Excerpt from The Conquest of the Atlantic: Texts and Lithographs This little world was surrounded by almost impenetrable mysteries. In the North, fog and frost made a chaotic, unstable element of land, sea, and air. In the South, the burning sun melted land and sea into one boiling, seeth ing mass. And far, far away, beyond mystic jungles and inaccessible mountains were the eastern wonderlands of golden towers, precious stones, and fragrant spices - mysterious Cathay, and perhaps even the Terrestrial Paradise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.