that he was crazy. "Why,
how can the earth be round?" they cried. "The water would all spill out
if it were, and the men who live on the other side would all be standing
on their heads with their feet waving in the air." And then they laughed
all the harder.

But Columbus did not think it was anything to laugh at. He believed it
so strongly, and felt so sure that he was right, that he set to work to
find some king or prince or great lord to let him have ships and sailors
and money enough to try to find a way to Cathay by sailing out into the
West and across the Atlantic Ocean.

Now this Atlantic Ocean, the western waves of which break upon our
rocks and beaches, was thought in Columbus's day to be a dreadful place.
People called it the Sea of Darkness, because they did not know what was
on the other side of it, or what dangers lay beyond that distant blue
rim where the sky and water seem to meet, and which we call the horizon.
They thought the ocean stretched to the end of a flat world, straight
away to a sort of "jumping-off place," and that in this horrible
jumping-off place were giants and goblins and dragons and monsters and
all sorts of terrible things that would catch the ships and destroy them
and the sailors.

So when Columbus said that he wanted to sail away toward this dreadful
jumping-off place, the people said that he was worse than crazy. They
said he was a wicked man and ought to be punished.

But they could not frighten Columbus. He kept on trying. He went from
place to place trying to get the ships and sailors he wanted and was
bound to have. As you will see in the next chapter, he tried to get
help wherever he thought it could be had. He asked the people of his own
home, the city of Genoa, where he had lived and played when a boy; he
asked the people of the beautiful city that is built in the sea--Venice;
he tried the king of Portugal, the king of England, the king of France
the king and queen of Spain. But for a long time nobody cared to listen
to such a wild and foolish and dangerous plan--to go to Cathay by the
way of the Sea of Darkness and the Jumping-off place. You would never
get there alive, they said.

And so Columbus waited. And his hair grew white while he waited, though
he was not yet an old man. He had thought and worked and hoped so much
that he began to look like an old man when he was forty years old. But
still he would never say that perhaps he was wrong, after all. He said
he kne