It was truly the hope that upheld many on a voyage
that they chose to think a witches’ one.
He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what that
traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He
meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it
so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening
and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making
humdrum and workaday over to his heart’s desire.
The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their
books, had related wonders enough. These grew
with him, it might be said—and indeed in
his lifetime was often said—into wonders
without a foot upon earth. But if one took as
figures and symbols his gold roofs and platters, temples
and gardens, every man a merchant in silks and spices,
strange fruit-dropping trees and pearls in carcanets,
the Grand Khan and Prester John—who could
say that in the long, patient life of Time the Admiral
was over-esteeming? The pity of it was that most
here could not live in great lengths of time.
They wanted riches now, now! And they wanted
only one kind of riches; here and now, or at the most
in another month, in the hands and laps of Pedro and
Fernando and Diego.
CHAPTER XIII
THERE grew at times an excited feeling that he was
a prophet, and that there were fabulously great things
before us. As I doctored some small ill one day
in the forecastle, a great fellow named Francisco
from Huelva would tell me his dream of the night before.
He had already told it, it seemed, to all who would
listen, and now again he had considerable audience,
crowding at the door. He said that he dreamed
he was in Cipango. At first he thought it was
heaven, but when he saw golden roofs he knew it must
be Cipango, for in heaven where it never rained and
there were no nights, we shouldn’t need roofs.
One interrupted, “We’d need them to keep
the flying angels from looking in!”
“It was Cipango,” persisted Francisco,
“for the Emperor himself came and gave me a
rope of pearls. There were five thousand of them,
and each would buy a house or a fine horse or a suit
of velvet. And the Emperor took me by the hand,
and he said, `Dear Brother—’ You might
have thought I was a king—and by the mass,
I was a king! I felt it right away! And
then he took me into a garden, and there were three
beautiful women, and one of them would push me to
the other, and that one to the third, and that to
the first again, as though they were playing ball,
and they all laughed, and I laughed. Then there
came a great person with five crowns on his head,
and all the light blazed up gold and blue, and somebody
said, `It’s Prester John’!”
His dream kept a two-days’ serenity upon the
ship. It came to the ear of the Admiral, who
said, " `In dreams will I instruct thee.’—I
have had dreams far statelier than his.”
Pedro Gutierrez too began to dream,—fantastic
things which he told with an idle gusto. They
were of wine and gold and women, though often these
were to be guessed through strange, jumbled masks
and phantasies. “Those are ill dreams,”
said the Admiral. “Dream straight and high!”
Fray Ignatio, too, said wisely, “It is not always
God who cometh in dreams!”
