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are close to the soil will be drawn upon. Olympus towers afar with its divinities. Nearer to the earth, for example, is the mountain of San Francisco in Arizona, which the Navahos say was "bound with a sunbeam, decked with haliotis shell, clouds, he-rain, yellow maize, and animals, nested with eggs of the yellow warbler, spread with yellow cloud and made the home of White-Corn Boy and Yellow-Corn Girl." However high their spirit soars, men's feet are on the ground. If it is the limitation of their nature it is the liberation of their art that their interest is more in quests of the Terrestrial Paradise than in myths of things unearthly.

It was the first belief of man that with a thought he could change the outer world. What was it, indeed, but the projec tion of his own soul-the demons that were his evil thoughts, "the savage and voluptuous beasts that were the emblems of his folly," the ideal lands that were the dawn and afterglow of his own days? The beginning of art was magic, alike in the chants of rainmakers, the cave paintings of the Dordogne, and the sculptures of Egypt; and magic is its end. Still may the artist soul of man fashion its own realities.

While he builds the pleasant marvels of his yesterdays into habitations of fancy, he will rear other structures of the like insubstantial stuff and deem them the abiding places of reality. The shows of nature are a pageant through which man moves in a dream of his own making. The piling and passing of the clouds, the fog's oblivion, the sunset, the night and the stars, work their spells about him, masking, concealing, revealing. With the harmless revel of fireflies in the dew and dusk, fairy locks unbolt for him. He cannot look upon life save as a drama or an allegory, with the earth as the stage and the sky for its hangings. By the law of his being he must be maker of myths.

Only a divine animal could question what was behind the hills, win the vision of unconjectured oceans, hear the note of eternity in the sound of running water, and, flashing into a brief ecstasy, sink back again with the cry of Eheu Fugaces. The brute-gods of his myths, are they not man himself with his animal routine and his divine moments? When he crosses the barrier of dreams, when he sits at the gates of memory, when contemplation holds him motionless "like a flame in a windless

spot," in his Dionysian intoxications, in the very dances wherein he merges the god and the brute, he creates worlds that ensphere his every mood. The Iranian who calls the abode of the blest the House of Song, and the Mongol whose official scrolls speak of the continents as the Golden Surface have made a new heaven and a new earth.

It is not given man to envisage reality. His is the greater gift to brood over Chaos and shape it as he will.

Bibliography

In preparing this book the works most frequently consulted have been Pliny's Natural History, Browne's Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, Beazley's Dawn of Modern Geography, Frazer's Golden Bough, Tylor's Primitive Culture, Hakluyt's Principal Voyages of the English Nation, and Pinkerton's Collection of Voyages and Travels. Both the Hakluyt and Pinkerton collections are libraries in themselves, each with some hundreds of titles, and the travel narratives they contain will not be separately listed here.

Following are the main sources drawn upon for the materials of this study:

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