Dante speaks again of these extra-climatal races in _De Mon._ I. xiv. 43-51, where he contrasts the Scythians who live beyond the seventh climate, and therefore endure extreme inequality of days and nights, and suffer almost intolerable cold, with the Garamantes who live under the equator, where days and nights are always equal, and the heat is so intense that they can scarcely bear any clothing. Since “the astrologers who determine the climates”[385] had fixed their northern limit at 50½°, nearly the whole of Britain also lay, like barbarous Scythia, in this scarcely habitable region of long nights and bitter cold! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [385] _Qu._ xix. 36. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ When we have marked these three places on the globe, _i.e._ the two poles and the equator, it is easy (Dante goes on) to see how the sun circles. I say then, that the heaven of the sun turns from west to east, not directly against the diurnal movement—that is, the movement which produces day and night—but obliquely against it, and so that its middle circle, which is similarly between its two poles, and on which is the body of the sun [_i.e._ the ecliptic], cuts in two opposite points the circle of the two first poles [the equator], that is, at the beginning of Aries and the beginning of Libra; it diverges from that circle in two arcs, one north and the other south. The highest points of these arcs are equally distant from the first circle in either direction, being 23 degrees and a little more; and the one summit is at the beginning of Cancer, and the other at the beginning of Capricorn. Therefore, when the sun is in the beginning of Aries, travelling in the mid-circle of the first poles [the equator], _Maria_ will see this sun circling the world, low down on the ground, or on the sea, like a mill-stone only half of which is seen, and day after day he will be seen to rise, like the screw of a press, until he has performed about ninety revolutions, or a little more. When these revolutions are accomplished, he will be as high in the sky above _Maria_ as he stands in the sky of the Garamantes at middle-tierce at the time of equal days and nights.[386] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [386] Adopting the reading of Dr. Moore: “nella mezza terra, alla mezza terza,” that is, “at the equator at middle-tierce.” See _Studies in Dante_ III. 107, 108. ------------------------------------------------------------------------