There is no good reason for discrediting so many of the old maps. Their makers sometimes went wrong; but they tried to be accurate and would hardly, through a century or two, persist in making the northern island the greater one unless it was at first really so. Of course the most natural solution of the difficulty is that Corvo’s border has sunk or the sea has risen over it, completely drowning the territory which made the lobes or curved outline of the island form in the medieval maps and leaving only above water its rocky backbone, with the crater for a nucleus. Apparently those lobes and their contents are just what might be most profitably dredged for and dived after. Perhaps the island has not greatly changed since Mr. Henriques wrote his little sketch of it in the sixth decade of the last century: The first part of the ride to it [the crater] is through steep and narrow lanes walled in with stones. Over those walls you can sometimes see the country right and left, which is divided into small and well-cultivated compartments by low stone walls. These small fields form narrow terraces, one above another, looking from the sea like steps in the hills. An hour’s ride brings you to an open mountain covered with heath where browse flocks of sheep and hogs, and about an hour and a half more to the crater on the summit, now a quiet green valley, with a dark, still pond in the center.... The Corvoites, particularly the women, are a happy and industrious people and have strong and healthy constitutions. The men in trade evince a remarkable shrewdness, proverbial among the other Azorians, but in private life their manners are simple and unassuming.... They are like a large family of little less than a thousand members, all living in the only village on the island.[288] CHAPTER XII THE SUNKEN LAND OF BUSS AND OTHER PHANTOM ISLANDS Beside those legendary Atlantic islands that may cast some light on visits of white men to America before Columbus or have been at some time linked therewith by speculation or tradition--notably Antillia and its consorts, Brazil, Man or Mayda, Green Island, Estotiland and Drogio, the Island or Islands of St. Brendan, and the Island of the Seven Cities--there are numerous others, quite a swarm indeed, excusing Ptolemy’s and Edrisi’s extravagant estimate of 27,000. Sometimes, but not always, they are of more recent origin and are explainable in various ways. Several are linked to the idea of volcanic destruction or seismic engulfment. Of course the colossal and classical instance of Atlantis comes first into mind, it being the earliest as well as in every way the most imposing. Most likely the well-known story, repeated, if not originated, by Plato, developed naturally, as we have seen, from the insistent need to account for the obstructive weedy wastes of the Sargasso Sea beyond the Azores and recurrent facts of minor cataclysms among them.