On those terms peace was made, and then the wall was torn down at once and we prisoners were restored. When we reached the moon we were met and tearfully welcomed by our comrades and by Endymion himself. He wanted me to stay with him and join the colony, promising to give me his own son in marriage—there are no women in their country. But I was not to be persuaded; I asked him to let me go down to the sea. When he perceived that he could not prevail on me, he let us go after entertaining us for seven days.
In the interval, while I was living on the moon, I observed some strange and wonderful things that I wish to speak of. In the first place there is the fact that they are not born of women but of men: they marry men and do not even know the word woman at all! Up to the age of twenty-five each is a wife, and thereafter a husband. They carry their children in the calf of the leg instead of the belly. When conception takes place the calf begins to swell. In course of time they cut it open and deliver the child dead, and then they bring it to life by putting it in the wind with its mouth open. It seems to me that the term “belly of the leg”[1] came to us Greeks from there, since the leg performs the function of a belly with them. But I will tell you something else, still more wonderful. They have a kind of men whom they call the Arboreals, who are brought into the world as follows: Exsecting a man’s right genital gland, they plant it in the ground. From it grows a very large tree of
- ↑ I.e. calf of the leg.
