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boring lands hear voices of folk, and horses neighing, and cocks crowing.

The story is that a cursed emperor of Persia that was hight Saures overtook a Christian host in the plain that was hight Megon and would have destroyed it. "But anon a thick Cloud came and covered the Emperor and all his Host. And so they endure in that Manner that they must not go out on any Side; and so shall they evermore abide in Darkness till the Day of Doom, by the Miracle of God. And then the Christian Men went where liked them best. Also ye shall understand that out of that Land of Darkness goeth out a great River that sheweth well that there be Folk dwelling there by many Tokens; but no Man dare enter into it."

Some report of the long Arctic night reached the Asiatic countries of lower latitudes, and Marco Polo when he traversed them. He gives a hearsay account of what he calls the Region of Darkness. It is distant fourteen journeys by dog-sled across the tundras from the country of the Tartars. The atmosphere in this twilight land is "as we find it just about the dawn of day, when we may be said to see and not to see." Its people are tall and well made, but pale, stupid, and brutish, and without prince or other governance. They have great stores of furs of ermines, martins, and foxes. Under cover of the prevailing darkness the Tartars raid them, plundering them of their furs and driv ing off their cattle. That they may not become lost forever in the gloom, the raiders ride mares that have young foals, and these are left on the frontiers. When the Tartars would return, they lay the bridles on the necks of the dams, and maternal instinct finds the homeward track.

Fable and fact ride abreast through this narrative, as horsemen through the chill obscurity of dawn, and a great thing has come of it. Marco's account of the peltry of the north had more to do than aught else, tradition says, with the founding of the Hudson Bay Company and the opening of the northern half of the American continent.

Distance

The haze on all these horizon lands is the haze of distance. There are two phrases which come to the ear with the sound of

unlocking doors. One is Once upon a Time, which children hear; it is distance measured in years. The other is Beyond the Mountains, which plainsmen use; it is distance measured in miles and difficulties. For either distance, fetters fall.

Three tales may declare this as well as a thousand, and a thousand might be told. Russian peasants speak of a land which they call Bielovodye, and which lies, as they think, somewhere on the borders of Mongolia in the distant east. It is a country of peace and plenty, and nobody lives there.

Rubruquis gives just a glimpse, as of something seen afar through a narrow window. "A Chinese priest," he says, "told me also for truth (which neverthelesse, I doe not believe) that there is a province beyond Cataia, into the which, at whatsoever age a man enters, he continueth in the same age wherein he entred."

The widest horizons of time and space are reached in a single artless sentence in a gypsy folk tale: "They went then further than I can remember, till they reached the knoll of the country at the back of the wind and the face of the sun, that was in the realm of Big Women." The men who made this journey skirted all the coasts of illusion.

Chapter XVI. Lands of Legend

THERE are countries whose boundaries have not been fixed by armies or treaties, nor their ways marked out by trade. The dreams of men have made them. Their substance is reality, yet their effect is vision. By a sort of conspiracy of wish, to which men of imaginative mind have been parties and all others have yielded assent, these countries have been supposed to be dif ferent from what any was or could be. It has been easy enough to create the illusion, for one's view of another land is always more or less a symbolic drawing.

Ophir

The geographical table in the tenth chapter of Genesis tells a straight tale which men debated for something more than two thousand years and only in the present century have accepted at its face value. In one phrase the Scriptures link Ophir and Havilah, and then add that "their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar, a mount of the East." Where was Ophir? Perhaps the learned men of Alexandria were the first to ask the question. What was Ophir? This question nobody thought of putting, and it was vital.

Ophir was a magic word which let no man rest once he had heard it. The spell of gold was in it. Even as they wrote, it seemed to intoxicate the Jewish prophets, poets, and chroniclers. Isaiah speaks of the "golden wedge of Ophir." It is said of wisdom in the Book of Job that it cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx or the sapphire. "Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks," says another passage Oriental in its opulence of suggestion.

From Ophir came the fleet of Solomon and Hiram of Tyre, fetching gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and sandalwood. The arrival of the treasure fleet is associated in the narrative,

for some reason one may only guess, with the coming to Jerusalem of the Queen of Sheba. The two incidents constitute the most gorgeous episode in Jewish history.

Sheba's queen comes to visit Solomon with a very great train, with camels that bear spices, and very much gold and precious stones. She sees the meat of his table, the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers. She proves him with hard questions, and pride dies in her. The report she has heard in her own land of his wealth and wisdom was a true report, she declares, but the half had not been told. Then she goes back, and her camels take across the deserts gifts richer than they had brought. Gold of Ophir travels north, and south again, and legend follows it.

Two other place-names appear on this piece of Hebrew brocade. One is Ezion-geber, Solomon's port on the Red Sea in the land of Edom. The other is Tharshish, where the king had ships. Once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks. There was nothing in these imports that one might eat or drink or use for shelter or raiment. The commodities were typical of ancient commerce in their magnificence, their vain show, and their uselessness— and the cargo has freighted the imagination of men ever since. There was contraband in the ships of Tharshish. Among the elephants' teeth and peacocks was stowed away the spirit of the East.

Where was Tharshish? Where was Ophir? Where was Havilah, mentioned rarely, but in a significant context?

It was long thought that Tharshish was the Carthaginian port of Tartessus beyond the Pillars, where now is the Spanish port of Cadiz. But Spain had few apes, little gold, and no ivory. The text of Genesis seemed to point to the Arabian coast as the seat of Ophir. But Araby had no elephants and its gold came from elsewhere. Ophir was sought also in the African spiceland of Punt, in the Midian country of northern Arabia, and at the mouth of the Indus in Hindostan. Once in every three years came the fleet, so said the text; and into this was read the meaning, not of periodic sailings, but of voyages that covered three years. Ophir, therefore, must lie in the far East, and men sought it in the Malay Peninsula, in that Golden Chersonese

where were ivory and apes and peacocks, as well as precious metals.

For one splendid century it was Portugese instinct to advance steadily, to see clearly, and to do great things easily-the legacy, perhaps, of that incomparable spirit, Prince Henry the Navigator. Within the century after his death, his countrymen had gone around Africa, opened a sea route to the Indies, and made the coveted Spice Islands their own. Also, they had discovered Ophir, or rather almost discovered it. What they found was the missing port of Tharshish, and Havilah, the land which scriptural writers linked with Ophir, and dismissed.

A Portugese squadron, outbound for the Indies in 1505, put in at the little African port of Sofala on the Mozambique Channel, looking east toward Madagascar. Learning that the Arabs, or Moors, as they called them, were trafficking here for gold brought down to the coast from the interior, its captains said that this must be Ophir. It has taken four centuries to show how near this casual judgment was to the truth. The gold of Ophir reached the Indian Ocean through the African port once named Tharshish and now called Sofala, and came from the Mashona and Matabele region between the lower Zambesi and the Limpopo rivers in what is now Rhodesia. It was Hottentot gold, not gold of Araby.

What was Ophir? When at length this question was asked, the Scripture texts, which pointed eastward toward Arabian regions where gold was not, slowly yielded their paradox. Ophir was not a country at all. It was a port, perhaps the greatest of the ancient world. Here the products of India, of Africa, and of the Eastern Mediterranean were interchanged. The gold of ancient Rhodesia (Havilah) became gold of Ophir, just as figs of the Levant become Smyrna figs and the white grapes of Spain become Malaga grapes, when freighted on ships outbound from those ports.

In the days of its decline Ophir was known to Ptolemy, the Alexandrian geographer, as the Sapphar Metropolis; to Arrian, the Greek geographer, as Portus Nobilis, and to the Romans as Moscha. It lay where Genesis places it: "and their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar a mount of the east." There, under the shadow of Mount Sephar, nearly oppo

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