The first account of the Arctic regions likewise reads like pure romance to the ignorant and untravelled. "After one day's journey to the north of Thule," says Pytheas, "men come to a sluggish sea, where there is no separation of sea, land, and air, but a mixture of these elements like the substance of jelly-fish, through which one can neither walk nor sail." Here the nights were very short, sometimes only two hours, after which the sun rose again. This, in fact, was the "Sleeping Palace of the Sun." With all this wealth of discovery, Pytheas returned home by the Bay of Biscay to the mouth of the Gironde; thence he sailed up the Garonne, and from the modern town of Bordeaux he reached Marseilles by an overland journey. CHAPTER VII JULIUS CAESAR AS EXPLORER Our next explorer is Julius Caesar. As Alexander the Great had combined the conqueror with the explorer, so now history repeats itself, and we find the Roman Caesar not only conquering, but exploring. It was Caesar who first dispelled the mist that lay over the country about the French Seine, the German Rhine, the English Thames--Caesar who gives us the first graphic account of crossing the English Channel from France to England. Pytheas had hinted at the fog-bound lands of the north--Caesar brought them into the light of day. Since the days of Alexander the centre of Empire had shifted from Greece to Rome, and Rome was now conquering and annexing land, as Persia had done in the olden days. Hence it was that Julius Caesar was in the year 58 B.C. appointed Governor of a new province recently brought under Roman sway, stretching from the Alps to the Garonne and northward to the Lake of Geneva, which at this time marked the frontier of the Roman Empire. Caesar made no secret of his intentions to subdue the tribes to the north of his province and bring all Gaul under the dominion of Rome. His appointment carried with it the command of four legions, including some twenty thousand soldiers. His chance soon came, and we find Caesar, with all the ability of a great commander, pushing forward with his army into the very heart of France one hundred and fifty miles beyond the Roman frontier. On the banks of the river Saone he defeated a large body of Celtic people who were migrating from Switzerland to make their homes in the warmer and roomier plains at the foot of the Pyrenees.