Free Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano Page B

up with the theorems crucial to that development. Copernicus used their theorems but did not cite the source.
    Europe looked in the mirror and saw the world.
    Beyond that lay nothing.
    The three inventions that made the Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, came from China. The Babylonians scooped Pythagoras by fifteen hundred years. Long before anyone else, the Indians knew the world was round and had calculated its age. And better than anyone else, the Mayans knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time.
    Such details were not worthy of Europe’s attention.

SOUTH

    Arab maps still showed the south on top and the north below, but by the thirteenth century Europe had reestablished the natural order of the universe.
    According to the rules of that order, dictated by God, north was up and south was down.
    The world was a body. In the north lay the limpid countenance, eyes raised to heaven. In the south lay the musky nether parts, populated by filth and by dark beings named antipodes, the reverse image of the luminous inhabitants of the north.
    In the south, rivers ran backward, summers were cold, day was night, and the devil was God. The sky was black, empty. All the stars had fled north.

BESTIARY

    Beyond Europe, monsters swarmed, the sea bellowed, and the earth burned. A few travelers had been able to overcome their fear. Upon their return, they told their stories.
    Odoric of Pordenone, who set forth in the year 1314, saw two-headed birds and hens covered in wool instead of feathers. In the Caspian Sea, live lambs emerged from the buds of plants. In Africa, Pygmies married and had children when they reached six months of age.
    John Mandeville visited some of the islands of the Orient in 1356. There he saw headless people who ate and spoke through an open mouth in their chests, and he also saw people with a single foot that was sometimes used as a parasol or an umbrella. The inhabitants of the island of Tacorde, who ate nothing but raw snakes, did not speak. They hissed.
    In 1410, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly described Asia according to the tales of travelers. On the island of Taprobane there were mountains of gold, guarded by dragons and by ants as large as dogs.
    Antonio Pigafetta went around the world in 1520. He saw trees that sprouted leaves with feet, and during the day they leapt from the branches and went for a stroll.

ORIGIN OF SEA BREEZES

    According to the stories of ancient mariners, the sea was once still, an immense lake without waves or ripples, and it could only be navigated by paddle.

    Then a canoe, lost in time, arrived from the other side of the world and found the island where the breezes lived. The mariners captured them and carried them off and obliged them to blow. The canoe rode on the captive breezes, and the mariners, who had spent centuries paddling and paddling, could at last lie down to sleep.
    They never awakened.
    The canoe crashed against a rocky cliff.
    Ever since, the breezes wander the globe in search of their lost island home. Trade winds and monsoons and hurricanes roam the seven seas, in vain. To avenge that long-ago kidnapping, they sometimes sink the ships that cross their path.

AFTERMAP

    A couple of millennia ago, Seneca foretold that someday the map of the world would extend beyond Iceland, known then as Thule.
    Seneca the Elder, who was a Spaniard, wrote:
In the later years of the world, will come
certain times in which the ocean sea will release
the meekness of things.
And a great land will open.
And a new mariner,
like the one who guided Jason
and who went by the name Tiphys,
will discover a new world
and the island of Thule will no longer be the last of the lands.

COLUMBUS

    Defying the fury of the winds and the hunger of ship-eating monsters, Admiral Christopher Columbus set sail.
    He did not discover America. The Polynesians had arrived a century previous, and the Vikings four centuries before that. And three hundred