Transcript
Book 1, Chapter Six: The Wonder Stone, Pages 123 and 124
“Oh! You know of it?”
The red-cloaked Lady glides to a book shelf, where she procures
a tube, containing within it a map.
“Of course. Is it not that same Water
from acros the Ocean, far into Paradise,
at the horizon where, embedded deep in a land of eternal darkness,
heaven and earth meet
and where
birth and death mingle…?”
The Servant gives a luminous smile, as he finishes her sentence.
“At the end of the world.
Yes.”
The Lady unfolds the map circular,
the world (or rather, a section of it, but in the old days that was all the world they knew)…
Anyway,
the countries, Europe, North Africa, West and Central Asia, are
bound by a halo of wide Ocean
that touches the perimeter of the map,
and at the top perimeter,
is a country,
unknown but there,
that is in contact with the edge.
The edge of everything,
the horizon of the Ocean
of all the world,
where heaven and earth meet,
and where
the Water of Life is supped.
The Lady says,
“You’re ambitious. Immortality is a difficult conquest.”
The Servant agrees, “Indeed.”
Chapter Six 123-124
Footnotes:
The illustration on the bottom left is taken from the Flammarion engraving.
The map is based on the ancient conception of land as a kind of large continent bounded by an Ocean, following Hecataeus of Miletus. The map here is a bit of a mishmash from historical objects and descriptions of how the world seems to work in the Alexander Romance, and references of Alexander’s desire to see “the Ocean/end of the world” in India.
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