THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEA 9 
ble gulf of unendurable heat; the sea was alive with 
whales of incredible size, and monsters defying descrip- 
tion; it was thick with floating weed through which a 
ship could not make way, and notwithstanding the in- 
tensity of the solar heat by day and the fire thrown down 
by the stars at night, it was veiled in a perpetual stifling 
fog. All these exaggerations have so clear a basis of 
truth that we can hardly acquit the Phoenician sailormen, 
who traded far into the tropics, of wilfully heightening 
the discomforts of the doldrums, the terrors of equatorial 
thunder-storms and of the dust clouds blown from the 
Sahara, in order to maintain their monopoly. 
Whether the southern hemisphere were held to consist 
mainly of land or of water the terrors of the torrid zone 
supply a sufficient explanation of the failure of the early 
explorers to penetrate it. At the same time there is evi- 
dence that before the growth of the torrid myth some 
voyages to the south had been undertaken with success. 
It may be that Ophir was in the southern hemisphere ; it 
is practically certain that Africa was circumnavigated by 
the Phoenicians and that other early travellers had sailed 
far southward along the east coast of that continent. 
But these achievements were forgotten, and the legacy 
of Greek wisdom to Christendom was the fact that the 
Earth is a globe and the belief that the southern hemi- 
sphere of that globe contained habitable land which could 
never be reached. 
