She cries out to the sovereign of the gods for mercy. She refers to the burdens of the crops she annually bears; the wounds of the crooked plow and the barrow, which she voluntarily endures; and she calls on mighty Jove to put an end to the conflagration. And he does so. The rest of the world has been scarred and seared with the fire, but he spares and saves this island-land, this agricultural, civilized land, this land of the Tritons and Atlas; this "island of the innocent" of Job. And when the terrible convulsion was over, and the {p. 370} rash Phaëton dead and buried, Jove repairs, with especial care, "his own Arcadia." It must not be forgotten that Phaëton was the son of _Merops_; and Theopompus tells us that the people who inhabited Atlantis were the _Meropes_, the people of Merou. And the Greek traditions[1] show that the human race issued from _Upa-Merou_; and the Egyptians claim that their ancestors came from the _Island of Mero_; and among the Hindoos the land of the gods and the godlike men was _Meru_. And here it is, we are told, where in deep caves, and from the seas, receding under the great heat, the human race, crying out for mercy, with uplifted and blistered hands, survived the cataclysm. And Ovid informs us that this land, "with a mighty trembling, sank down a little" in the ocean, and the Gothic and Briton (Druid) legends tell us of a prolongation of Western Europe which went down at the same time. In the Hindoo legends the great battle between Rama and Ravana, the sun and the comet, takes place _on an island_, the Island of Lanka, and Rama builds a stone bridge sixty miles long to reach the island. In the Norse legends Asgard lies to the west of Europe; communication is maintained with it by the bridge Bifrost. Gylfe goes to visit Asgard, as Herodotus and Solon went to visit Egypt: the outside barbarian was curious to behold the great civilized land. There he asks many questions, as Herodotus and Solon did. He is told:[2] "The earth is round, and _without it round about lies the deep ocean_." [1. "Atlantis," p. 171. 2. The Fooling of Gylfe--The Creation of the World--The Younger Edda.] {p. 371} The earth is Ovid's earth; it is Asgard. It is an island, surrounded by the ocean: "And along the outer strand of that sea they gave lands for the giant-races to dwell in; and against the attack of restless giants they built a burg within the sea and around the earth." This proves that by "the earth" was not meant the whole globe; for here we see that around the outside margin of that ocean which encircled Asgard, the mother-country had given lands for colonies of the giant-races, the white, large, blue-eyed races of Northern and Western Europe, who were as "restless" and as troublesome then to their neighbors as they are now and will be to the end of time.