At the end of four months he reached Marseilles, resolved to embark for the Indies. At the sight of the raging sea, however, his brave and faithful servants were seized with an epidemic, called by the physicians stay-at-homeativeness in Hebrew, and the headache in the feet in Latin. To the great regret of these honest people, they were forced to quit their good master and remain quietly on shore, wrapped in their warm blankets, while Carlino, embarked on a frail bark, braved the winds and waves. Nothing can stop a heart hurried away by passion. The prince roamed over Egypt, India, and China, going from province to province, from city to city, from house to house, and from cabin to cabin, everywhere seeking the original of the fair image that was engraved on his heart, but in vain. He saw women of all colors and shades, brown, blond, olive, sandy, white, yellow, red, and black, but he did not see her whom he loved. Always seeking and never finding, Carlino at last reached the end of the world. There was nothing more before him but the ocean and the sky. His hopes were at an end; his dream had vanished. As he was walking despairingly up and down the seashore, he spied an old man warming himself in the sun. The prince asked him if there was nothing beyond these waves that stretched as far as the eye could reach. "No," said the old man; "no one has ever discovered anything in this shoreless ocean, or, at least, those who have ventured on it have never returned to tell the story. I remember, however, having heard the old men among us say, when I was a child," he added, "that their fathers had told them that yonder, a long, long way off, far beyond the horizon, was the Island of the Fates; but woe to the imprudent man who approaches these merciless fairies: he is struck with death at their sight." "What does that matter?" cried Carlino. "I would face death itself to gain my wishes." A bark lay by the strand. The prince sprang on board and unfurled the sail. The wind, which blew off the shore, hurried forward the frail craft, the land disappeared, and Carlino found himself in the midst of the ocean. In vain he gazed about him; there was nothing but the sea--the sea everywhere; in vain the bark bounded over the foaming waves with the speed of lightning, like a steed with mane floating on the wind; there was nothing but the sea--the sea everywhere. Billows followed billows, the hours passed one after another, the day declined, and the solitude and silence seemed to deepen around Carlino, when all at once he uttered a cry; he saw a black speck in the distance. At the same instant the bark, shooting ahead like an arrow, struck upon the sand at the foot of huge rocks, which raised their dark summits, notched and worn by time, to the skies. Fate had thrown Carlino upon that strand from which none had ever returned.