spanned the earth, and sustained the heavenly bodies. It might
rest on the distant mountains, or be borne on the shoulders of an
Atlas; or the whole cosmic scheme might be laid on the back of a
gigantic elephant, and--if you pressed--the elephant might stand
on the hard shell of a tortoise. But you were not encouraged to
press.

The idea of the vault had come from Babylon, the first home of
science. No furnaces thickened that clear atmosphere, and the
heavy-robed priests at the summit of each of the seven-staged
temples were astronomers. Night by night for thousands of years
they watched the stars and planets tracing their undeviating
paths across the sky. To explain their movements the
priest-astronomers invented the solid firmament. Beyond the known
land, encircling it, was the sea, and beyond the sea was a range
of high mountains, forming another girdle round the earth. On
these mountains the dome of the heavens rested, much as the dome
of St. Paul's rests on its lofty masonry. The sun travelled
across its under-surface by day, and went back to the east during
the night through a tunnel in the lower portion of the vault. To
the common folk the priests explained that this framework of the
world was the body of an ancient and disreputable goddess. The
god of light had slit her in two, "as you do a dried fish," they
said, and made the plain of the earth with one half and the blue
arch of the heavens with the other.

So Chaldaea lived out its 5000 years without discovering the
universe. Egypt adopted the idea from more scientific Babylon.
Amongst the fragments of its civilisation we find representations
of the firmament as a goddess, arching over the earth on her