The coasts of illusion — A Closer Reading

f 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 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.