thought the foul weather would never cease, and our toil would never
cease--then lo! at the point of despair the sky cleared with a great
clap of light, the coast turned sharply, sheerly south--he named the
great cape, Cape Gracias a Dios--and we ran freely, West again.

Coming in three days to a wide river mouth, in we turned. The shore was
grown with reeds that would do for giants' staffs. On mud banks we saw
the crocodile, "cayman" they call it. Again the sky hung a low, gray
roof; a thin wind whistled, but for all that it was deathly hot. Seeing
no men, we sent two boats with Diego Mendez up the stream. They were not
gone a half league, when, watching from the _Consolacion_ we marked a
strange and horrid thing. There came without wind a swelling of the sea.
Our ships tossed as in tempest, and there entered the river a wall of
sea water. Meeting the outward passing current, there ensued a fury with
whirlpools. It caught the boats. Diego Mendez saved his, but the other
was seized, tossed and engulfed. Eight men drowned.

The thing sank as it had come. The River of Disaster, we named it,
and left this strip of coast that seemed to us gloomy and portentous.
"_Wizardry! It's not to be lucky, this voyage_." It was now late
September.

Next day, we anchored, it being most clear and beautiful. We lay beside
a verdurous islet, between it and a green shore. Here were all our
fruits, and we thought we smelled cinnamon and clove. Across, upon
the main, stood a small village. _Cariari_ the Indians there called
themselves. They had some gold, but not to touch that canoe from
Yucatan. Likewise they owned a few cotton mantles, with jars of baked
clay, and we saw a copper hatchet. But they did not themselves make
these things. They had drifted to them, we thought, from a people far
more skilled.

The Admiral cried, "When and when and when shall we come to this
people?"

I answered, "I tell you what is in my mind, and I have got it, I think,
from your inmost mind, out of which you will not let it come forth
because you have had a great theory and think you must stand to it.
But what if this that you have underneath is a greater one? What if the
world truly is larger than Alfraganus or the ancients thought? What if
all this that we have found since the first island and that means only
beginnings of what is to be found; what if it is not Asia at all? What
if it is a land mass, great as Europe or greater, that no one knew
anythin