“For your health, my Admiral, I wish you could rest a while from thinking!”

“We were upon the south side of Mangi.  I am assured of that!  Could I, this time, have sailed on—­Now I see it!”

He dropped his hands from his knees and turned full toward me.  I saw that lying thus for an hour he had gathered strength and now was passed, as he was wont to pass after quiet, into a high degree of vision, accompanied by forth-going energy.  “Now I see, and as soon as I may, I will do!  Beyond Mangi, Champa.  Beyond Champa, the coast trending southward, India of the Ganges and the Golden Chersonese.  Land of Gold—­Land of Gold!—­are they not forever pointing southward?  But it is not of gold —­or wholly gold—­that now I think! Aurea Chersonesus maketh a vast peninsula, greater maybe than Italy, Greece and Spain taken together.  But I will round it, and I will come to the mouth of Ganges!  Then again, I read, we go southward!  There is the Kingdom of Maabar where Saint Thomas is buried, and the Kingdom of Monsul where the diamonds are found.  Then we come to the Island of Zeilan, where is the Tomb of our Father Adam.  Here are sapphires, amethysts, topaz, garnet and rubies.  There is a ruby here beyond price, large as a man’s two fists and a well of red fire.  But what I should think most of would be to stand where Adam laid him down.—­Now from the Island of Zeilan I sail across the India sea.  And I go still south, three hundred leagues, and I find the great island of Madagascar whose people are Saracens and there is the rukh-bird that can lift an elephant, and they cut the red sandal there and find ambergris.  Then lifteth Zanzibar whose women are monsters and where the market is in elephant teeth.  And so I come at last to the extremity of Africa which Bartholomew Diaz found—­my brother, Don Bartholomew being with him—­and named Good Hope.  So I round Good Hope, and I come home by Cape Bojador which I myself have seen.  I will pass Fez and Ercilla and the straits and Cadiz.  I will enter the River Sagres at Palos, for there was where I first put forth.  The bells of La Rabida will ring, for a thing is done that was never done before, and that will not cease to resound!  I shall have sailed around the earth.  Christopherus Columbus.  Ten ships.  Ten chances of there being one in which I may come home!”

“There have been worse dreams!” said Juan Lepe.

“I warrant you!  But I am not dreaming.”

He rose and stood with arms outstretched, crosswise.

" `Nought is hid,’ saith Scripture, `but shall be found!’ Here is Earth.  Do you not think that one day we shall go all about it?  Aye, freely, freely!  With zest and joy, discovering that it is a loved home.  For every road some man or men broke the clods!”

They hailed us from the Cordera.  One had seen from
topmast the Santa Clara.

Still we sailed by the south coast of Hispaniola.  We knew now that it was not Cipango.  But it was a great island, natheless, and one day might be as Cipango.  Beata, Soana, Mona were the little islands that we found.  We sailed between them and our great island, and at last we came to the corner and turned northward, and again after days to another corner and sailed west once more, with hopes now of Isabella.  It was the first week in September.