For us, however, the information which Dicuil gives us of his own knowledge, or gathered from his own countrymen, is far more valuable; and to this we would especially invite the reader’s attention.
In the sixth chapter, when speaking of the Nile, he says
“Although we never read in any book that any branch of the Nile flows into the Red Sea, yet Brother Fidelis[232] told in my presence, to my master Suibhne (to whom, under God, I owe whatever knowledge I possess), that certain clerics and laymen from Ireland, who went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, sailed up the Nile for a long way.”
—and thence continued their voyage by canal to the entrance of the Red Sea.
This Irish pilgrimage to Jerusalem is worthy of notice, for many of our critics where they find mention of such pilgrimages to Rome and to Jerusalem in the Lives of our early Saints, seem to regard it as an exaggeration, if not a kind of pious fraud. But here we have the testimony of one in every way worthy of credit, who himself spoke to such pilgrims after their return from the Holy Land.
Then their testimony is peculiarly valuable in reference to a vexed geographical question regarding the existence of a navigable canal in those days from the Nile to the Red Sea. A canal called the “River of Ptolemy” and afterwards “The River of Trajan,” was certainly cut from the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to the Red Sea at Arisnoe. It was certainly open for commerce in the time of Trajan, but during the decline of the Roman empire became partially filled with sand. Trajan, it seems, however, when re-opening the canal connected it with the Nile at a point higher up the river than the old route, opposite Memphis, near Babylon, in order that the fresh water might flow through the canal and help to keep it open. Under the Arabians this canal of Trajan was re-opened, but geographers have asserted that it became choked shortly afterwards and remained so ever since. The testimony of the Irish pilgrims quoted by Dicuil is the only satisfactory evidence that we now possess to prove that this canal was open at the end of the eighth century for the purposes of commerce and navigation.[233]
The pilgrims also give some interesting information with reference to the Pyramids, which they call the “Barns of Joseph.” “The pilgrims,” he says, “saw them from the river rising like mountains four in one place and three in another.” Then they landed to view these wonders close at hand and coming to one of the three greater pyramids, they saw eight men and one woman and a great lion stretched dead beside it. The lion had attacked them, and the men in turn had attacked the lion with their spears, with the result that all perished in the mutual slaughter, for the place was a desert and there was no one at hand to help then. From top to bottom the pyramids were all built of stone, square at the base, but rounded towards the summit, and tapering to a point. The aforesaid brother Fidelis measured one of them, and found that the square face was 400 feet in length. Going thence by the canal to the Red Sea, they found the passage across to the eastern shore at the Road of Moses to be only a short distance. The brother who had measured the base of the pyramid wished to examine the exact point where Moses had entered the Red Sea, in order to try if he could find any traces of the Chariots of Pharaoh, or the wheel tracks; but the sailors were in a hurry and would not allow him to go on this excursion. The breadth of the sea at this point appeared to him to be about six miles. Then they sailed up this narrow bay which once kept the murmuring Israelites from returning to Egypt.
This is a very interesting and manifestly authentic narrative. Another interesting chapter is that in which Dicuil describes Iceland and the Faroe Islands. “It is now thirty years,” he says, “since certain clerics, who remained in that island (Ultima Thule) from the 1st of February to the 1st of August, told me that not only at the Summer solstice, (as Solinus said), but also for several days about the solstice, the setting sun at eventide merely hid himself, as it were, for a little behind a hill, so that there was no darkness even for a moment, and whatever a man wished to do, if it were only to pick vermin off his shirt—vol pediculos de camisia abstrahere—he could do as it were in the light of the sun, and if he were on a mountain of any height, he could doubtless see the sun all through.” This way of putting it is certainly more graphic than elegant, but it is at the same time strictly accurate, and shows that the Irish monks had really spent the summer in Iceland. For the arctic circle just touches the extreme north of Iceland, and therefore in any part of that country the sun would even at the solstice set for a short time, but it would be only, as it were, going behind a hill to reappear in an hour or in half an hour. So that by the aid of refraction and twilight a man would always have light enough to perform even those delicate operations to which Dicuil refers.
He then observes with much acuteness that at the middle point of this brief twilight it is midnight at the equator, or middle of the earth; and in like manner he infers that about the Winter solstice there must be daylight for a very short time in Thule, when it is noonday at the equator. These observations show a keen observant mind, and would lead us to infer that Dicuil, like his countryman Virgilius, who flourished a little earlier, had been taught the sphericity of the earth in the schools of his native country. He says also in this same chapter, what is certainly true, that those writers are greatly mistaken who describe the Icelandic Sea as always frozen, and who say that there is a perpetual day from Spring to Autumn, and perpetual night from Autumn to Spring. For the Irish monks sailed thither, he says, through an open sea in a month of great natural cold, and whilst they were there enjoyed alternate day and night except about the Summer solstice, as already explained. But one day’s sail further north brought them to the frozen sea.
Dicuil’s reference to Iceland is interesting from another point of view. In almost all our books of popular instruction, and even in many standard works on geography, it is stated that the Danes, or Norwegians, “discovered” Iceland about the year A.D. 860, and shortly afterward colonized it during the reign of Harold Harfager. But Dicuil clearly shows that it was well known to Irish monks at least more than half a century before Dane or Norwegian ever set foot on the island, as is now generally admitted by scholars who are familiar with Icelandic literature and history.