There isn't any boat, good or bad, that can stand it when a
lodestone as big as Gibraltar begins to draw iron!"

The second, whose element was melancholy, sighed, "I've been north of
Ireland, Pedro, and that was bad enough! The lookout saw a siren and the
_Infanta Isabella_ was dashed on the rocks and something laughed at us
all night!"

"Ireland's nothing at all to it!" answered the angry man, whose name was
Pedro. "I've heard men that know talk! The Portuguese going down Africa
coast got to Cape Bojador, but they've never truly gotten any further,
though I hear them say they have! They sent a little carrack further
down, and it had to come back because the water fell to boiling! There
wasn't any land and there wasn't any true sea, but it was all melted up
together in fervent heat! Like hot mud, so to speak. It's hell, that's
what I say; it's hell down there! Moreover, there ain't any heaven
stretched over it."

"What does it mean by that?" asked the second.

"It means, Fernando, that there wouldn't be any sky, blue nor gray nor
black, nor clouds, nor air to breathe! There wouldn't be any thunder and
lightning nor rain nor wind, and at night there wouldn't be stars, no
north star, nor any! It would just be--I don't know what! Fray Ignatio
told me, and he said the name was 'chaos'."

"That was south. That wasn't west."

"West is just as bad!"

Fernando also addressed the young man, the third, calling him Sancho.
"If there were anything west for Christian men, wouldn't the Holy Father
at Rome have sent long ago? We are all going to die!"

"But they didn't know it was round," said Sancho. "Now we do, and that's
the difference! If you started a little manikin just here on an orange
and told him to go straight ahead, he'd come around home, wouldn't he?"

"You weary me, Sancho!" cried the first. "And what if you did that
and it took so long that you come back to Fishertown old and bald and
driveling, and your wife is dead and all the neighbors! Much good you'd
have from knowing it was round!"

"When you got right underfoot wouldn't you fall; that's what I want to
know?"

"Fall! Fall where?"

"Into the sky! My God, it's deep! And there wouldn't be any boat to pick
you up nor any floating oar to catch by--"

The vision seemed to appall them. Fernando drew back of hand across
eyes.

I came in. "You wouldn't do that any more than the ant falls off the
orange! Men have come back who have been almost underfoot, s