s and Jews. Moreover, seeing all that live on
this earth were shown on the wheel, Satyrs and Cyclopes were there, and
Pygmies and Centaurs such as Africa nurses in her burning deserts, and
the men Marco Polo the traveller found, who are born without heads and
with a face below their navel.

And from betwixt the lips of each there issued a scroll, bearing a
device. Now each device was of a hue which did not appear in any other,
and in all the incalculable multitude of devices, no two could have been
discovered of the same appearance. Some were dyed purple, others painted
with the bright colours of the sky and sea, or the shining of the stars,
yet others green as grass. Many were exceeding pale, many again
exceeding dark and sombre, the whole so ordered that the eye found in
these devices every one of the colours that paint the universe.

The holy man Giovanni began to decipher them, by this means making
himself acquainted with the divers thoughts of divers men. And after
reading on a good while, he perceived that these devices were as much
diversified in the sense of the words as in the hues of the letters, and
that the sentences differed one from the other in such sort that there
was never a single one did not flatly contradict every other.

But at the same time he noted that this contradiction which existed in
the head and body of the maxims did not continue in their tail, but that
they all agreed together very accurately in their lower extremity, all
ending in the same fashion, seeing each and all terminated in these
words, _Such is Truth_.

And he said in his heart:

"These mottoes are like the flowers young men and maidens pluck in the
water-meadows by the Arno, to make them into posies. For these flowers
are readily gathered together by the tails, while the heads keep
separate and fight amongst themselves in hue and brilliancy. And it is
the same with the opinions of human beings."

And the holy man found in the devices a host of contradictions regarding
the origin of sovereignty, the fountains of knowledge, pleasure and
pain, things lawful and things unlawful. And he discovered likewise
mighty difficulties in connection with the shape of the Earth and the
Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by reason of the Heretics and Arabs
and Jews, the monsters of the African desert and the Epicureans, who all
had their place, a scroll in their lips, on the wheel of fire.

And each sentence ended in this way, _Such is Tr