He was a wretched-looking object. His head and cheeks were quite hairless; his wrinkled face was of a sickly grey tinge; his limbs seemed to be wasting away; his back was crooked; his knee was bent outwards, his chest inwards. Although it was a hot summer day, he seemed to be freezing, despite the thick fur mantle in which he was closely wrapped.
Bar Noemi's astonishment increased when he was addressed by this strange shape, in that out-of-the-way corner of the world, in a corrupt but perfectly intelligible Carthaginian dialect.
"Thou hast come from Carthage, eh?"
"Yes, we come from Carthage," repeated Bar Noemi, "and have suffered shipwreck. But who art thou, and how is it that thou dost address us in our own language?"
The man shivered in the warmth of the equinoctial summer, and wrapping himself closer in his woollen mantle, which was interwoven with gold and silver flowers, he came still closer. It was evidently a labour for him to speak to them from a distance, for his voice was not strong enough to do so without very great exertion.
"If you come from Carthage, you must have heard of Hanno's tables, for though it is forbidden to as much as mention them there under pain of death, they must be known to every Carthaginian, for thousands have already come from Africa's coasts to the Fortunate Islands as Hanno called this continent."
"Then we are on the Fortunate Islands?" cried Bar Noemi, who had often heard the legend from the lips of his sailors.
"This is no island, but a continent ten times as large as the continent beyond the seas. Those who dwell on one side of it do not even know the names of those who dwell on the other. The boldest travellers do not yet know the boundaries of this continent, and whatsoever direction they take they always come upon new lands, new mountains, and new peoples, a hundred-fold more numerous than those of Rome and Greece put together, as described by them who come from thence. The Fortunate Islands have no limit, they are infinity itself."
"And does the land really deserve to be called fortunate?"
"Throw thyself to the ground and kiss it. This land is the Paradise where everything for which men toil and labour elsewhere, grows of its own accord. One tree bears wool whiter than the wool of sheep; in the flowers of another tree you will find sweet honey; a third gives milk and butter which is fatter than the milk of cows; and yon branches which nod their heads towards thee supply in abundance wine and bread and luscious fruits. And then, too, each one of our natural juices has its own peculiar intoxicating joy. The sleep-compelling juice of the Areka transports thee into very Paradise; drink thyself drunken with the sweet juice of the Batata, and the love of a thousand women at once will burn in thy breast; drink deeply of the burnt beans of the coffee plant, and thou wilt feel two souls within thee instead of one; whilst all the other joys of life are as nothing compared with the ecstatic vibrations which thrill through every nerve when thou dost taste of the fermented juice of the sugar-cane. Ah! stranger, here are a thousand different kinds of bliss which other lands wot not of. Shame it is that one cannot live longer. Shame that life vanishes like a dream. I myself am not far from my dotage, for thirty summers have already passed over my head!"