lack Sea.

Nowhere in all the history of exploration have we a more poetical
account of the launching of a ship for distant lands: "Then they have
stored her well with food and water, and pulled the ladder up on board,
and settled themselves each man to his oar and kept time to Orpheus'
harp; and away across the bay they rowed southward, while the people
lined the cliffs; and the women wept while the men shouted at the
starting of that gallant crew." They chose a captain, and the choice
fell on Jason, "because he was the wisest of them all"; and they rowed
on "over the long swell of the sea, past Olympus, past the wooded bays
of Athos and the sacred isle; and they came past Lemnos to the
Hellespont, and so on into the Propontis, which we call Marmora now."
So they came to the Bosphorus, the "land then as now of bitter blasts,
the land of cold and misery," and a great battle of the winds took
place.

[Illustration: A MAP OF THE VOYAGE OF THE ARGONAUTS. Drawn according
to the principal classical traditions. The voyage through the ocean
which, according to the ancient idea, surrounded the world will be
especially noted.]

Then the Argonauts came out into the open sea--the Black Sea. No Greek
had ever crossed it, and even the heroes, for all their courage, feared
"that dreadful sea and its rocks and shoals and fogs and bitter freezing
storms," and they trembled as they saw it "stretching out before them
without a shore, as far as the eye could see."

Wearily they sailed on past the coast of Asia; they passed Sinope and
the cities of the Amazons, the warlike women of the east, until at
last they saw the "white snow peaks hanging glittering sharp and bright
above the clouds. And they knew that they were come to Caucasus at
the end of all the earth--Caucasus, the highest of all mountains, the
father of the rivers of the East. And they rowed three days to the
eastward, while the Caucasus rose higher hour by hour, till they saw
the dark stream of Phasis rushing headlong to the sea and, shining
above the treetops, the golden roofs of the Child of the Sun."

How they reached home no man knows. Some say they sailed up the Danube
River and so came to the Adriatic, dragging their ship over the snowclad
Alps. Others say they sailed south to the Red Sea and dragged their
ship over the burning desert of North Africa. More than once they gave
themselves up for lost, "heartbroken with toil and hunger," until the
brave helmsman cried