“Of course I am telling you the truth.  You are very wise about the sea—­you who never saw it until two weeks ago!  Gil Andrade has been to places that you Castilians never even heard of.  He has seen whales, and mermaids, and the Sea of Darkness itself!  He has been to the Gold Coast beyond Bojador, where the people are fried black like charcoal, and the rivers are too hot to drink.”

“Then why didn’t he die?” inquired the unbelieving Beatriz.

“Because he didn’t stay there long enough.  And there are devils in the forest, stronger than ten men, and all covered with shaggy hair—­”

“I will not listen to such nonsense!  Do you think that because I am Spanish, and a girl, I am without understanding?  Tio Sancho, is it true that there is a Sea of Darkness?”

Sancho Serrao was an old seaman, as any one would know by his eyes and his walk.  For fifty years he had used the sea, as ship-boy, sailor, and pilot.  His daughter Catharina had been the nurse of Beatriz, and he had brought coral, shells and queer toys to the little thing from the time she could toddle to his knee.

“What has Fernao been saying to thee, pombinha agreste?” (little wood-dove) he asked soberly, though his eyes twinkled ever so little.  He seated himself as he spoke, on an ancient bench that rested its back against the wall just where the wind was sweetest.  Under the fragrances of ripening vineyards and flowering shrubs there was always the sharp clean smell of the sea.

“He believes all that Gil Andrade and Joao Pancado tell him as if it were the Credo,” Beatriz began, her words flung out like sparks from a little crackling fire.  “He says that there is a Sea of Darkness out away beyond the Falcon Islands, where ships are drawn into a great pit under the edge of the world.  And he says that ships cannot go too far south because the sun is so near it would burn them, and they cannot go too far north because the icebergs will catch them and crush them.  If I were a man, I would sail straight out there, into the sunset, and show them what my people dared to do!”

Old Sancho was not all Portuguese.  In his veins ran the blood of the three great seafaring races of southern Europe—­the Genoese, the Lusitanian and the Vizcayan—­and their jealousies and rivalries amused him.  He had spent most of his life in the feluccas and caravels of Lisbon and Oporto, because when he was young they went where no other ships dared even follow; but he did not believe that the last word in discovery had been said even by Dom Henriques at Sagres, or the Mappe-Monde of Fra Mauro in Venice.