Every observation and incident of this voyage gave to Columbus proof of the correctness of his theory. The farther south he had gone along the African coast, the blacker and more barbarous he had found the people, the more intense the heat, and the more arid the soil. For many days they had sailed under an atmosphere so heated and oppressive that he doubted if his ships would not fall to pieces and their crews perish, if they did not speedily escape into some more temperate region. He had remarked in former voyages that at a hundred leagues west of the Azores there was a north-and-south line, to cross which was to find an immediate and grateful change in the skies above, in the waters beneath, and in the reviving temperature of the air. The course of the ships was altered directly westward, that this line might be reached, and the perils escaped which surrounded him and his people. It was when the line was crossed that he observed how his ships were gently ascending toward the skies. Not only were the expected changes experienced, but the North Star was seen at a new altitude; the needle of the compass varied a point, and the farther they sailed the more it turned to the northwest. However the wind blew, the sea was always smooth; and when the Island of Trinidad and the shores of the continent were reached, they entered a climate of exceeding mildness, where the fields and the foliage were “remarkably fresh and green, and as beautiful as the gardens of Valencia in April.” The people who crowded to the shore “in countless numbers” to gaze at these strange visitors were “very graceful in form, tall, and elegant in their movements, wearing their hair very long and smooth.” They were, moreover, of a whiter skin than any the Admiral had heretofore seen “in any of the Indies,” and were “shrewd, intelligent, and courageous.” The more he saw and the more he reflected, the more convinced he was that this country was “the most elevated in the world, and the nearest to the sky.” Where else could this majestic river, that rushed eagerly to this mighty struggle with the sea, come from, but from that loftiest peak of the globe, in the midst whereof was the inexhaustible fountain of the four great rivers of the earth? The faith or the fanaticism—whichever one may please to call it—of the devout cosmographer was never for an instant shadowed by a doubt. The human learning of all time had taught him that the shorter way to India must be across that western ocean which, he was persuaded, covered only one third of the globe and separated the western coast of Europe from the eastern coast of Asia. When it was taken for granted that his first voyage had proved this geographical theory to be the true one, then he could only understand that as in each successive voyage he had gone farther, so he was only getting nearer and nearer to the heart of the empire of the Great Khan.