THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 775
than Columbus of finding signs and marvels, he hallucinated the song of nightingales in the forests of Haiti, as transfigured ‘as our forebears must have heard it and as it
will only return for the Blessed one day’, he sensed the air of Paradise in the vicinity of the mouth of the Orinoco, and Paradise itself beyond the Orinoco delta. All this
in the midst of the most exact observation, with masterly orientation by means of the astrolabe, establishing an equatorial current and also curious connections between
the degree of longitude and the climate. But the famous letter from Haiti of October 1498 to the Spanish monarchs contains the following passage about the Orinoco
(cf. C. Jane, Selected Documents, Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, II, 1933, p. 7f.): ‘I say that if this river does not come from Paradise then it comes from
a distant, hitherto unknown land in the south. But I am much more convinced that the earthly paradise lies there, and I cite the proofs and authorities which I have stated
above.’ These proofs referred to the fact that Columbus believed he had reached the original point in the east where the first sunrise occurred after the Creation. But at
the same time this point marked the peak of the earth, the ‘apex terrae’, related to a mystical concept, the ‘apex mentis’, at which, in the opinion of the scholastics, the
unfallen part of the human soul comes into contact with God on high. Columbus did indeed write to the Spanish monarchs of the globe coming to a peak at the point he
had reached in the east, and that it was consequently closer to heaven, ‘for this elevation consists only in that most excellent part of the earth, from which the first ray of
light emerged at the moment of Creation, namely from the first point in the east. The earthly paradise lies there from which the great rivers flow down, no mountains with
sheer and rugged slopes, but an elevation on the globe (el colmo ò pezón de la pera),* towards which even at a great distance the surface of the oceans gradually
rises’. Humboldt comments on this (Kritische Untersuchungen II, 1852, p. 44, note): ‘It is possible that Columbus wanted to allude to a systematic idea of the Arabian
geographers, to a passage in Abulfeda where he says that the land of Lanka (Ceylon), where the dome of the earth or Aryn is to be found, is situated at the equator
midway between the western and eastern boundary of the earth.’ But apart from the analogy of the mystical summit of the earth with the mystical apex mentis, the
actual Olympus image of Paradise is also far older, it has its origin (for Columbus a legitimate one) in the Bible itself. The Garden of Eden had been sought by the
Yahwist in the upper reaches of the two rivers Euphrates
* ‘The top or stalk of the pear.’