The coasts of illusion
Date: 2025-03-30T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Legends; Geographical myths

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Title: The coasts of illusion

A study of travel tales

Author: Clark B. Firestone

Illustrator: Ruth Hambidge

John Everett Millais

Release date: March 31, 2025 [eBook #75759]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75759

Credits: Alan, Hannah Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COASTS OF ILLUSION ***

THE COASTS OF ILLUSION

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

“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 Speaker: Marco Polo.
The Place: Venice, the Rialto. | 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.

THE COASTS OF ILLUSION

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Weigall, Arthur E. P. “A Nubian Highway,” in Blackwood’s Magazine for 1907.

Wells, H. G. The Outline of History.

Westropp, Thomas J. “Brasil and the Legendary Atlantic Islands,” in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy for 1912.

Wheeler, William A. Familiar Allusions.

Wiener, Leo. Africa and the Discovery of America.

Williams, Archibald. The Romance of Early Exploration.

Williams, Henry S. The Historians’ History of the World.

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, 62
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

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Table of Contents

- THE COASTS OF ILLUSION
- MARCO TALKS WITH HIS NEIGHBORS
- PREFACE
- Chapter I. The World That Was
- Chapter II. The Earth Itself
- Chapter III. Inanimate Nature
- Chapter IV. The Animal Kingdom
- Chapter V. The Fabulous Beasts
- Chapter VI. Fable upon Wings
- Chapter VII. The Dragon
- Chapter VIII. Denizens of the Deep
- Chapter IX. The Peoples of Prodigy
- Chapter X. The Satyrs
- Chapter XI. The Pygmies
- Chapter XII. The Amazons of Legend
- Chapter XIII. The Amazons of History
- Chapter XIV. The Folk of Tradition
- Chapter XV. The Horizon Lands
- Chapter XVI. Lands of Legend
- Chapter XVII. Islands of Enchantment
- Chapter XVIII. The Terrible Ocean
- Chapter XIX. The Sargasso Sea
- Chapter XX. Atlantis
- Chapter XXI. The Gilded Man
- Chapter XXII. The Dream Quests of Spain
- Chapter XXIII. The Fabric of Illusion
- Chapter XXIV. The Travel Tales of Mankind
- Chapter XXV. The Gains of Fable
- Bibliography
- Index
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE