wives, placed their children in the presence of snakes; if the
snakes fled they knew their wives were pure. Callias took him
further yet, to the home of the hermaphrodites; Nymphodorus showed
him a race of fascinators who used enchanted words. With
Apollonides he encountered women who killed with their eyes those
on whom they looked too long. Megasthenes guided him to the
Astomians, whose garments were the down of feathers, and who lived
on the scent of the rose.

In his cups they all passed, confusedly, before him; the
hermaphrodites whispered to the rose-breathers the secrets of
impossible love; the griffons bore to him women with magical eyes;
the Albanians danced with elastic feet; he heard the shrill call
of the Psyllians, luring the serpents to death; the column of
Panchaia unveiled its mysteries; the Hyperboreans the reason of
their fear of life, and on the wings of the chimera he set out
again in search of that continent which haunted antiquity and
which lay beyond the sea.





IV

THE PURSUIT OF THE IMPOSSIBLE


"Another Phaethon for the universe," Tiberius is reported to have
muttered, as he gazed at his nephew Caius, nicknamed Caligula, who