Page:The book of wonder voyages (1919).djvu/237

 NOTES

are found in the earliest of all literatures the Egyptian. In a papyrus at the Hermitage collection at Petrograd there is an account of a shipwrecked sailor who visited an isle which was inhabited by huge serpents big enough to carry the sailor in his mouth. This has been given by M. Maspero in his Contes populaires de l'Egypte ancienne, Paris, 1882; and by Prof. Flinders Petrie in the first series of his Egyptian Tales, pp. 81-96. The Odyssey itself may be regarded as the grandest specimen of this genre of literature, which is even represented among the books of the Bible by the story of Jonah. Among the Jatakas again there are one or two which would seem to show that the Indian imagination also took its flight among islands that never were on sea. The Wonder Voyage had become a convention of Greek Literature by the time that Lucian adopted it as the work of his satirical Vera Historia, which itself became the type of a whole series of philosophic Wonder Voyages which culminated in Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire Comique de la Lune, and Swift's Gulliver. These in their turn were parodied by the redoubtable Baron Munchausen. Mr. Rider Haggard has practically revived the genre in the nineteenth-century form of novels of adventure.

At the root of the whole idea of a Wonder Voyage is the scepticism with regard to travelers' tales and sailors' yarns which is current among all peoples. Curiously enough, the book of Marco Polo, which was regarded by his contemporaries as mainly a Wonder Voyage, has proved to be quite a sane and critical account of Mid and Eastern Asia. Yet "Sir John Mandeville" was evidently poking fun at him in 215