Speculation was rife as to what lay beyond the equatorial zone and in those mysterious parts of the earth of which man had no knowledge. Rumors and conjectures of an austral continent and of antipodal regions figure widely in the geographical literature of the age. A fourth continent beyond the equatorial ocean (or Mare Rubrum) is shown on all the Beatus maps. It is represented as a strip of land along the southernmost edge of the earth (see Figs. 2 and 4, pp. 69 and 123, above). A legend, taken from Isidore, informs us on the St. Sever map that “In addition to the three parts of the world, there is a fourth part beyond the ocean in the midst of the south and unknown to us on account of the heat of the sun. Within its confines the antipodeans are fabulously said to dwell.”[699] The Osma Beatus map locates the _skiapodes_, or sun-shade-footed men, here (see Fig. 4). Confusion between true antipodal regions on the opposite side of the world and an austral continent lying south of the equator was not uncommon in antiquity and during the Middle Ages.[700] Belief in the latter did not necessarily involve belief in a spherical earth, and it has been argued that the Roman cartographers (whose maps may have inspired Beatus) showed such a fourth continent south of the equator, even though they did not deem the question of the sphericity of the world worthy of serious consideration. The Beatus maps themselves may easily be reconciled with an implicit belief in a flat world disk. While this may be true of the Beatus maps, it cannot be said of the _mappamundi_ of Lambert of St. Omer or of references to the antipodes elsewhere in the literature of our period where it is impossible to question the conviction in the cartographers’ or writers’ minds that the earth is a sphere.