efore if a man travel east or west he will, if God prosper him,
return in time to his starting-point."

The speaker looked at Philip as if to invite contradiction, but the
other nodded.

"It is the belief of the best sailors," Battista went on; "it is the
belief of the great Paolo Toscanelli in this very land of Italy."

"It was the belief of a greater than he. The ancients--"

"Ay, what of your ancients?" Battista asked eagerly.

Philip responded with a scholar's zest. "Four centuries before our
Lord's birth Aristotle taught the doctrine, from observing in
different places the rise and setting of the heavenly bodies. The sages
Eratosthenes, Hipparchus and Ptolemy amplified the teaching. It is found
in the poetry of Manilius and Seneca, and it was a common thought in the
minds of Virgil and Ovid and Pliny. You will find it in St. Augustine,
and St. Isidore and Beda, and in many of the moderns. I myself have
little knowledge of such things, but on the appeal to high authority
your doctrine succeeds.'

"What a thing is learning!" Battista exclaimed with reverence. "Here
have I and such as I been fumbling in the dark when the great ones of
old saw clearly!... It follows, then, that a voyage westward will bring
a man to Cathay?"

"Assuredly. But how will he return? If the earth is a sphere, his course
will be a descent, and on his way back he will have to climb a great
steep of waters."

"It is not so," said Battista vigorously. "Though why it is not so I
cannot tell. Travelling eastward by land there is no such descent, and
in this Mediterranean sea of ours one can sail as easily from Cadiz to
Egypt as from Egypt to Cadiz. There is a divine alchemy in it which I
cannot fathom, but the fact stands."

"Then you would reach Cathay by the west?"

"Not Cathay." The man's voice was very earnest. "There is a land between
us and Cathay, a great islandland beyond the Seven Cities of Antillia."

"Cipango," said Philip, who had read Marco Polo's book in the Latin
version published a year or two before.

"Nay, not Cipango. On this side Cipango. Of Cipango the Venetians have
told us much, but the land I seek is not Cipango."

He drew closer to Philip and spoke low. "There was a Frenchman, a
Rochellois he is dead these ten years--but I have spoken with him. He
was whirled west by storms far beyond Antillia, and was gripped by a
great ocean stream and carried to land. What think you it was? No less
than Hy-Brasil. There h