THE weather plagued us. The rains were cataracts, the lightning blinding, the thunder loud enough to wake the dead. Day after day, until this weather grew to seem a veritable Will, a Demon with a grudge against us.

The Margarita sailed no better; she sailed worse. The Admiral considered abandoning her, taking the Adelantado upon the Consolacion and dividing his crew among the three ships. But the Adelantado's pride and obstinacy and seamanship were against that. "I'll sail her, because San Domingo thinks I can!"

Stormy days and nights, and the Admiral watching. "The Margarita! Ho, look out! Do you see the Margarita?"

In the midst of foul weather came foully back the gout that crippled him. I would have had him stay in his bed. "I cannot! How do you think I can?" In the end he had us build him some kind of shelter upon deck, fastening there a bench and laying a pallet upon this. Here, propped against the wood, covered with cloaks, he still watched the sea and how went our ship and the other ships.

Day after day and day after day! Creeping eastward along a bad shore, in the teeth of the demon. The seas, the winds, the enormous rain wore us out. Men grew large-eyed. If we slept came a shriek and wakened us. We would put to land, but the wind turned and thrust us out again, or we found no harbor. We seemed to be fixed in one place while time rushed by us.

Forecastle began to say, "It is enchantment!" Presently poop echoed it. The boy Fernando brought it to his father. "Alonso de Zamorra and Bernardo the Apothecary say that demons and witches are against us."

"The Prince of the Power of the Air!" said the Admiral. "It may be, child! Paynimry against Christianity. We had a touch of the same quality once off Cuba. But is it, or is it not, Christian men shall win! And send me Bartholomew Fiesco. Such talk is injury. It bores men's courage worse than the teredo a ship's bottom!"

We thought the foul weather would never cease, and our toil would never cease—then lo! at the point of despair the sky cleared with a great clap of light, the coast turned sharply, sheerly south—he named the great cape, Cape Gracias a Dios—and we ran freely, West again.

Coming in three days to a wide river mouth, in we turned. The shore was grown with reeds that would do for giants' staffs. On mud banks we saw the crocodile, "cayman" they call it. Again the sky hung a low, gray roof; a thin wind whistled, but for all that it was deathly hot. Seeing no men, we sent two boats with Diego Mendez up the stream. They were not gone a half league, when, watching from the Consolacion we marked a strange and horrid thing. There came without wind a swelling of the sea. Our ships tossed as in tempest, and there entered the river a wall of sea water. Meeting the outward passing current, there ensued a fury with whirlpools. It caught the boats. Diego Mendez saved his, but the other was seized, tossed and engulfed. Eight men drowned.

The thing sank as it had come. The River of Disaster, we named it, and left this strip of coast that seemed to us gloomy and portentous. "Wizardry! It's not to be lucky, this voyage." It was now late September.

Next day, we anchored, it being most clear and beautiful. We lay beside a verdurous islet, between it and a green shore. Here were all our fruits, and we thought we smelled cinnamon and clove. Across, upon the main, stood a small village. Cariari the Indians there called themselves. They had some gold, but not to touch that canoe from Yucatan. Likewise they owned a few cotton mantles, with jars of baked clay, and we saw a copper hatchet. But they did not themselves make these things. They had drifted to them, we thought, from a people far more skilled.

The Admiral cried, "When and when and when shall we come to this people?"

I answered, "I tell you what is in my mind, and I have got it, I think, from your inmost mind, out of which you will not let it come forth because you have had a great theory and think you must stand to it. But what if this that you have underneath is a greater one? What if the world truly is larger than Alfraganus or the ancients thought? What if all this that we have found since the first island and that means only beginnings of what is to be found; what if it is not Asia at all? What if it is a land mass, great as Europe or greater, that no one knew anything of? What if over by the sunset there is Ocean-Sea again, true ocean and as many leagues to Asia as to Spain? What if they cannot lead us to Quinsai, Cambaluc or Zaiton, or to the Ganges' mouth, or Aurea Chersonesus, because they never heard of them, and they have no ships to pass again an Ocean-Sea? What if it is all New, and all the maps have to be redrawn?"

He looked at me as I spoke, steadily and earnestly. What Juan Lepe said was not the first entry into his mind of something like that. But he was held by that great mass of him that was bound by the thinking of the Venerable. He was free far and far beyond most, but to certain things he clung like a limpet. "The Earthly Paradise!" he said, and he looked toward that Paria that we thought ran across our south. "When our first parents left the Earthly Paradise, they and their sons and daughters and all the peoples to come wandered by foot into Chaldea and Arabia. So it could not be!" His blue-gray eyes under that great brow and shock of white hair regarded the south.

This faery island—the Garden he called it—and the Cariari who came to us from the main. One day they saw one of us take out pen and inkhorn and write down their answers to our many questions. Behind us lay the blue sea, before us the deep groves of the islet; between us and the rich shade stood gathered a score of these Indians. They looked at the one seated on the sand, industriously making black marks upon a white sheet. The Indian speaking stopped short and put up an arm in an attitude of defense; another minute and they had all backed from us into the wood. We saw only excited, huddled eyes. Then one started forth, advancing over the sand, and he had a small gourd filled with some powder which he threw before him. He scattered it ceremonially between us and himself and his fellows, a slow, measured rite with muttered words and now and then a sharp, rising note.

Cried Juan Sanchez the pilot, "What's he doing?"

Juan Lepe answered before he thought, "He thinks the notary yonder is a magician and the pen his wand. Something is being done to them! Counter-magic."

"Then they are enchanters!" cried Alonso de Zamorro.

Our great cluster gave back. "Fix an arrow and shoot hi............