There is something magical in seeing the land rise from the depths of the sea. Christopher Columbus, surrounded by a mutinous crew, preparing to return to Europe without having attained the object of his voyage, perceives a small light upon a beach which the darkness had hidden from him. The flight of the birds had guided him to America; the gleam from the hut of a savage reveals to him the presence of a new world. Columbus must have experienced the sort of feeling which the Scriptures attribute to the Creator when, having out of nothing brought forth the world, He saw that His work was good: "And God saw that it was good[453]." Columbus created a world. One of the first lives of the Genoese pilot is that which Giustiniani[454], when editing a Hebrew psalter, placed in the form of a "note" at the foot of the psalm, _Cœli enarrant gloriam Dei._[455] Vasco da Gama must have marvelled no less when, in 1498, he approached the coast of Malabar. Thereupon all things change on the face of the globe: a new revelation of nature is given; the curtain which for thousands of ages has concealed one part of the earth is raised, discovering the birthplace of the sun, the spot whence he issues each morning "as a bridegroom, as a giant[456];" we see in all its nudity the wise and brilliant East, whose mysterious history was intermixed with the journeys of Pythagoras, the conquests of Alexander, the memory of the Crusades, and whose perfumes came to us across the plains of Arabia and the seas of Greece. Europe sent to the East a poet to salute it: the Swan of Tagus made his sad and beautiful voice heard upon the shores of India; Camoëns[457] borrowed their lustre, their fame and their misfortune; he left them only their riches. When Gonzalo Villo, Camoëns' maternal grandfather, discovered a portion of the Archipelago of the Azores, he ought, had he foreseen the future, to have reserved for himself a concession of six feet of ground to cover the bones of his grandson.