouri, 326
+
+  Mistletoe, 19-20, 216
+
+  Mnemosyne, fountain of, 18
+
+  Mock king, 85, 188
+
+  Mole, 374
+
+  Molucca Islands, 1, 206, 242-245, 316
+
+  Moly, 20
+
+  Monaco, Prince of, 280
+
+  Mongolia, 113, 222, 236, 237, 239, 269, 377
+
+  Monoceros, 51
+
+  Monocoli, the, 113
+
+  Monomatti, the, 107
+
+  Monomotapa, 179
+
+  Montaigne, 341
+
+  Montana, 139
+
+  Montanes, 327
+
+  Montegre, 57
+
+  Montserrat, island of, 160
+
+  Montygre, 66
+
+  Moon goddess, 98
+
+  Moon, voyage to, 354
+
+  Moorish warrior queen, 178
+
+  Mordecai, 187
+
+  More, 373
+
+  Morea, the, 2, 247
+
+  Morgan le Fay, 256
+
+  Mormons, 359
+
+  Morocco, 140, 290
+
+  Morris, 75
+
+  Moscha, 225, 226
+
+  Moses and an Ethiopian princess, 71
+
+  Moslems, 138, 140, 238, 271
+
+  Mount of Eden, 8
+
+  Mount Ida, 25
+
+  Mount Sion, 62
+
+  Mountains, beliefs relating to, 205-209;
+    lights on, 2, 206, 207
+
+  Mountains of the Moon, 207
+
+  Mouse-Apollo, 30
+
+  Moving Isle, 253
+
+  Müller, Max, 205, 346
+
+  Müller, von, 54
+
+  Mummification, 87, 373
+
+  Munchausen, 354
+
+  Munster, a lake in, 261
+
+  Munza, King, 144
+
+  Murder, ritual, 158
+
+  Murger, 250
+
+  Muscovites, 58
+
+  Musk, 230, 234
+
+  Mustaghata, Mount, 208
+
+  Myrina, 153, 187
+
+  Myrrh, 231
+
+  _Mythical Monsters_, 82
+
+  Myths of observation, 343-344
+
+  Muysca Indians, 299
+
+
+  N
+
+  Nabatheans, 233
+
+  Nagas, 112, 217
+
+  Nahuatl ark legend, 292
+
+  Nahuelhuapi, Lake, 312, 316, 317
+
+  Nairs, the, 125
+
+  Nanling Mountains, 128
+
+  Narwhal, 51, 53
+
+  Nasamonian youths, 134
+
+  Natural histories, 350
+
+  _Natural History of Norway_, 92, 93
+
+  _Natural History, Pliny’s_, 354-355
+
+  Nature a pageant for man, 376
+
+  Nausicaa, 99
+
+  Navahos, 83, 95, 164, 204, 208, 217, 323, 376
+
+  Navel of the World, 279
+
+  Nearchus, 63, 91, 196
+
+  Nebraska, 326
+
+  Necho, 263
+
+  Necromancers, 218
+
+  Negrillos, 145
+
+  Negritos, 145
+
+  Negritos del Monte, 145
+
+  Negro Indians, 291
+
+  Negroland, 179
+
+  Negro, Rio, 161
+
+  Nekhbet, 75
+
+  Nephrite, 24
+
+  Nereids, 90, 197
+
+  Nergal, 55
+
+  Nero, 169, 230, 275
+
+  Nesnas, 111
+
+  Nestorians, 239-240, 361
+
+  Nestorius, 240
+
+  New Calabar, 98
+
+  New Granada, 300, 301, 304
+
+  New Guinea, 106, 145, 147, 148, 242, 328
+
+  New Hebrides Islands, 329
+
+  New Mexico, 62, 139
+
+  New Towns, 144
+
+  New York, 256
+
+  Niam-Niams, the, 130
+
+  Nicander, 39
+
+  Nicobar Islands, 17, 106
+
+  Niebuhr, 156, 198
+
+  Niger, 135
+
+  Nightingale, 28
+
+  Nile River, 85, 86, 87, 132, 135, 148, 195, 207, 275
+
+  Nina-chumpi, island of, 327
+
+  Ninth wave, 14
+
+  Nixie, 99
+
+  Njogel, 97
+
+  Noah, 292
+
+  Nomad spirit, the, 372
+
+  Nonius Marcellus, 351
+
+  Nordland, 93
+
+  North, 204
+
+  North Atlantic continent, 290
+
+  North Atlantic, floating storehouse of, 278
+
+  North Brother Island, 167
+
+  North Carolina, 306
+
+  Northmen, 267-268, 335
+
+  North Pole, 268
+
+  North Sea, 94
+
+  North wind, 56, 201, 202
+
+  Northern Lights, 4
+
+  Norva Sound, 267
+
+  Norway, 240
+
+  Nosala, island of, 197
+
+  Noseless nations, 108
+
+  Notaries on shipboard, 369
+
+  Nova Zembla, 101
+
+  Novgorod manuscript, 115, 116, 117
+
+  Nubian Highway, 144
+
+  Nulo Mountain, 114
+
+  Numantranus, 9
+
+  Number of peoples, provinces, rivers, and towns, 8
+
+  Numidia, 212
+
+  Nutmegs, 243, 245
+
+  Nysæan shore, 203
+
+
+  O
+
+  Obongos, the, 142
+
+  O Brasile, 256, 375
+
+  O’Brien, Frederick, 260
+
+  Oceania, 145
+
+  Ocean Stream, 8, 11, 203, 207, 262
+
+  Odoric, 58, 61, 96, 137, 243, 365, 366, 367
+
+  Odyssey, 81, 228, 252, 352, 363, 366
+
+  Ogier the Dane, 16
+
+  Ogre, 343
+
+  Ojibwas, the, 106
+
+  Olaus Magnus, 92, 93
+
+  Old Man of the Sea, 102, 363
+
+  Old Man of the Woods, 216
+
+  Old men’s tales, 336
+
+  Old Woman Islands, 315
+
+  Oleacinidæ, 290
+
+  Olisipo, 50, 90
+
+  Olive, 19, 202
+
+  Olympus, 7, 376
+
+  Omaguas, the, 300, 302, 303
+
+  Onesicritus, 191, 349
+
+  Onoscileas, the, 103
+
+  Ophiophagi, the, 199
+
+  Ophir, 1, 223-227
+
+  Opinicus, 66
+
+  Oraisan, 259
+
+  Oranges, 284
+
+  Orang-utan, 363
+
+  Orc, 2, 95
+
+  Orellana, 151, 161, 163, 167
+
+  Orgy of death, Amazon, 183
+
+  Orichalcum, 284
+
+  Orinoco, River, 110, 258, 304, 305, 308, 311, 312, 332
+
+  Orkney Islands, 241
+
+  Orlando, 95
+
+  Ormuz, 25
+
+  Orontes River, 186
+
+  Orsæan Indians, 51
+
+  Ory, 51, 55, 374
+
+  Osiris, 85, 86, 338
+
+  Osorno, 318
+
+  Ostrich, 43, 50, 114
+
+  Othman, 237
+
+  Otter-men, 117
+
+  Otto of Freisingen, 238
+
+  Ottokar, 249
+
+  Ottoman empire, 185
+
+  Otway, 256
+
+  Ovid, 121, 125, 342
+
+  Oviedo, 277, 369
+
+  Owl, 47, 237
+
+  Ox, 47, 58, 361;
+    burrowing, 57
+
+  Oxus River, 7
+
+  Oysters, government of, 42
+
+
+  P
+
+  Pacific Ocean, 260, 296;
+    lost continent in, 255;
+    island traditions of, 327, 328
+
+  Padua, 96
+
+  Pajarito plateau, 62
+
+  Palenque, 292
+
+  Paleolithic artists, 340
+
+  Palestine, 353
+
+  Palomides, 65
+
+  Palos, 242
+
+  Palus Mœotis, 154
+
+  Pamirs, the, 208
+
+  Pamphagi, 199
+
+  Pan, 2, 122, 127, 215, 216, 246
+
+  Panama, 304, 338
+
+  Panama-Pacific Exposition, 284
+
+  Panathenæa, 286
+
+  Pandavas, 146
+
+  Pandore, 109
+
+  Panther, 42, 47
+
+  Paracelsus, 6
+
+  Parade, negro Amazon, 182-183
+
+  Paradise and pearls and pepper, 362
+
+  Paraguay, 299, 300
+
+  Paraguay River, 139, 312, 313
+
+  Paranunta, Rani, 156
+
+  Pard, 49
+
+  Parik, 100
+
+  Paris, 250
+
+  Paris, Island of, 251
+
+  Parroquet, 89
+
+  Parrot, 338, 374
+
+  Partridge, 47
+
+  Pasto, 301
+
+  Pastoral song, 246
+
+  Patagonia, 316
+
+  Pathen, 366
+
+  Paula, 358
+
+  Pausanias, characterized, 353-354;
+    cited, 77, 129
+
+  Peacock, 44, 60
+
+  Peanuts, 291
+
+  Pear, earth shaped like, 12
+
+  Pearl, 87, 98, 351, 364
+
+  Peary, 255
+
+  Pedrarias, 331
+
+  Pegasus, 66, 68, 152
+
+  Pegu, 34
+
+  Pelican, 44, 350, 375
+
+  Pellinore, 64-65
+
+  Peloponnesus, 246
+
+  Peltry, Siberian, 221
+
+  _Penguin Island_, 342
+
+  Penang, island of, 245
+
+  Peoples of Prodigy, 2, 103-120, 351
+
+  Pepper, 363;
+    Pepper Country, 366;
+    Pepper “forests,” 243;
+    pepper wars, 244
+
+  Pepy II, Letter of, 143
+
+  Perforated people, 349
+
+  Periplus of Erythræan Sea, 266
+
+  Perotti, 40
+
+  Persia, 63, 82, 111, 230, 235, 240, 287, 352, 365
+
+  Persian Gulf, 59, 91, 290
+
+  _Persica_, 63
+
+  Peru, 139, 285, 299, 300, 304, 309, 316, 327, 328, 333
+
+  Petachia, Rabbi Moses, 358
+
+  Peter Martyr, 314, 315
+
+  Petra, 231, 233
+
+  Petrified cities, 211-213
+
+  Petrifying river, 261
+
+  Petrograd snipers, 176
+
+  Phædrus, 286
+
+  Phæacia, 99
+
+  Pharaoh’s Red Sea hosts, 102
+
+  Pheasant, 28, 78
+
+  Philes, 350
+
+  Philippines, 111, 138, 145
+
+  Philology, 291
+
+  Philomela, 28
+
+  Phineus, King, 75
+
+  Phlegethon, 262
+
+  Phœnicians, 98, 226, 263, 264, 295
+
+  Phœnix, 2, 60, 68-70, 71, 350, 361, 375
+
+  Phong, the, 136
+
+  Photios, 349
+
+  Phrygian cap, 186
+
+  _Physiologus_, 46, 91
+
+  Piasa petroglyph, 81
+
+  Piedras hijades, 162
+
+  Pigafetta, 138, 191
+
+  Pigeon, 44
+
+  Pig of the ocean, 67
+
+  _Pih T’an_, 89
+
+  Pike, 97
+
+  Pilate, Swiss legend of, 209
+
+  Pilatus, Mount, 209
+
+  Pillar of salt, 358
+
+  Pillars of Hercules, 129, 203, 264, 274, 281
+
+  Pima deluge myth, 342
+
+  Pindar, 202, 263, 339, 352
+
+  Pinkerton, 4, 102
+
+  Pinna, 59, 61
+
+  Pippilika, 64
+
+  Pison, 7
+
+  Pizzani, 271
+
+  Pizarro, the brothers, 161, 299, 301, 302
+
+  Plague, a remedy for, 24
+
+  Plato, 15, 266, 274, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287, 293, 295
+
+  Platypus, 341
+
+  Pliny, characterized, 354-355;
+    cited, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 26, 27, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 43, 49, 50,
+           51, 53, 55, 68, 72, 78, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 104, 108, 109,
+           111, 113, 114, 115, 128, 133, 135, 141, 193, 194, 199, 202,
+           206, 228, 229, 230, 232, 286, 345, 349, 350, 351, 359, 361,
+           362, 363, 366, 369
+
+  Pliny’s Ape, 349
+
+  Pliny the Younger, 296, 354
+
+  Plutarch, 36, 43, 69, 174, 265, 286
+
+  Poetry, magic of, 347
+
+  Pohjola, 241
+
+  Poland, 100, 154, 156
+
+  Polish women fighters, 177
+
+  Polo, Marco, characterized, 363-365;
+    cited, 8, 12, 19, 34, 72, 73, 106, 128, 138, 158, 160, 167, 170,
+           204, 210, 221, 239, 244, 334, 349, 361, 362
+
+  Polybius, 264, 265
+
+  Polyhistor, 355
+
+  _Polyphem ein Gorilla_, 192
+
+  Polyphemus, 90, 228, 363
+
+  Polystephanos, 349
+
+  Pompeii, 296
+
+  Pompeius Festus, 351
+
+  Pompey, 246
+
+  Pomponius, 199
+
+  Pontoppidan, 42, 92, 93, 94, 100, 102, 367
+
+  Pontus, 153
+
+  Popayan, 301
+
+  Pope, Alexander, 108
+
+  Pope Alexander III, 239
+
+  Popinjays, in the deserts, 105
+
+  Popol Nuh, 118
+
+  Popos, 183
+
+  Porcupines, 43
+
+  Pork, 259
+
+  Porter-nations, fables of, 354
+
+  Port of Missing Ships, 276
+
+  Porto Rico, 314
+
+  Portugal, 112, 162, 178, 225, 243, 244, 277
+
+  Portus Nobilis, 225
+
+  Poseidon, 282, 283, 285
+
+  Potato, 306
+
+  Pottery, animal outlines of, 30
+
+  _Prabhâsakhanda_, 106
+
+  Prague, 172, 248
+
+  Prasias, Lake, 196
+
+  Precious stones in Christian symbolism, 24-25
+
+  Prejevalski, 54
+
+  Prescott, 302
+
+  Prester John, 1, 12, 17, 63, 211, 238-240, 359, 361, 362, 366
+
+  Priestesses, armed, 184
+
+  Priest-king, 85
+
+  _Primum mobile_, 9
+
+  _Principal Trade Routes_, 362
+
+  _Principal Voyages_, 369
+
+  Prison for lost souls, 276
+
+  Proclus, 286
+
+  Procopius, 60, 265, 266
+
+  Progne, 28
+
+  _Prometheus Bound_, 207
+
+  Promises of princes, 373
+
+  Prophecy: how the gift is conferred, 24
+
+  Prospero’s isle, 206
+
+  Psalm-singing birds, 253
+
+  Pseudo-Plutarch, 352
+
+  Psylli, the, 194
+
+  Psyllotoxotæ, the, 103
+
+  Pterodactyl, 79
+
+  Ptolemy, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 129, 195, 207, 225, 362
+
+  Public-house signs, 345
+
+  Pueblo Indians, 204
+
+  Puerto de Arica, 327
+
+  Pu-lu tribe, 136
+
+  Punt, 143, 224, 231, 233, 234
+
+  _Puranas_, 269, 359
+
+  Purchas, 3, 42, 53, 74, 199, 335
+
+  Purgative, a, 24
+
+  Pygmies, 2, 108, 117, 132-150, 208, 350, 361, 368
+
+  Pygmy Highway, 144
+
+  Pyramids, 358
+
+  Pyrenees Mountains, 56, 203
+
+  Pytheas of Massilia, 264, 334
+
+
+  Q
+
+  Quail, 44, 356
+
+  Quatrefages, 146
+
+  Queen Bee, 186
+
+  Queen of Sheba, 224, 226
+
+  Quesada, 301
+
+  Quesada, Ximenes, 304
+
+  Questing beast, 64-65
+
+  Quetelet, 192
+
+  Quetzalcoatl, 161, 292
+
+  Quichna Indians, 314, 333
+
+  Quimper, 256
+
+  Quiros, 329
+
+  Quito, 299, 300, 301, 302
+
+  Quivera, 312, 314, 323-326
+
+  Quoyas Morrov, 125
+
+
+  R
+
+  Rabbit, 29, 127
+
+  Race-course, 253, 284, 296
+
+  Rainbow, 370
+
+  Rain trees, 20-21
+
+  Rajputana, 124
+
+  Rakshasis, 156, 157
+
+  Raleigh, 3, 36, 110, 111, 151, 152, 162, 163, 166, 305-310, 329,
+           346, 369
+
+  Ram, 47
+
+  Ram-eagle, 67
+
+  Rami, the, 137
+
+  Ramni, 104
+
+  Ramus, Jonas, 41
+
+  Ras Sem, petrified village of, 212, 213
+
+  Rat, 342, 366;
+    worship of, 30-31;
+    monster, 57
+
+  Rath, 100
+
+  Raven, 42, 43, 374
+
+  Raw materials, search for, 372
+
+  Rawlinson, 184, 228
+
+  Realm of Big Women, 222
+
+  Red River, 136
+
+  Red Sea, 1, 195, 196, 199, 226, 227
+
+  _Regio feminarum_, 160
+
+  Region of Darkness, 221
+
+  Reig Rawan, Desert of, 211
+
+  Reindeer, 240
+
+  Remora, 97
+
+  Repose, regions of, 251
+
+  _Republic_, Plato’s, 286, 287, 373
+
+  Retreat of the Ten Thousand, 195
+
+  Retzius, 291
+
+  _Revelation_, book of, 236;
+    Horsemen of, 62
+
+  Regnard, 40
+
+  Reynard the fox, 47
+
+  Rhegium, 38
+
+  Rhine maidens, 99
+
+  Rhinoceros, 34, 46;
+    of the air, 74-75;
+    horn for detecting poison, 34
+
+  Rhizophagi, the, 199
+
+  Rhodesia, ancient, 1, 225, 226
+
+  Rhodope Mountains, 100
+
+  Rhone River, 209
+
+  Ribbon fish, 95
+
+  Ribeiro, 125, 166
+
+  Ricold of Monte Croce, 237
+
+  Riddles, 346
+
+  Rights of Women, 173
+
+  Riphæan Rocks, 202, 203
+
+  Ritual mimes, 339
+
+  Ritual murder, 85
+
+  River of China, 7
+
+  River that flows by the Throne of God, 262
+
+  Robin Hood cycle, 345
+
+  Roc, 72-74, 363, 365
+
+  Rock crystal, 24
+
+  Rock Tibboos, 195
+
+  Rocky Mountains, 207
+
+  Rodriguez, Barboza, 164
+
+  Rodzianko, 175
+
+  Roebuck, 43
+
+  Roger, King of Sicily, 270
+
+  Rogero, 95
+
+  Rohan, family, 99
+
+  Roman pharmacopeia, animal items in, 27
+
+  Rome, 90, 96, 230, 247, 258, 262, 265, 349, 354
+
+  Romulus, 344
+
+  Root-eaters, 199
+
+  Roraima, Mount, 208
+
+  Rothery, 163, 179
+
+  Rotundity of the earth, 272, 366-367
+
+  Roulin, 141
+
+  Roundhouses, ceremonial, 370
+
+  Royal Irish Society, 256
+
+  Ruad, 100
+
+  Rubruquis, 113, 222, 239
+
+  Ruby, 24, 244
+
+  Ruskin, 216
+
+  Russia, 154, 240, 290, 365;
+    fighting women of, 174-177;
+    strange peoples of, 115-117
+
+
+  S
+
+  Saba, 232, 233
+
+  Sabæans, the, 226, 231, 232, 233
+
+  Sacramento, 284;
+    Valley, 283
+
+  “Sacred groaning stick,” 370
+
+  Sacred Promontory, 10
+
+  Saffron as magic diet, 217
+
+  Sagittary, 66
+
+  Sago tree, 138
+
+  St. Augustine, 355
+
+  St. Bernard, 47, 172
+
+  St. Brendan, 91, 259, 271, 276, 363;
+    island of, 252
+
+  St. Clement, 69
+
+  St. Collen, 368
+
+  St. Colodoc, 45
+
+  St. Costinian, 45
+
+  St. Francis, 375
+
+  St. Gerasimus, 45
+
+  St. Guthlac, 45
+
+  St. Helenus, 45
+
+  St. Jerome, 237, 358
+
+  St. John, 65
+
+  St. John’s Eve, 188
+
+  St. Leonor, 45
+
+  St. Maria Rotunda, 342
+
+  St. Mark, treasure of, 53
+
+  St. Sulpicius, 45
+
+  St. Vitus dance, 39, 40
+
+  Sais, temple at, 281
+
+  Saint, statue of a, 271
+
+  Salamanca, 147;
+    Council of, 10
+
+  Salamander, 38-39, 47, 70, 337, 350
+
+  Salmon, 89
+
+  Salt fish diet, 243
+
+  Salvaje, 126
+
+  Samar, 158
+
+  Samarcand, 170
+
+  Samaria, 358
+
+  Sambation, the river, 17-18
+
+  Samoan Islands, 260
+
+  Samoyeds, 56, 57, 74, 115, 116, 117, 364
+
+  Sanazzaro, 247
+
+  Sandalwood, 230, 233
+
+  Sandrokotos, 184
+
+  San Joao River, 124
+
+  San Francisco, 294
+
+  San Francisco, mountain of, 376
+
+  San Joaquin Valley, 283
+
+  Santa Cruz, island of, 329
+
+  Santa Marta, 301
+
+  Santa Thome del Agostina, 311
+
+  San Thome River, 124
+
+  Santom aborigines, 136
+
+  Santos, Juan, 333
+
+  Sapphar Metropolis, the, 225
+
+  Sapphire, 24, 25
+
+  Saragossa, feminine defense of, 174
+
+  Sardinia, 96, 264;
+    pygmy survivals in, 147
+
+  Sardonic plant, 356
+
+  Sargasso Sea, 274-280, 281, 287
+
+  Sarmatians, 156
+
+  Sassafras, 242
+
+  Satan, 112, 204, 236, 350
+
+  Satyr-fish, 67
+
+  Satyrs, 2, 66, 121-131, 206, 272, 356, 361, 375;
+    Satyr Islands, 129
+
+  Saures, 221
+
+  Savaii, 260
+
+  Sayce, 185, 186
+
+  Sayf Al-Muluk, 251
+
+  Scaliger, 58, 112, 140
+
+  Scalping, 120
+
+  Scandinavia, 290
+
+  Scapegoat, 187
+
+  Scarab, 218
+
+  Scarecrows as tribal ancestors, 200
+
+  _Scenes de la Vie de Bohème_, 250
+
+  Schenchzer, 80
+
+  Schomburgk, 167
+
+  Schoolcraft, 119, 370
+
+  Schorodomachi, the, 103
+
+  Schweinfurth, 142, 144, 147
+
+  Sciapodes, the, 113
+
+  Scilly Islands, 255, 263, 265
+
+  Scipio, 265
+
+  Scobellum, 374
+
+  Scorpion men, 260
+
+  Scotland, tide myth of, 9, 345
+
+  Scrofula, animal remedies for, 27
+
+  Scylax, 275, 353
+
+  Scyritæ, the, 108, 114
+
+  Scythia, 82, 107, 141, 154, 155, 156, 196, 235, 236, 237
+
+  Scythian lamb, 58-62
+
+  Sea a symbol of eternity, 262
+
+  Sea creatures, 89-102;
+    named after land animals, as sea-dragons, hares, horses, kites,
+    lions, mice, oxen, spiders, 89
+
+  Sea serpent, 2, 93-95
+
+  Sea of Clarified Butter, 269
+
+  Sea of Curds or Whey, 269
+
+  Sea of Glass, 252
+
+  Sea of Milk, 261, 269
+
+  Sea of Salt Water, 269
+
+  Sea of Sugar Cane Juice, 269
+
+  Sea of Wine, 269
+
+  Seal, 42, 89
+
+  Seal-men, 117, 242, 257
+
+  Sebo, 77
+
+  Sedentary Indians, 320
+
+  Selfishness, myths of, 371
+
+  Semangs, the, 147, 260
+
+  Semiramis, 18, 169
+
+  Semites, commercial fictions of, 9;
+    culture of, 357
+
+  Seneca, 252
+
+  Senegal, 286, 290, 291
+
+  Senegal River, 263
+
+  Sephar, Mount, 223
+
+  Sepulchers of Zenu, 312, 329-330
+
+  Seres, 191, 193, 230
+
+  Serrano, 244
+
+  Sertorius, 264, 265
+
+  Set, 86, 87
+
+  Seven Cities of Cibola, 312, 318-323
+
+  Seven Seas, 269
+
+  “Shadow-footed,” 346
+
+  Shagamaw, 66
+
+  Shakespeare, 109, 248
+
+  _Shan Hai King_, 359
+
+  Shantung, 89, 137
+
+  Shape-shifting, 28, 370
+
+  Shark, 87, 95, 97-98, 260
+
+  Shaw, 212
+
+  Sheep, 257, 327, 358
+
+  Sheikh of the Seaboard, 363
+
+  Shetland Islands, 97, 241
+
+  Shikh, 111
+
+  Shoshones, the, 6
+
+  Shrewmouse, 43
+
+  _Shu-king_, 71
+
+  Siam, 33, 34, 137, 240, 269, 293
+
+  Siberia, 115, 116, 117, 344;
+    women fighters of, 177
+
+  Sicily, 147, 246
+
+  Sid, the, 217
+
+  Sidney, Sir Philip, 247
+
+  Sierras, the, 283
+
+  Sigismund, King, 101
+
+  _Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man_, 149
+
+  Silent Isle, 252
+
+  Silver, 284, 327
+
+  Silvia of Aquitaine, 358
+
+  Simeon, Rabbi, 62
+
+  Simhala, 157, 158
+
+  Simon, Padre, 300
+
+  Sinai, 143
+
+  Sind, 158
+
+  Sindbad, 3, 33, 72, 91, 137, 206, 234, 362, 363, 366
+
+  Singular speech, 104-105
+
+  Sinmenkpen, 183
+
+  Siptakhora tree, 105
+
+  Sirens, 48, 89, 90, 197, 272
+
+  Siva, 338
+
+  Skeletons, animated, 117
+
+  Skin-shifting, 28
+
+  Skogfrau, 216
+
+  Skulls as drinking cups, 196;
+    talking, 117;
+    rolling, 119, 120, 370
+
+  Slave Coast, 179
+
+  Slavs, 100, 248, 261
+
+  Sliabh Daidche, 252
+
+  Sluggish Sea, 264
+
+  Smith, Grafton Elliot, 84, 87
+
+  Smithsonian Institution, report of, 288
+
+  Smyrna, 153, 187
+
+  Snails, 366
+
+  Snake, 30, 37-38, 43, 45, 64, 78, 79, 81, 84, 112, 351, 361
+
+  Snake-eaters, 199
+
+  Snakes in Ireland, no, 356
+
+  Snoligoster, 66
+
+  Snowy Mountains, 7
+
+  Society Islands, 329
+
+  Socotra, island of, 226, 365
+
+  Socrates, 286
+
+  Soe-Drawl, 92
+
+  Soe-Ormen, 94
+
+  Sofala, 225
+
+  Solar mythology, 83, 287, 295
+
+  Solinus, characterized, 356;
+    cited, 9, 35, 38, 42, 53, 206, 349, 350, 363, 366
+
+  Solomon, 125, 185, 223, 224, 226, 227
+
+  Solomon Islands, 260, 312, 327-329
+
+  Solon, 281
+
+  Somaliland, 1, 234
+
+  Sombreron, 127
+
+  Sorcerers that took hyena form, 36
+
+  South, 9, 204
+
+  South America, 2, 3, 65, 126, 291, 298
+
+  South Atlantic continent, 290
+
+  South Arabs, 226
+
+  South Brother Island, 167
+
+  South Dakota, 208
+
+  South Seas, 203, 258, 336
+
+  Southern hemisphere noblest, 9
+
+  Souza, 271
+
+  Soviets, 156
+
+  Spain, 9, 161, 162, 224, 243, 264, 277, 290, 299, 300, 309, 333,
+         368, 372;
+    treasure ships of, 306, 309
+
+  Sparta, 246
+
+  _Speculum Regale_, 101
+
+  Spence, 292
+
+  Spencer, 336, 345
+
+  Spenser, 306
+
+  Sphinx, 66, 356
+
+  Spice Islands, 1, 12, 90, 225, 242-245
+
+  Spices, 302, 364
+
+  Spider, 28
+
+  Spitzbergen, 41
+
+  Splinter cat, 66
+
+  Springs, magical, 18, 353
+
+  Spurred men, 245
+
+  Squid, 95
+
+  Squonk, 66
+
+  Stag, 28, 45, 48, 51
+
+  Stagnant Sea, 358
+
+  Staked plains, 324
+
+  Stanley, 132, 144, 145
+
+  Star of the Archers, 178
+
+  Statues as source of myths, 340, 341
+
+  Stone Age heathen, 343
+
+  Stone giants, 207
+
+  “Stone of the eyes,” 26
+
+  Storax, 232
+
+  Stork, 28, 42, 44
+
+  “Story of the Winged Disk,” 86
+
+  Strabo, 3, 8, 9, 25, 38, 55, 107, 135, 140, 154, 197, 198, 228, 264,
+          286, 351, 353
+
+  Straits of Florida, 278
+
+  Straits of Magellan, 316
+
+  Street of feathers, 359
+
+  Streets of women, 209
+
+  Struthocameli, 50
+
+  Struthophagi, the, 199
+
+  Struthopodes, the, 113
+
+  Struys, 129
+
+  Stygian Pool, 262
+
+  Stymphalian birds, 2, 77
+
+  Subraces, 342
+
+  Suffolk, 101
+
+  Sukhavati, 261
+
+  Sumatra, 128, 129, 137, 159, 240, 363
+
+  Sun-haters, 194
+
+  Sun, track of the, 205
+
+  Sunamukha, the, 106
+
+  Sun-Carrier, 6-7
+
+  Sunda Islands, 148, 269
+
+  _Sung Geography_, 128
+
+  Sunken Lands, 254-257
+
+  Sunset, hissing sound at, 14
+
+  Superior, Lake, 294
+
+  Suwanee River, 319
+
+  Svetadvipa, 261
+
+  Swallow, 28, 40-41, 45, 81, 375
+
+  Swallower of the West, 338, 372
+
+  Swan song, 44, 202
+
+  Sweden, 240;
+    the Great, 268
+
+  Swine, 30, 44, 48, 87, 127, 253, 260, 338, 374
+
+  Symmetry, sense of cosmic, 7
+
+  Symons, 250
+
+  Sympathetic magic, 187
+
+  Syria, 61, 169, 186, 195
+
+  Syrian lamb, 61
+
+  Syrtic district, 228
+
+
+  T
+
+  Tabernacle form of earth, 6
+
+  Table of the Sun, 14-15
+
+  Tachnin River, 102
+
+  Tachylyte, 289, 295
+
+  Tae-Ping women fighters, 177
+
+  Tagus River, 50
+
+  Tahetan tide myth, 9
+
+  Tahiti, 260
+
+  Tailed men, 121-131
+
+  Takla-makan, dead city of, 215
+
+  Talmud, 60, 61, 91, 204
+
+  Tamerlane, 237
+
+  Tanganyika country, 145
+
+  Tangi, 97
+
+  Tannhäuser, 219, 220
+
+  Taos, 323
+
+  Tapio, 128
+
+  Tapirs, king of the, 127
+
+  Taprobane, 10, 63
+
+  Taranto, 39, 59
+
+  Tarantula, 39-40
+
+  Tarascon, shield of, 66
+
+  Tarask, 66, 337
+
+  Tartars, 108, 130, 147, 154, 170, 221, 237, 365
+
+  Tariessus, 224
+
+  Tatius, 37
+
+  Tauron, 104
+
+  Taurus Mountains, 186
+
+  Tawny Moors, 199
+
+  Tchad, Lake, 135
+
+  Tchudi, the, 117
+
+  Tecumbalam, the bird, 293
+
+  Tembandumba, 178
+
+  Tempe, 201
+
+  _Tempest, The_, 103
+
+  Tempests, how to avert, 24
+
+  Temple harlots, 184
+
+  Temple of Dobayba, 312, 331-332
+
+  Temple of the Sun, 332
+
+  Ten Lost Tribes, 17, 138, 237, 359, 362
+
+  Tennyson, 227, 252, 255
+
+  Tenochtitlan, 318
+
+  Tensevetes, 361
+
+  Terhetar, 241
+
+  Termeh, 153
+
+  Termier, 288, 289, 290, 291, 295, 296
+
+  Ternate, 244
+
+  Terra Australis Incognita, 11
+
+  Terrestrial Paradise, 7, 8, 117, 158, 239, 312, 365, 368, 373, 376
+
+  Terrible Ocean, 262-273
+
+  Tetramorph, 338
+
+  Texera, 163
+
+  Teyma, 211
+
+  Thalestris, 154
+
+  Thanet, island of, 351
+
+  Tharshish, 224, 225, 226, 227
+
+  Thebaid, 148
+
+  Theocritus, 246
+
+  Theodor, Bishop, 117
+
+  Theodosius, 358
+
+  Theophrastus, 275
+
+  Theopompus, 286
+
+  Thermiscyra, 186
+
+  Thermodon River, 153
+
+  Theseus, 152, 153
+
+  Thevet, 53
+
+  Thirty Years’ War, 248
+
+  Thomas, 326
+
+  Thoreau, 204
+
+  Thorne, 244
+
+  Thought, fancied omnipotence of, 376
+
+  Thrace, 135
+
+  Thule, 10, 264
+
+  Thunberg, 34
+
+  Thunder bird, 81
+
+  Thunderbolts, 26
+
+  Thuringia, 220
+
+  Thurium, 352
+
+  Tiber River, 209
+
+  Tiberius, 19, 90
+
+  Tibet, 54, 64, 124, 187, 188, 196, 240, 364
+
+  Tides, 9
+
+  Tidor, 244
+
+  Tierra del Fuego, 328
+
+  Tierra-firma, 13, 303
+
+  Tig-balang, 127
+
+  Tiger, 49, 57, 81, 351, 361
+
+  Tigris River, 238
+
+  _Timæus_, the, 281, 285, 286
+
+  Tin, 284
+
+  Tin Islands, 263, 265, 352
+
+  Titan, 370
+
+  Tithonus, 38
+
+  Titicaca, Lake, 312
+
+  Tityrus, 66
+
+  Tlingit myths, 29, 370
+
+  Toad, 78
+
+  Tobacco, 306
+
+  Toltecs, 292
+
+  Tomyris, 169
+
+  Tonga, 260
+
+  Topago, province of, 162
+
+  Topaz, 24
+
+  Topographical legends, 14
+
+  Topsell, 51
+
+  Topsy-turvy, law of, 3
+
+  Torca, island of, 255
+
+  Torres Straits, 260
+
+  Tortoise, 6, 47, 96, 343
+
+  Toscanelli, map of, 12
+
+  Totemism, 29
+
+  Totoneac, 320, 323
+
+  Toucan, 42
+
+  Tower of London, 307
+
+  Traconda, island of, 104
+
+  Tragedy, Greek, 339
+
+  Trapalanda, 316
+
+  Travel Tales of Mankind, 348-370
+
+  _Travels in Barbary_, 212
+
+  Travelers, Lot of, 335-336
+
+  Travelers’ Trunk, earth like a, 6
+
+  Trebizond, 153
+
+  Tree of the Sun, 19
+
+  Trees, 19-21, 353
+
+  Trickster-hero, 370
+
+  Trinidad, 300, 305, 308
+
+  Trinity, the earliest, 85, 86
+
+  Tritons, 89, 90, 272
+
+  Troglodytes, 2, 25, 106, 109, 138, 158, 194-195
+
+  Troll, 367
+
+  Tronador, 318
+
+  Tropic of Cancer, 277, 278, 280
+
+  Trotzky, 177
+
+  Troubadours, 47
+
+  Troy, 75, 133, 152
+
+  _True History_, 103, 275, 354
+
+  Tsheremis, 107
+
+  T’sung-ling Mountains, 360
+
+  Tuanaki, island of, 255
+
+  Tuatha Dé Danann, 217
+
+  Tumbleweed, 120
+
+  Tupac-Amaru, 333
+
+  Tupac Yupanqui, Inca, 327
+
+  Tupi-Guarani myth, 292
+
+  Tupimare, the hill, 292
+
+  Turanians, 151, 185
+
+  Turkestan, 87, 214, 361
+
+  Turkey, 108, 154, 170, 237
+
+  Turkomans, 186, 346, 353
+
+  Turja Fells, 241
+
+  Turquoise, 24, 318
+
+  Turtle, 81, 119
+
+  Turtle-eaters, 198
+
+  Tuscany, 282
+
+  Twelfth Day, 31
+
+  Two Mussulman Travelers, 363
+
+  Two Sisters, isles of, 158
+
+  Tylor, 123, 343, 346
+
+  Tzetzes, 109, 350
+
+
+  U
+
+  Udyana, 259
+
+  Ulloa, 21, 38
+
+  Ulysses, 99, 205, 228, 229, 336, 354
+
+  Underground, beliefs as to, 217-220
+
+  _Undine_, 99
+
+  Ung-Khan, 239
+
+  Unicorn, 2, 50-55, 66, 67, 340, 375;
+    horn of, antidote for poison, 51
+
+  Unicorn bird, 75
+
+  Uniped, 113
+
+  United States, 290
+
+  Universe an egg, 6
+
+  Unpaid vows, 373
+
+  Ural Mountains, 107, 202
+
+  Urcos, lake of, 332
+
+  Urdu-begani, 177
+
+  Utopia, 373
+
+  Uttarakarns, the, 261, 336
+
+
+  V
+
+  Vaikuntha, 261
+
+  Vain efforts, 373
+
+  Valasca, 172
+
+  Valencia, 178
+
+  “Valentines,” Amazon, 152, 162
+
+  Vale Perilous, 191
+
+  Valley of Apes, 125
+
+  Valley of Diamonds, 73
+
+  Valley of the Shadow of Death, 367
+
+  Valum Chvim, 292
+
+  Vampires, 367
+
+  Vancouver Island, 28
+
+  Van Diemen’s Land, 95
+
+  Van Noort, 191
+
+  Varasena, Pass of, 361
+
+  Varenius, 278
+
+  Varro, 351
+
+  Varthema, 138
+
+  Vartomannus, 53
+
+  Vashti, 187
+
+  Vassals of the beasts, men as, 28
+
+  Vaz, Lopez, 163, 304, 328
+
+  Veddahs, the, 148
+
+  Vegetable lamb, 58-62
+
+  Venetus, Paulus, 53
+
+  Venezuela, 126, 207, 301, 304, 306
+
+  Venice, lion of, 66
+
+  Venus, 219
+
+  Venus, Mandragorolis, 22
+
+  Vergil, Polydore, 128
+
+  Vermin, a diet against, 193
+
+  Verrius, 351
+
+  Versailles, march on, 172
+
+  Vicarious sacrifice, 86
+
+  _Views of Nature_, 278
+
+  Viking names, 267
+
+  Villon, 249
+
+  Vilna unit of girl soldiers, 177
+
+  Vincent of Beauvais, 366
+
+  Vine, 19
+
+  Vineta, legendary city of, 254
+
+  Vine-women, 103
+
+  Virgil, 75, 247
+
+  Virgin gift-bearers, 201
+
+  Virgin Mary, 240
+
+  Virtues and vices pictured, 47
+
+  Vishnu, 134
+
+  Vitruvius, 204
+
+  Vokearos, the, 166
+
+  Volcano Island, 137
+
+  Volga River, 107
+
+  Von Hutten, 302, 303
+
+  Votiaks, the, 29
+
+  Voyage of Maldune, 252
+
+  _Voyage of St. Brendan_, 367
+
+  Vulture, 43, 338
+
+
+  W
+
+  Wagon homes, 155
+
+  Wak-wak, 111, 159, 261, 363
+
+  Wales, legend of, 255
+
+  Wallerius, 41
+
+  Walnut tree, 19
+
+  Walton, Isaac, 43
+
+  Wandering arts, 249
+
+  Wapaloosie, 66
+
+  Wars over women, Indian, 162-163
+
+  Wartburg, 219
+
+  Water gods of northern Europe, 97
+
+  Water horse, 97, 242
+
+  Water sheep, 60
+
+  Weddell, 102
+
+  Weigall, 143
+
+  Welsers, the, 302
+
+  West, 204-205;
+    as home of marvel, 349
+
+  West African Rain Forest, 132, 148
+
+  West Indies, 287, 290, 291
+
+  Westropp, 256
+
+  West wind, 262
+
+  Whale, 3, 47, 94, 354, 363;
+    bones of for dwellings, 197
+
+  Wheel-shaped maps, 7
+
+  Whirlwind the dance of a ghost, 370
+
+  White-Corn Boy, 376
+
+  White House, 333
+
+  White Indians, 4, 331
+
+  White Nile, 184
+
+  Whitman, Walt, 193
+
+  Whore of Babylon, 65
+
+  Whydah, 179, 183
+
+  Wichita Indians, 326
+
+  Wiener, 291, 315
+
+  Wild Women, 216
+
+  William of Wykeham, 372
+
+  Wind-egg, 50
+
+  Winged serpents, 70, 233
+
+  _Winter’s Tale_, 249
+
+  Wish, power of, 347
+
+  Witchcraft, 78, 204, 218, 240-242, 272, 292, 365
+
+  Witch Realm of Lapland, 240-242
+
+  Wolf, 28, 30, 43, 45, 48, 58
+
+  Wolf, Dr., 130
+
+  Woman of the Thicket, 216
+
+  Women for guests, 364
+
+  Women in Mexican revolutions, 169-170
+
+  World, a living being, 6
+
+  Woodpecker, 29
+
+  Words, power of, 347
+
+  World summit, theory of, 12-13
+
+  Woruisamocos, the, 167
+
+  Wu-lung-li-tan, village of, 129
+
+  Wyvern, 66
+
+
+  X
+
+  Xanadu, 365
+
+  Xarayes, Laguna de los, 312, 313, 333
+
+  Xecotcovach, the bird, 293
+
+  Xenophon, 195, 286
+
+  Xerxes, 352
+
+
+  Y
+
+  Yacu-mama, 95
+
+  Yakuts, the, 57
+
+  Yams, 260, 291
+
+  Yangste Kiang, the, 137
+
+  Yao, the, 128
+
+  _Yashka_, 174
+
+  Yazd, 214
+
+  Yazel, Abraham, 17
+
+  Yedua, 60, 62
+
+  Yellow-Corn Girl, 376
+
+  Yellow Sea, 259
+
+  Yemen, 196
+
+  _Yen-men_, 57
+
+  Yima, garden of, 337
+
+  Yoruba, 179
+
+  Ysopete, 324, 325, 326
+
+  Yucatan, 204
+
+  Yule, Colonel, 129
+
+  Yunnan, 128, 136
+
+
+  Z
+
+  Zahm, 207
+
+  Zambesi River, 225, 226
+
+  Zanzibar, 3, 245, 270, 363, 364
+
+  Zell, 192
+
+  Zenobia, 169
+
+  Zephyria, 50
+
+  Zipangu, 12
+
+  Zulus, 111, 125
+
+  Zuñi, 322, 323
+
+  Zuyder Zee, 254
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+_Distinguished Books_
+
+
+  BARE SOULS      BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD
+
+This volume goes beyond the geographical limits of Mr. Bradford’s
+successful “Damaged Souls,” and includes a group of the world’s most
+mysteriously fascinating personalities. Under Mr. Bradford’s magic
+touch they spring to life as self-revealing human beings. His subjects
+include John Keats, Thomas Gray, Flaubert, Voltaire, Edward Fitzgerald,
+Charles Lamb and Horace Walpole.
+
+
+  LEVIATHAN      BY WILLIAM BOLITHO
+
+“If you are a discriminating reader you will have marked William
+Bolitho as a man whose stuff you will follow anywhere, for he stands
+out from the hordes of excellent and gentle essayists as boldly as
+does a woodcut when placed next a half-tone engraving.”--_Laurence
+Stallings_ in the New York _World_.
+
+
+  THE LIFE OF THE BAT      BY CHARLES DERENNES
+
+An exciting personal narrative is told in this book--the life story of
+the bat, much of it threaded on the life experiences of a captive bat
+called Noctu. He very soon develops a strong personality, and through
+his story we learn the life history of bats generally,--their apparent
+pastimes,--as in their aerial ballets--their mating, their search
+for food and the whole fascinating range of their daily and nightly
+activities.
+
+
+  AT A VENTURE      BY CHARLES A. BENNETT
+        _Illustrated by Clarence Day, Jr._
+
+“How delightful to run across a new writer of such subtle penetration
+combined with a light and lazy humor. Mr. Bennett has a fine sense of
+satire, of character, of life, and is a master of the luminous phrase.
+He discusses live subjects, and his papers cover all sorts of topics
+from advertising to zebra-raising, written with ease, elegance and
+grace. The pictures are priceless, all movement, irony and grin.”--_W.
+E. Woodward_ in the _Nation_.
+
+
+HARPER & BROTHERS
+
+
+
+
+_A Miscellany_
+
+
+  THE BIBLE AND COMMON SENSE      BY BASIL KING
+
+Here is a book in which honest people of every communion, groping
+their way through the storms of controversy, will find fresh light to
+guide them. Mr. King tells eloquently what the Bible means to him as
+an individual, and frankly and fearlessly discusses such topics as the
+Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and the effect of scientific
+criticism on the Bible. His tone is always constructive, always
+reverent, always inspiring.
+
+
+  THE MYSTERY OF RELIGION      BY EVERETT DEAN MARTIN
+
+What is religion? Has it any real bearing on morality and the
+unescapable facts of human relationship? The author of “The Behavior
+of Crowds” here scientifically analyzes, in the light of social
+psychology, the ceremonials and taboos of religion, and the fundamental
+meaning and cause of group religion as a universal human need.
+
+
+  THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS      BY GILBERT SELDES
+
+A spirited and entertaining discussion of the “low-brow” arts and
+artists of comic stage and screen, of song and dance and newspaper
+humor, by a “high-brow” young critic who sees in them the flourishing
+germ of a native American expression.
+
+
+  A MAGICIAN AMONG THE SPIRITS      BY HOUDINI
+
+A master magician here reveals the results of years of careful study
+of noted mediums and of spiritualistic phenomena of all kinds. This
+account of his adventures during his investigations, and the striking
+conclusions to which he has been forced form an important--and
+entertaining--chapter in the crusade for truth.
+
+
+  THE AMERICAN MIND IN ACTION
+        BY HARVEY O’HIGGINS and DR. E. H. REEDE
+
+A keen analysis of the typical American attitude, as exemplified in the
+lives and personalities of a dozen outstanding Americans. “The work is
+absorbingly interesting, holding the reader as with a magic spell from
+beginning to end. The American reader feels as he follows the analysis
+of the American mind that he is gradually penetrating to the mystic
+depths of his own soul.”--_Boston Transcript._
+
+
+HARPER & BROTHERS
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber's Notes:
+
+  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
+
+  Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75759 ***