they made their way to Syria, where they were at once thrown
into prison by Mohammedan conquerors. They were brought before the
ruler of the Mohammedan world, or Khalif, whose seat was at Damascus.
He asked whence they came.

"These men come from the western shore, where the sun sets: and we
know not of any land beyond them, but water only," was the answer.

Such was Britain to the Mohammedans. They never got a footing in that
country: their Empire lay to the east, and their capital was even now
shifting to Bagdad.

[Illustration: THE WORLD-MAP OF COSMAS, SIXTH CENTURY. This is the
oldest Christian map. It shows the flat world surrounded by the ocean,
with the four winds and the four sacred rivers running out of the
terrestrial Paradise; beyond all is the "terra ultra oceanum," "the
world beyond the ocean, where men dwelt before the flood."]

But before turning to their geographical discoveries we must see how
Cosmas, the Egyptian merchant-monk, set the clock back by his quaint
theories of the world in the sixth century. Cosmas hailed from
"Alexander's great city." His calling carried him into seas and
countries remote from home. He knew the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian
Gulf, and the Red Sea. He had narrowly escaped shipwreck in the Indian
Ocean, which in those days was regarded with terror on account of its
violent currents and dense fogs. As the ship carrying the merchant
approached this dread region, a storm gathered overhead, and flocks
of albatross, like birds of ill-omen, hovered about the masts.

"We were all in alarm," relates Cosmas, "for all the men of experience
on board, whether passengers or sailors, began to say that we were
near the ocean and called out to the pilot: 'Steer the ship to port
and make for the gulf, or we shall be swept along by the currents and
carried into the ocean and lost.' For the ocean rushing into the gulf
was swelling with billows of portentous size, while the currents from
the gulf were driving the ship into the ocean, and the outlook was
altogether so dismal that we were kept in a state of great alarm."

That he eventually reached India is clear, for he relates strange
things concerning Ceylon. "There is a large oceanic island lying in
the Indian Sea," he tells us. "It has a length of nine hundred miles
and it is of the like extent in breadth. There are two kings in the
island, and they are at feud the one with the other. The island, being
as it is in a central position, i