Not far from the Riphean Mountains two men with long tunics and round bonnets are represented in the attitude of fighting; one brandishes a sword, the other a kind of club, and the legend tells us, "The customs of the people of the interior of Scythia are somewhat wild; they inhabit caves; they drink the blood of the slain by sucking their wounds; they pride themselves on the number of people they have slain--not to have slain any one in combat is reckoned disgraceful." Near the river that empties itself into the Caspian Sea it is written: "This river comes from the infernal regions; it enters the sea after having descended from mountains covered with wood, and it is there, they say, that the mouth of hell opens." To the south of this river, and to the north of Hyrcania, is represented a monster having the body of a man, the head, tail, and feet of a bull: this is the Minotaur. Further on are the mountains of Armenia, and the ark of Noah on one of its plateaux. Here, too, is seen a large tiger, and we read: "The tiger, when he sees that he has been deprived of his young, pursues the ravisher precipitately; but the latter, hastening away on his swift horse, throws a mirror to him and is safe." Elsewhere appears Lot's wife changed into a pillar of salt; the lynx who can see through a stone wall; the river Lethe; so called because all who drink of it forget everything. Numerous other details might be mentioned, but enough has been said to show the curious nature and exceeding interest of this map, in which matters of observation and imagination are strangely mixed. Another very curious geographical document of that epoch is the map of the world of the _Grandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis_. This belongs to the fourteenth century. The capitals here too are represented by edifices. The Mediterranean is a vertical canal, which goes from the Columns of Hercules to Jerusalem. The Caspian Sea communicates with it to the north, and the Red Sea to the south-east, by the Nile. It preserves the same position for Paradise and for the land of Gog and Magog that we have seen before. The geography of Europe is very defective. Britannia and Anglia figure as two separate islands, being represented off the west coast of Spain, with Allemania and Germania, also two distinct countries, to the north. The ocean is represented as round the whole, and the various points of the compass are represented by different kinds of winds on the outside. [Illustration: FIG. 49.--COSMOGRAPHY OF ST. DENIS.]