'Asgard? What is Asgard?'

The beauty looked at the giant for further instructions.

'The City of the immortal Gods,' interposed the old warrior, hastily
and sternly, to the lady.

'The city of God is in heaven,' said Philammon to the interpreter,
turning his head away from those. gleaming, luscious, searching
glances.

His answer was received with a general laugh by all except the
leader, who shrugged his shoulders.

'It may as well be up in the skies as up the Nile. We shall be just
as likely, I believe, to reach it by flying, as by rowing up this
big ditch. Ask him where the river comes from, Pelagia.'

Pelagia obeyed .... and thereon followed a confusion worse
confounded, composed of all the impossible wonders of that mythic
fairyland with which Philammon had gorged himself from boyhood in
his walks with the old monks, and of the equally trustworthy
traditions which the Goths had picked up at Alexandria. There was
nothing which that river did not do. It rose in the Caucasus.
Where was the Caucasus? He did not know. In Paradise--in Indian
Aethiopia--in Aethiopian India. Where were they? He did not know.
Nobody knew. It ran for a hundred and fifty days' journey through
deserts where nothing but flying serpents and satyrs lived, and the
very lions' manes were burnt off by the heat....