he skies as up the Nile. We shall be just
as likely, I believe, to reach it by flying, as by rowing up this big
ditch. Ask him where the river comes from, Pelagia.'

Pelagia obeyed.... and thereon followed a confusion worse confounded,
composed of all the impossible wonders of that mythic fairyland with
which Philammon had gorged himself from boyhood in his walks with the
old monks, and of the equally trustworthy traditions which the Goths had
picked up at Alexandria. There was nothing which that river did not do.
It rose in the Caucasus. Where was the Caucasus? He did not know. In
Paradise--in Indian Aethiopia--in Aethiopian India. Where were they? He
did not know. Nobody knew. It ran for a hundred and fifty days' journey
through deserts where nothing but flying serpents and satyrs lived, and
the very lions' manes were burnt off by the heat....

'Good sporting there, at all events, among these dragons,' quoth Smid
the son of Troll, armourer to the party.

'As good as Thor's when he caught Snake Midgard with the bullock's
head,' said Wulf.

It turned to the east for a hundred days' journey more, all round Arabia
and India, among forests full of elephants and dog-headed women.

'Better and better, Smid!' growled Wulf, approvingly.

'Fresh beef cheap there, Prince Wulf, eh?' quoth Smid; 'I must look over
the arrow-heads.'

--To the mountains of the Hyperboreans, where there was eternal night,
and the air was full of feathers.... That is, one-third of it came from
thence, and another third came from the Southern ocean, over the Moon
mountains, where no one had ever been, and the remaining third from the
country where the phoenix lived, and nobody knew where that was. And
then there were the cataracts, and the inundations-and-and-and above the
cataracts, nothing but sand-hills and ruins, as full of devils as they
could hold.... and as for Asgard, no one had ever heard of it.... till
every face grew longer and longer, as Pelagia went on interpreting and
misinterpreting; and at last the giant smote his hand upon his knee, and
swore a great oath that Asgard might rot till the twilight of the gods
before he went a step farther up the Nile.

'Curse the monk!' growled Wulf. 'How should such a poor beast know
anything about the matter?'

'Why should not he know as well as that ape of a Roman governor?' asked
Smid.

'Oh, the monks know everything,' said Pelagia. 'They go hundreds and
thousands of miles up the river, and