He
seated himself as he spoke, on an ancient bench that rested its back
against the wall just where the wind was sweetest. Under the fragrances
of ripening vineyards and flowering shrubs there was always the sharp
clean smell of the sea.
"He believes all that Gil Andrade and Joao Pancado tell him as if it
were the Credo," Beatriz began, her words flung out like sparks from a
little crackling fire. "He says that there is a Sea of Darkness out
away beyond the Falcon Islands, where ships are drawn into a great pit
under the edge of the world. And he says that ships cannot go too far
south because the sun is so near it would burn them, and they cannot go
too far north because the icebergs will catch them and crush them. If I
were a man, I would sail straight out there, into the sunset, and show
them what my people dared to do!"
Old Sancho was not all Portuguese. In his veins ran the blood of the
three great seafaring races of southern Europe--the Genoese, the
Lusitanian and the Vizcayan--and their jealousies and rivalries amused
him. He had spent most of his life in the feluccas and caravels of
Lisbon and Oporto, because when he was young they went where no other
ships dared even follow; but he did not believe that the last word in
discovery had been said even by Dom Henriques at Sagres, or the
Mappe-Monde of Fra Mauro in Venice.
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