‘Asgard? What is Asgard?’
The beauty looked at the giant for further instructions.
‘The City of the immortal Gods,’ interposed the old warrior, hastily and sternly, to the lady.
‘The city of God is in heaven,’ said Philammon to the interpreter, turning his head away from those gleaming, luscious, searching glances.
His answer was received with a general laugh by all except the leader, who shrugged his shoulders.
‘It may as well be up in the skies as up the Nile. We shall be just as likely, I believe, to reach it by flying, as by rowing up this big ditch. Ask him where the river comes from, Pelagia.’
Pelagia obeyed.... and thereon followed a confusion worse confounded, composed of all the impossible wonders of that mythic fairyland with which Philammon had gorged himself from boyhood in his walks with the old monks, and of the equally trustworthy traditions which the Goths had picked up at Alexandria. There was nothing which that river did not do. It rose in the Caucasus. Where was the Caucasus? He did not know. In Paradise—in Indian Aethiopia—in Aethiopian India. Where were they? He did not know. Nobody knew. It ran for a hundred and fifty days’ journey through deserts where nothing but flying serpents and satyrs lived, and the very lions’ manes were burnt off by the heat....
‘Good sporting there, at all events, among these dragons,’ quoth Smid the son of Troll, armourer to the party.
‘As good as Thor’s when he caught Snake Midgard with the bullock’s head,’ said Wulf.
It turned to the east for a hundred days’ journey more, all round Arabia and India, among forests full of elephants and dog-headed women.