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That this was a sea of artifice Roberto had long suspected, 
and it explained why down here cosmographers had always 
imagined creatures contrary to nature, who walked with their 
feet in the air.
   To be sure, the artists of the courts of Europe, who built 
grottoes encrusted with lapis lazuli, fountains operated by 
secret pumps, had not inspired nature in her invention of the 
lands of those seas; any more than it was the nature of the 
Unknown Pole that inspired those artists. The fact is, 
Roberto said to himself, both Art and Nature are fond of 
machination, and that is simply what the atoms themselves do 
when they aggregate in this way or in another. Is there any 
more artificed wonder than the tortoise, work of a goldsmith 
of thousands and thousands of years past, who fashioned this 
Achilles' shield patiently nielloed, imprisoning a serpent 
with its feet?
   At home, he continued his musing, everything that is 
vegetal life has the fragility of a leaf with its veins and 
of the flower that lasts the space of a morning; whereas 
here the vegetal is like leather, a thick and oily matter, 
a scaly sheath prepared to resist the days of mad suns. Every 
leaf -- in these lands where the wild inhabitants surely do 
not know the art of metals or of clays -- could become 
instrument, blade, goblet, spatula, and the petals of the 
flowers are of lacquer. Everything vegetal here is strong, 
while everything animal is weak, to judge by the birds I have 
seen, spun from varicolored glass, while at home we have the 
strength of the horse, the stubborn sturdiness of the ox....
   And what of fruits? At home the complexion of the apple, 
ruddy with health, denotes its friendly taste, whereas the 
livid mushroom betrays its hidden venom. Here, on the 
contrary, as I saw yesterday and during the voyage of the 
Amaryllis, there is the witty play of opposites: the 
mortuary white of one fruit guarantees vivid sweetness, 
whereas the more russet fruits may secrete lethal philters.
   With the spyglass he studied the shore and glimpsed 
between land and sea some climbing roots that seemed to 
leap towards the open sky, and clumps of oblong fruits that 
revealed their treacly ripeness by appearing as unripe 
berries. And he recognized on some other palms coconuts 
yellow as summer melons, whereas he knew they would proclaim 
their maturity by turning the color of dead earth.
   So to live in this terrestrial Beyond -- he had to remember,
if he was to come to terms with its nature -- he should proceed
in the direction opposite to his instinct, for instinct was 
probably a discovery of the first giants, who tried to adapt 
themselves to the nature of the other side of the globe. 
Believing the most natural nature was that to which they had 
become adapted, they thought nature naturally born to adapt 
herself to them. Hence they were sure the sun was small, as 
it seemed to them, whereas certain leaves of grass were 
immense, if they looked at them through eyes close to the 
ground.
   To live in the Antipodes, then, means reconstructing 
instinct, knowing how to make a marvel nature and nature a 
marvel, to learn how unstable the world is, which in one half 
follows certain laws, and in the other half the opposite of 
those laws.