A Child's Book of Saints

by William Canton

That we could not answer, for it seemed to us that such a one would lose heart and hope in the roofless waste, with never a stone or tree, nor any shadow save a cloud's, and turn back dismayed; but Serapion replied: "To me it appears, your Discretion, that so bold a mariner, if years failed him not, might win to the Earthly Paradise."

"So have I heard," said the Bishop. "Yet here would you be sailing into the west, and for a certainty the Paradise of God was in the east. How would you give a reasonable account of this?"

But we could make no reply, for we knew not; nor Serapion more than we.

"Now, watching the sea," said the Bishop, "you have marked the ships, how they go. When they come to you, they first show the mast-top, then the sail, and last the body of the ship, and perchance the sweep of the oars, reverse-wise when they depart from you, you first fail to see the body of the ship, and then the sail, but longest you hold in sight the mast-top, or it may be a bright streamer flying therefrom, or a cross glittering in the light—though these be but small things compared with the body of the ship. Is it not so?"

We answered, readily enough, that so it was.

"Is it not then even as though one were to watch a wayfarer on horse-back, going or coming over the green bulge of a low hill? Were he coming to you, you would first see the head of the rider, and last the legs of the horse, and were he riding away the horse would first go down over the hill, but still, for a little, you would see the man waving his hand in farewell as he sank lower and lower."

Such indeed, we said, was the fashion of a ship's coming and going.

"Does it not then seem a likely thing," said his Discretion, "that the sea is in the nature of a long low hill, down which the ships go? So have I heard it surmised by wise men, sages and scholars of the lights of heaven, in the cities of Greece and Egypt. For the earth and the ocean-sea, they teach, is fashioned as a vast globe in the heights of heaven. And truly, if indeed it be the shadow of the world which darkens the face of the moon in time of eclipse, the earth may well be round, for that shadow is round. Thus, then, one holding ever a westward course might sail down the bulge of the sea, and under the world, and round about even unto the east, if there be sea-way all along that course."

Silently we listened to so strange a matter, but the Bishop traced for us on the sand a figure of the earth. "And here," said he, "is this land of ours, and here the sea, and here the bulge of ocean, and here a ship sailing westward; and here in the east is the Earthly Paradise; and mark now how the ship fareth onward ever on the one course unchanged, till it cometh to that blessed place."

Truly this was a wondrous teaching; and when we questioned how they who sailed could escape falling out and perishing, they and indeed their ship, when they came so far down the round sea that they hung heads nethermost, his Discretion laughed: "Nay, if the sea, which the wind breaketh and lifteth and bloweth about in grey showers, fall not out, neither will the ship, nor yet the mariners; for the Lord God hath so ordered it that wheresoever mariners be, there the sea shall seem to them no less flat than a great grass-meadow when the wind swings the grass; and if they hang head downward they know not of it; but rather, seeing over them the sun and the clouds, they might well pity our evil case, deeming it was we who were hanging heads nethermost."