of his time he well understood. He pored over the maps of the ancient
geographer Ptolemy, over the maps of Cosmas, a later geographer, over
Palestrello's charts, given him by Philippa's mother.

9. Ptolemy said the world is round, but Cosmas, whom good Christians
were bound to believe, since he founded his science on the Bible, said
it is flat, with a wall around it to hold up the sky--very probable,
certainly. But that notion of the ancients that the world is "round
like a ball" had been caught up and believed by a handful of men
scattered sparsely down through the centuries, and of late lead
gained, among advanced scientists, more of a following than ever. And
Columbus, who, with all his enthusiasm for adventure and his reverence
for religion and he church, had a clear, unbiased, scientific head,
mentally turned his back upon Cosmas, and clasped hands with the
ancients and the wisest scientists of his own day.

10. The north was known, the south was fast becoming so, the east had
been penetrated, but the west was unexplored. Stretching along from
Thule, the distant Iceland, to the southern part of the great African
continent, thousands of miles, lay the "Sea of Darkness," as the
people called it. What lay beyond? The question had been asked before,
times enough; times enough answered for any reasonable man. "Hell was
there," said one superstition, "Haven't you seen the flames at
sunset-time?" "A sea thick like paste, in which no ships can sail,"
said another. "Darkness," said another, "thick darkness, the blackness
of nothing, and the end of all created things!"

11. There _was_ a legend that over there beyond was Paradise, and St.
Brandan, wandering about the seas, had reached it. The ancients told
of an island Atlantis over there somewhere in the West, and one of