lago to archipelago.

Thus they had dared to sally forth from the coast, to lose sight of
land, to venture forth into the blue desert, advised of the existence
of islands by the vaporous knobs of the mountains which were outlined
on the horizon at sunset. Every advance of this hesitating marine over
the Mediterranean had represented greater expenditure of audacity and
energy than the discovery of America or the first voyage around the
world.... These primitive sailors did not go forth alone to their
adventures on the sea; they were nations _en masse_, they carried with
them families and animals. Once installed on an island, the tribes sent
forth fragments of their own life, going to colonize other nearby lands
across the waves.

Ulysses and his mate thought much about the great catastrophes ignored
by history--the tempest surprising the sailing exodus, entire fleets of
rough rafts swallowed up by the abyss in a few moments, families dying
clinging to their domestic animals,--whenever they attempted a new
advance of their rudimentary civilization.

In order to form some idea of what these little embarkations were,
Ferragut would recall the fleets of Homeric form, created many
centuries afterwards. The winds used to impose a religious terror on
those warriors of the sea, reunited in order to fall upon Troy. Their
ships remained chained an entire year in the harbor of Aulis and,
through fear of the hostility of the wind and in order to placate the
divinity of the Mediterranean, they sacrificed the life of a virgin.

All was danger and mystery in the kingdom of the waves. The abysses
roared, the rocks moaned; on the ledges were singing sirens who, with
their music, attracted ships in order to dash them to pieces. There was
not an island without its particular god, without its monster and
cyclops, or its magician contriving artifices.

Before domesticating the elements, mankind had attributed to them their
most superstitious fears.

A material factor had powerfully influenced the dangers of
Mediterranean life. The sand, moved by the caprice of the current, was
constantly ruining the villages or raising them to peaks of unexpected
prosperity. Cities celebrated in history were to-day no more than
streets of ruins at the foot of a hillock crowned with the remains of a
Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine or Saracen castle, or with a fortress
contemporary with the Crusades. In other centuries these had been
famous ports; before t