第36章 THE WOOD OF LIFE(5)

Battista shook his head."Not Cathay.To go there would be only to make assurance of that which we already know.I have shown the road: let others plan its details and build hostelries.For myself I am for a bolder venture."The balcony was filling up.A noisy group of young men were chattering at one table, and at others some of the merchants from the Merceria were at wine.But where the two sat it was quiet and dusky, though without on the canal the sky made a golden mirror.Philip could see his companion's face in the reflected light, and it reminded him of the friars who had filled the chamber of his dying grandmother.It was strained with a steadfast ardour.

Battista leaned his elbows on the board and his eyes searched the other's.

"I am minded to open my heart to you," he said."You are young and of a noble stock.Likewise you are a scholar.I am on a mission, Sir Philip--the loftiest, I think, since Moses led Israel over the deserts.I am seeking a promised land.Not Cathay, but a greater.I sail presently, not the African seas, but the Sea of Darkness, the Mare Atlanticum." He nodded towards Bianco's map."I am going beyond the Ultimate Islands.""Listen," he went on, and his voice fell very low and deep."I take it we live in these latter days of which the prophets spoke.I remember a monk in Genoa who said that the Blessed Trinity ruled in turn, and that the reign of the Father was accomplished and that of the Son nearing its close; and that now the reign of the Spirit was at hand.It may have been heresy--I am no scholar--but he pointed a good moral.For, said he, the old things pass away and the boundaries of the world are shifting.Here in Europe we have come to knowledge of salvation, and brought the soul and mind of man to an edge and brightness like a sword.Having perfected the weapon, it is now God's will that we enter into possession of the new earth which He has kept hidden against this day, and He has sent His Spirit like a wind to blow us into those happy spaces....Now, mark you, sir, this earth is not a flat plain surrounded by outer darkness, but a sphere hung in the heavens and sustained by God's hand.Therefore if a man travel east or west he will, if God prosper him, return in time to his starting-point."The speaker looked at Philip as if to invite contradiction, but the other nodded.

"It is the belief of the best sailors," Battista went on; "it is the belief of the great Paolo Toscanelli in this very land of Italy.""It was the belief of a greater than he.The ancients--""Ay, what of your ancients?" Battista asked eagerly.

Philip responded with a scholar's zest."Four centuries before our Lord's birth Aristotle taught the doctrine, from observing in different places the rise and setting of the heavenly bodies.The sages Eratosthenes, Hipparchus and Ptolemy amplified the teaching.It is found in the poetry of Manilius and Seneca, and it was a common thought in the minds of Virgil and Ovid and Pliny.You will find it in St.Augustine, and St.Isidore and Beda, and in many of the moderns.I myself have little knowledge of such things, but on the appeal to high authority your doctrine succeeds.'

"What a thing is learning!" Battista exclaimed with reverence."Here have Iand such as I been fumbling in the dark when the great ones of old saw clearly!...It follows, then, that a voyage westward will bring a man to Cathay?""Assuredly.But how will he return? If the earth is a sphere, his course will be a descent, and on his way back he will have to climb a great steep of waters.""It is not so," said Battista vigorously."Though why it is not so I cannot tell.Travelling eastward by land there is no such descent, and in this Mediterranean sea of ours one can sail as easily from Cadiz to Egypt as from Egypt to Cadiz.There is a divine alchemy in it which I cannot fathom, but the fact stands.""Then you would reach Cathay by the west?"1

"Cipango," said Philip, who had read Marco Polo's book in the Latin version published a year or two before.