So much for the outposts of the Old World. Of the New World, about the
possibility of which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the
Mediterranean, there was no knowledge and hardly any thought. Though new
in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations of
men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men came
upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life
and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries. And it is
quite possible that, long before even the civilisation that produced
Columbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there.
There are two very old fragments of knowledge which indicate at least the
possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.
There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, of
a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in which
Silenus correctly describes the Old World–Europe, Asia, and Africa–as
being surrounded by the sea, but also describes, far to the west of it, a
huge island, which had its own civilisation and its own laws, where the
animals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice our
years. There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis,
which was larger than Africa and Asia together, and which in an
earthquake disappeared beneath the waves, producing such a slime upon the
surface that no ship was able to navigate the sea in that place. This is
the story which the priests of Sais told to Solon, and which was embodied
in the sacred inscriptions in their temples. It is strange that any one
should think of this theory of the slime who had not seen or heard of the
Sargasso Sea–that great bank of floating seaweed that the ocean currents
collect and retain in the middle of the basin of the North Atlantic.
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