PREFACE
The book gives a view of the earth and its inhabitants as seen through the haze of distance, whether of space or of time. Its purpose is to present those myths and half-myths of geography which are loosely and yet significantly called travel tales. It treats of various countries and races and animals which are, or were, or might have been. Although their true domain is the imagination, their supposed domain is, or was, somewhere on the earth. The Coasts of Illusion, as glimpsed here, are nowhere the shores of the supernatural.
Always the two tend to merge and the problem has been to keep them apart. The travel tales of the race have grown out of, or become entangled with, myths in which men sought to figure the creation of the world, the journeys of the sun from dawn to darkness, the conflicts of light with storm and night and winter, the high places of the gods and their incarnations and agents. Yet the tales are touched with reality, while the myths are unearthly.
Ulysses tarried among the Phacakians, and these were a cloud people; but he skirted the land of the lotus-eaters, and these were a mundane folk. Who were the lotus-eaters? Achilles fought with Memnon, son of the Dawn, but also with Penthesilea, the Amazon queen. Who were the Amazons? Hercules was of the progeny of Olympian Zeus, but wandering on earth he passed through the land of the pygmies. Who were the pygmies? What reality lies back of the fabulous animals and Deformed Folk that peopled the mountains and deserts?
For thousands of years men accepted the realms and races of prodigy. It was only about a century ago that these disappeared from the maps and natural histories. The frontiers of ignorance had been pushed back so far that the never-never countries dropped off into the sea. There was no longer room for the phœnix to flap its wings, the dragon to hiss and roar, the giants to stalk, the kangaroo-men to hop.
The countries and creatures of legend passed from the scene without the parting word that every passing merits, without even a gesture of farewell. Is it more than a tardy courtesy to summon them back for a word that shall be both appraisal and remembrance?
These are the stories wanderers told in hall when the world was young; and in out-of-the-way places still they tell them, and men believe. These are stories the lad Raleigh heard along wharves where sailors in outlandish garb recited the wonders of countries below the rim of the sea. If one could recapture Raleigh’s boyish faith, and the faith of ages of listeners before him, it might still be possible to behold the King of Is in state beside the menacing ocean, to traverse the streets of the lost Atlantis, to win to the cities of gold which Spain could not find, and to repeople the waste places with their strange inhabitants. So might one achieve the purpose of these pages and regain a picture of things as they were supposed to be.
This is a survey of the world through the stained glass of men’s imaginings.
C. B. F.
THE COASTS OF ILLUSION