30 GEOGRAPHY OF THE HOMERIC PERIOD. [CHAP. And in our own days the experiences of Du Chaillu, Schweinfurth and Stanley in the course of their travels in Central Africa leave no doubt of their existence. We may conclude therefore that the Pygmies of Homer were a real people, and that their smallncss of stature caused them to be regarded as fit antagonists for the cranes. The Egyptians might easily have heard of these, and through them the story may have found its way into Greece. Still more interesting are the evidences which we discover of a faint acquaintance with the wonders of a northern an^wghtTof clime in certain passages in Homer, which can Northern hardly be otherwise explained than as referring to the long summer days and winter nights of the lands in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle. Ulysses, when narrating his visit to Telepylus, the city of the Lacstrygones, which he reached in the course of his wanderings, describes it as a place, "where herdsman hails herdsman as he drives in his flock, and the other who drives forth answers the call. There might a sleepless man have earned a double wage, the one as neatherd, the other shepherding white flocks: so near are the outgoings of the night and of the day1." The meaning of the last clause, which at first sight is somewhat enigmatical, becomes clear if for 'night and day' we substitute 'darkness and dawn/ or 'sunset and sunrise* : in fact, we could hardly wish for a better paraphrase of it than is given in Tacitus' description of the shortness of the summer nights in the north of Britain — ' finem atque initium lucis exiguo discrimine internoscasV No sooner does Night appear, than Day reappears ; and consequently there need be no intermission of work, such as the darkness causes. Again, the long unrelieved nights of an arctic winter seem to be described in the account which the poet gives of the Cimmerians, a people who dwell by the Ocean stream, which here we meet once more at the opposite extremity of the earth. The hero's ship, we are told, " came to the limits of the world, to the deep-flowing Oceanus. There is the land and the city of the els ri AT? rd feu rft A^TTTOV, Mw 4 Ne&os £«?, 08 KOL\ Xfyowai ro?s HiryM frwipev- o* yfy itrri roOro ftMos, dXV ton KIT*, r^v fajfaav 7^0? ju«pii> ph, fovcp X^yerai, Kal aflroi rat oi ftnroi, r/o&ryXoStfrai 5' «/