Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/271

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pomiferous trees. It contains the Tree of Life: there is neither cold nor heat there, but perpetual equable temperature. It contains a fountain which flows forth in four rivers.”

Rabanus Maurus, with more discretion, says:—“Many folk want to make out that the site of Paradise is in the east of the earth, though cut off by the longest intervening space of ocean or earth from all regions which man now inhabits. Consequently, the waters of the Deluge, which covered the highest points of the surface of our orb, were unable to reach it. However, whether it be there, or whether it be anywhere else, God knows; but that there was such a spot once, and that it was on earth, that is certain.”

Jacques de Vitry (“Historia Orientalis”), Gervais of Tilbury, in his “Otia Imperalia,” and many others, hold the same views as to the site of Paradise that were entertained by Hugo de S. Victor.

Jourdain de Sèverac, monk and traveller in the beginning of the fourteenth century, places the terrestrial Paradise in the “Third India;” that is to say, in trans-Gangic India.

Leonardo Dati, a Florentine poet of the fifteenth century, composed a geographical treatise in verse,