heir walls had taken place naval battles; now
from their ruined acropolis one could scarcely see the Mediterranean
except as a light blue belt at the end of a low and marshy plain. The
accumulating sand had driven the sea back miles.... On the other hand,
inland cities had come to be places of embarkation because of the
continual perforation of the waves that were forcing their way in.

The wickedness of mankind had imitated the destructive work of nature.
When a maritime republic conquered a rival republic, the first thing
that it thought of was to obstruct its harbor with sand and stones in
order to divert the course of its waters so as to convert it into an
inland city, thereby ruining its fleets and its traffic. The Genoese,
triumphant over Pisa, stopped up its harbor with the sands of the Arno;
and the city of the first conquerors of Mallorca, of the navigators to
the Holy Land, of the Knights of St. Stephen, guardians of the
Mediterranean, came to be Pisa the Dead,--a settlement that knew the
sea only by hearsay.

"Sand," continued Ferragut, "has changed the commercial routes and
historic destinies of the Mediterranean."

Of the many deeds which had stretched along the scenes of the _mare
nostrum_, the most famous in the captain's opinion was the unheard-of
epic of Roger de Flor which he had known from childhood through the
stories told him by the poet Labarta, by the _Triton_, and by that poor
secretary who was always dreaming of the great past of the Catalan
marine.

All the world was now talking about the blockade of the Dardanelles.
The boats that furrowed the Mediterranean, merchant vessels as well as
battleships, were furthering the great military operation that was
developing opposite Gallipoli. The name of the long, narrow maritime
pass which separates Europe and Asia was in every mouth. To-day the
eyes of mankind were converged on this point just as, in remote
centuries, they had been fixed on the war of Troy.

"We also have been there," said Ferragut with pride. "The Dardanelles
have been frequented for many years by the Catalans and the Aragonese.
Gallipoli was one of our cities governed by the Valencian, Ramon
Muntaner."

And he began the story of the Almogavars in the Orient, that romantic
Odyssey across the ancient Asiatic provinces of the Roman Empire that
ended only with the founding of the Spanish duchy of Athens and
Neopatria in the city of Pericles and Minerva. The chronicles of the
Orie