hut
out.

At last, "Well, well, we will turn! But first we must leave this gulf
and try it out for some distance westward!"

We left this water by a way as narrow as the entering strait, as narrow
and presenting the like rough confusion of waters, wall against wall.
We called it the Mouth of the Dragon. Mouth of the Dragon, Mouth of the
Serpent, and between them the Gulf of the Whale or of Paria. Now was
open sea, and south of us ran still that coast that he would have mount
to the Equator and to that old, first Garden Land where all things yet
were fair and precious! "I can not stay now, but I will come again!
I will find the mighty last things!" His eyes gave him great pain. He
covered them, then dropped his hands and looked, then must again cover.

A strange thing! We were borne westward ever upon a vast current of the
sea, taking us day and night, so that though the winds were light we
went as though every sail was wholly filled.

Christopherus Columbus talked of these rivers in ocean. "A day will come
when they will be correctly marked. Aye, in the maps of our descendants!
Then ships will say, 'Now here is the river so and so,' as to-day the
horseman says, 'Here is the Tagus, or the Guadalquiver!'"

Another thing he said was that to his mind all the islands that we had
found in six years, from San Salvador to Cubagua, had once been joined
together. Land from this shore to Cuba and beyond. So the peoples were
scattered.

He talked to us much upon this voyage of the great earth and the shape
of it, and its destinies; of the stars, the needle, the Great Circle
and the lesser ones, and the Ocean. He had our time's learning, gained
through God knows how many nights of book by candle! And he had a mind
that took eagle flights with spread of eagle wings, and in many ways he
had the eagle's eye.

It was not Cipango and Cathay that now he talked of, but of this great
land-mass before us which he would have rise to Equator and all Wonder.
And he talked also of some water passage, some strait lying to the
westward, by which we might sail between lands and islands to the
further Indian Ocean, and so across to the Sea of Araby, and then around
Africa by Good Hope and then northward, northward, to Spain, coming into
Cadiz with banners, having sailed around the world!

He talked, and all the time his pain ate him, and he must cover eyes to
keep the sword-light out.

In middle August we turned northward from our New Lan