inted pages of information
about this mysterious country. Throughout the Middle Ages the conception
of some sort of an antipodal inhabited world was vaguely entertained by
writers here and there, but many of the clergy condemned it as implying
the existence of people cut off from the knowledge of the gospel and not
included in the plan of salvation.

[Footnote 364: "Taprobane aut grandis admodum insula aut prima
pars orbis alterius Hipparcho dicitur; sed quia habitata, nec
quisquam circummeasse traditur, prope verum est." _De Situ
Orbis_, iii. 7.]

[Footnote 365: "Taprobanen alterum orbem terrarum esse, diu
existimatum est, Antichthonum appellatione." _Hist. Nat._, vi.
24.]

[Sidenote: The fiery zone.]

As to the possibility of crossing the torrid zone, opinion was not
unanimous. Greek explorers from Alexandria (cir. B. C. 100) seem to have
gone far up the Nile toward the equator, and the astronomer Geminus
quotes their testimony in proof of his opinion that the torrid zone is
inhabitable.[366] Panaetius, the friend of the younger Scipio Africanus,
had already expressed a similar opinion. But the flaming theory
prevailed. Macrobius, writing about six hundred years later, maintained
that the southernmost limit of the habitable earth was 850 miles south
of Syene, which lies just under the tropic of Cancer.[367] Beyond this
point no man could go without danger from the fiery atmosphere. Beyond
some such latitude on the ocean no ship could venture without risk of
being engulfed in some steaming whirlpool.[368] Such was the common
belief before the great voyages of the Portuguese.

[Footnote 366: Geminus, _Isagoge_, cap. 13.]

[Footnote 367: Macrobius, _Somnium Scipionis_, ii. 8. Strabo
(ii. 5, Sec.Sec. 7, 8) sets the southern boundary of the Inhabited
World 800 miles south of Syene, and the northern boundary at
the north of Ireland.]

[Footnote 368: Another notion, less easily explicable and less
commonly entertained, but interesting for its literary
associations, was the notion of a mountain of loadstone in the
Indian ocean, which prevented access to the torrid zone by
drawing the nails from ships and thus wrecking them. This
imaginary mountain, with some variations in the description, is
made to carry a serious geographical argument by the astrol