I

'See here! On the map of the Indian Ocean, westward of the island of Taprobane, we find a note—"The Sirens: prodigies of the sea." Christopher Columbus told me that having come there and found no sirens, he was greatly astonished. But you smile. Why?'

'Oh, nothing! Go on, Guido; I am listening.'

'I know very well, Messer Leonardo, that you don't believe in sirens! Well, and what would you say of the skiapodes, who use their feet as parasols; or the pygmies, whose ears are so large that they make one a bolster, the other a blanket; or of the tree which bears eggs for its fruit, from which come yellow downy chickens, so fishy-flavoured they may be eaten on fast-days; or of that marine monster upon which certain mariners, believing it an island, disembarked and lighted a fire for the cooking of their supper? This last is a very true tale, related by an aged mariner from Lisbon, a man in no wise given to wine, and who swore and swore again by the blood and the body of Christ, that he spoke what was true.'

This conversation took place six years after the discovery of the New World, on Palm Sunday, at Florence, in a room above the storehouse of Messer Pompeo Berardi, a shipbuilder, who had a branch establishment at Seville, and superintended there the building of ships for sailing to the New Continent. Messer Guido Berardi, Pompeo's nephew, was an impassioned seaman; he had prepared to take part in Vasco di Gama's expedition, when he was stricken by the terrible disease called French by the Italians, and Italian by the French; German by the Poles, Polish by the Muscovites, Christian by the Turks. In vain he had consulted all physicians, in vain he had made waxen offerings at every wonder-working shrine; paralysed, condemned to eternal immobility, he preserved an extraordinary activity of mind, and by listening to sailors' stories, and sitting up all night over books and maps, he sailed the oceans of imagination, and made discoveries by proxy. His room, which sextants, compasses, astrolabes, made like a ship's cabin, opened on to a balcony, a Florentine loggia. The clear sky of a spring evening was already darkening; the flame of the lamp flickered in the wind; from the storehouse below were wafted odours of spices—cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves.

'And so, Messer Leonardo,' he concluded, rubbing his unhappy legs under their coverlet, ''tis not meaningless the saying that faith removes mountains. Had Columbus doubted like you, he had accomplished naught. Confess, I pray you, is it not worth grey hair at thirty to have found the Earthly Paradise?'

'Paradise?' said Leonardo; 'nay, how is that?'

'What? Have you not heard? Know you not that by observations on the Pole Star, taken by Messer Cristoforo near the Azores, he has proved that the world has not the shape of an apple, as is commonly supposed. 'Tis a pear, with a protuberance like the nipple of a woman's breast. On this nipple, a mountain so high that its summit leans against the lunar sphere, lies the Earthly Paradise.'

'But, caro Guido, science....'

'Science!' cried the other contemptuously. 'Know you, Messere, what Columbus says of science? I will quote you his words in his Libro de las Profecias. He says: "Not mathematics, nor the charts of geographers, nor the arguments of reason, helped me to my deed, but solely the prophecy of Isaiah touching a new heaven and a new earth."'

Here Guido fell silent, for at this hour began the nightly racking of his joints. He was carried to his bed; and Leonardo, left alone, entertained himself verifying those observations upon the Pole Star which had led to so singular a delusion; and, in truth, he found errors so gross that he could not believe his eyes.

'What ignorance!' he said to himself more than once; 'it would seem he has discovered the New World by chance, groping at random. He himself sees no more than a blind man, nor doth he know what it is he has discovered; he thinks it is China or Solomon's Ophir; or, by my faith, the Earthly Paradise! Death will overtake him before he has learned the truth.'

He read the first letter, dated April 29th 1493, in which Columbus informed Europe of his discovery: 'the letter of Christopher Columbus, to whom our age oweth much touching the newly-found islands beyond the Ganges.'

Leonardo spent the whole night over the calculations and the maps. At times he went out upon the loggia and looked at the stars, thinking of this finder of the new heaven and the new earth—that strange dreamer with the mind, and the heart, of a child. Involuntarily he compared this man's destiny with his own.

'How little he knew; how much he did! And I, with all my knowledge, am helpless as the paralysed Berardi. I, too, have aimed at unknown worlds, but have made no step towards them. Faith, say they, faith! But is not perfect faith the same as perfect knowledge? Cannot these eyes of mine see farther than those eyes of Columbus, the blind prophet? Or is it the caprice of Fate that men must see to know; must be blind to act?'