of Spain, and, roundabout way, at the court of England, and at the houses of the Doges of Venice and of Genoa. They all kept me swinging long at anchor, but they have never given me a furthering wind. Eighteen years going to India! But why do I say eighteen? The Lord put me forth from landside the day I was born. Before I was fourteen, at the school in Pavia, He said, ‘Go to sea. Sail under thy cousin Colombo and learn through long years all the inches of salt water.’ Later He said, one day when we were swinging off Alexandria, ‘Study! Teach thyself! Buy books, not wine nor fine clothes nor favor of women. Study on land and study at sea. Look at every map that comes before you. Learn to make maps. When a world map comes before you, look at the western side of it and think how to fill it out knowingly. Listen to seamen’s tales. Learn to view the invisible and to feel under foot the roundness of my earth!’
“And He said that same year off Aleppo, ‘Learn to command ships. Learn in King Reinier’s war and in what other war Genoa makes. Learn to direct men and patiently to hear them, winding in and out of their counsels, keeping thyself always wiser than they.’ Well, I studied, and learned, and can command a ship or ships, and know navigation, and can make maps and charts with the best, and can rule seamen, loving them the while. Long ago, I went to that school which He set, and came forth magister! Long after His first speaking, I was at Porto Santo, well named, and there He said, ‘Seek India, going westward.’ ” He turned his face to the sun. “I have been going to India fifty-six years.”
Juan Lepe asked, “Why, on yesterday, were you not content with the King and Queen’s terms? They granted honor and competence. It was the estate of a prince that you asked.”
Some moments passed before he answered. The sun was shining, the road white and dusty, the mountains of Elvira purple to the tops and there splashed with silver. When he spoke, his voice was changed. Neither now nor hereafter did he discourse of money-gold and nobility flowing from earthly kings with that impersonal exaltation with which he talked of his errand from God to link together east and west. But he drew them somehow in train from the last, hiding here I thought, an earthly weakness from himself, and the weakness so intertwined with strength that it was hard to divide parasite from oak.
“Did you see,” he asked, “a boy with me? That was my son Diego whom I have left with a friend in Santa Fe. Fernando, his half-brother, is but a child. I shall see him in Cordova. I have two brothers, dear to me both of them, Diego and Bartholomew. My old father, Dominico Colombo, still lives in Genoa. He lives in poverty, as I have lived in poverty these many years. And there is Pedro Correo, to whom I owe much, husband of my wife’s sister. My wife is dead. The mother of Fernando is not my wife, but I love her, and she is poor though beautiful and good. I would have her less poor; I would give her beautiful things. I have love for my kindred—love and yearning and care and desire to do them good, alike those who trust me and those who think that I had failed them. I do not fail them!”
We padded on upon the dusty road. I felt his inner warmth, divined his life. But at last I said, “What the Queen and King promise would give rich care—”
“I have friends too, for all that I ride out of Spain and seem so poor and desolate! I would repay—ay, ten times over—their faith and their help.”
“Still—”
“There are moreover the poor, and those who study and need books and maps that they cannot purchase. There are convents—one convent especially—that befriended me when I was alone and nigh hopeless and furthered my cause. I would give that convent great gifts.” Turning in the saddle he looked southwest. “Fray Juan Perez—”
Palos shore spread about me, and rose La Rabida, white among vineyards and pines. Doves flew over cloister. But I did not say all I knew.
“There are other things that I would do. I do not speak of them to many! They would say that I was mad. But great things that in this age none else seems inclined to do!”
“As what?” I asked. “I have been called mad myself. I am not apt to think you so.”
He began to speak of a mighty crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre.
The road to Cordova stretched sunny and dusty. Above the mountains of Elvira the sky stood keen blue. Juan Lepe said slowly, “Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy and Governor of continents and islands in perpetuity, sons and sons’ sons after you, and gilded deep with a tenth of all the wealth that flows forever from Asia over Ocean-Sea to Spain, and you and all after you made nobles, grandees and wealthy from generation to generation! Kings almost of the west, and donors to the east, arousers of crusades and freers of the Sepulchre! You build a high tower!”
Carters and carts going by pushed us to the edge of road and covered all with dust. He waited until the cloud sank, then he said, “Do you know—but you cannot know what it is to be sent from pillar to post and wait in antechambers where the air stifles, and doff cap—who have been captain of ships!—to chamberlain, page and lackey? To be called dreamer, adventurer, dicer! To hear the laugh and catch the sneer! To be the persuader, the beggar of good and bad, high and low—to beg year in and year out, cold and warmth, summer and winter, sunrise, noon and sunset, calm and storm, beg of galleon and beg of carrack, yea, beg of cockboat! To see your family go needy, to be doubted by wife and child and brethren and friends and acquaintance! To have them say, ‘While you dream we go hungry!’ and ‘What good will it do us if there is India, while we famish in Spain?’ and ‘You love us not, or you would become a prosperous sea captain!’—Not one year but eighteen, eighteen, since I saw in vision the sun set not behind water but behind vale and hill and mountain and cities rich beyond counting, and smelled the spice draught from the land!”
I saw that he must count upon huge indemnity. We all dream indemnity. But still I thought and think that there was here a weakness in him. Far inward he may have known it himself, the outer self was so busy finding grounds! After a moment he spoke again, “Little things bring little reward. But to keep proportion and harmony, great thing must bring great things! You do not know what it is to cross where no man hath crossed and to find what no man hath found!”
“Yes, it is a great thing!”
“Then,” said he, “what is it, that which I ask, to the grandeur of time!”
He spoke with a lifted face, eyes upon the mountain crests and the blue they touched. They were nearer us than they had been; the Pass of Elvira was at hand. Yet on I walked, and before me still hung the far ocean west of Palos. I said, “I know something of the guesses, the chances and the dangers, but I have not spent there years of study—”
He kindled, having an auditor whom he chose to think intelligent. He checked his horse, that fell to grazing the bit of green by the way. “As though,” he said, “I stood in Cipango beneath a golden roof, I know that it can be done! Twelve hundred leagues at the most. Look!” he said. “You are not an ignoramus like some I have met; nor if I read you right are you like others who not knowing that True Religion is True Wonder up with hands and cry, ‘Blasphemy, Sacrilege and Contradiction!’ Earth and water make an orb. Place ant on apple and see that orbs may be gone around! Travel far enough and east and west change names! Straight through, beneath us, are other men.”
“Feet against feet. Antipodes,” I said. “All the life of man is taking Wonder in and making Her at home!”
“So!” he answered. “Now look! The largeness of our globe is at the equator. The great Ptolemy worked out our reckoning. Twenty-four hours, fifteen degrees to each, in all three hundred and sixty degrees. It is held that the Greeks and the Romans knew fifteen of these hours. They stretched their hand from Gibraltar and Tangier, calling them Pillars of Hercules, to mid-India. Now in our time we have the Canaries and the King of Portugal’s new islands—another hour, mark you! Sixteen from twenty-four leaves eight hours empty. How much of that is water and how much is earth? Where ends Ocean-Sea and where begins India and Cathay, of which the ancients knew only a part? The Arabian Alfraganus thinks that Ptolemy’s degrees should be less in size. If that be right, then the earth is smaller than is thought, and India nearer! I myself incline to hold with Alfraganus. It may be that less than two months’ sailing, calm and wind,