It was generally agreed that Paradise is in Asia,[1211] although this was not a universal belief. Hermann the Dalmatian in 1143 asserted that there was “no mean opinion” that Paradise lies beyond “Amphitrites,” the ocean which encircles the earth from north to south, and that indications of its presence had been found both to eastward and to westward.[1212] Gervase said that it could be forcibly argued that the Garden lies beyond the Torrid Zone and is inaccessible to man, though he did not commit himself either for or against this theory.[1213] Robert Grosseteste speaks of theologians who would place Paradise under the equator.[1214] Otto of Freising’s words[1215] also seem to imply indirectly that the Garden is not in Asia, for Otto tells us that Alexander the Great conquered the entire Orient from Scythia to the ends of the earth. The same idea may be gathered from the _De situ terrarum_,[1216] which places the Seres and not Paradise in the farthest East, and also from the cycle of romances of Alexander, which relate how the Macedonian hero conquered all those Oriental regions where Paradise was usually supposed to be. The _mappaemundi_ of Henry of Mayence[1217] and of Lambert of St. Omer[1218] place Paradise on an island beyond the easternmost limits of the habitable world; but St. Brandan found the Saint’s Land of Promise (probably no other than Paradise) far out in the Western Ocean.[1219] As a matter of fact there was no uniformity of opinion regarding the geographical position of the Happy Land: St. Augustine, whose works were read during our period, had even gone so far as to state that Paradise had no real existence at all but was merely an allegorical conception.[1220] A child is not worried about the latitude and longitude of fairyland, and the average man of the Middle Ages was just as little worried about the exact whereabouts of the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, in one version of the Romance of Alexander a logical outcome of the conqueror’s travels in the Far East was recognized. In the _Iter ad Paradisum_[1221] Alexander is actually brought to the gates of Paradise. When he had subjugated India he came to a broad river which he understood to be the Ganges; embarking with five hundred men on a ship that happened to be at hand, he arrived at the end of a month before an immense city surrounded by a wall on all sides. Here, after various adventures, he learned from a Jew that this city was the place where the souls of the just were sojourning until the Last Judgment or, in other words, that it was the Terrestrial Paradise. JOURNEYS TO PARADISE