tration: A MERCHANT-SHIP OF ATHENS, ABOUT 500 B.C. From a
vase-painting.]

Some thirty days' journey from the land of the lotus-eaters he had
found tribes who hunted with four-horse chariots and whose oxen walked
backwards as they grazed, because their horns curve outwards in front
of their heads, and if they moved forwards these horns would stick
in the ground.

Right across the desolate sandy desert of the north, Herodotus seems
to have made his way. The "region of the wild beasts" must have been
truly perilous, "for this is the tract," he says, "in which huge
serpents are found, and the lions, the elephants, the bears, and the
horned asses."

He also tells us of antelopes, gazelles, asses, foxes, wild sheep,
jackals, and panthers. There is no end to the quaint sights he records.
Here is a tribe whose wives drive the chariots to battle, here another
who paint themselves red and eat honey and monkeys, another who grow
their hair long on the right side of their heads and shave it close
on the left. Back through Egypt to Syria went our observant traveller,
visiting the famous seaport of Tyre on the way. "I visited the temple
of Hercules at that place and found two pillars, one of pure gold,
the other of emerald, shining with great brilliancy at night." That
temple was already two thousand three hundred years old.

Herodotus makes some astounding statements about various parts of the
world. He asserts that a good walker could walk across Asia Minor,
from north to south, in five days, a distance we know now to be three
hundred miles! He tells us that the Danube rises in the Pyrenees
Mountains and flows right through Europe till it empties its waters
into the Black Sea, giving us a long and detailed account of a country
he calls Scythia (Russia) with many rivers flowing into this same Black
Sea.

But here we must leave the old traveller and picture him reading aloud
to his delighted hearers his account of his discoveries and
explorations, discussing with the learned Greeks of the day the size
and wonders of the world as they imagined it.

News travelled slowly in these bygone days, and we know the Phoenicians
were very fond of keeping their discoveries secret, but it seems
strange to think that Herodotus never seems to have heard the story
of Hanno the Carthaginian, who coasted along the west of North Africa,
being the first explorer to reach the place we know as "Sierra Leone."

Hanno's "Periplus," or the "Coastin