"May the Almighty Lord bear witness! The Earth beneath our feet is a perfect sphere. After calculations by myself and the great scholar Toscanelli, the Earth's circumference should be 12,000 to 13,000 kilometers. And the length of the Eurasian continent is roughly 8,000 kilometers... Therefore, the brand-new sea route from the westernmost edge of Europe to the easternmost edge of Asia is only 4,000 to 5,000 kilometers!"
"May the merciful Lord bless us! The continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa are the only land created by the Lord. And scattered among these lands are countless islands... So long as we set out from the Canary Islands, the westernmost part of the Kingdom of Castile, pass by Antillia, which Aristotle mentioned, then sail at most another 3,000 kilometers and cross the legendary Saint Brendan's Island midway, we will be able to reach the easternmost edge of the Eurasian continent—that is, the island of Cipangu, Japan, of which Marco Polo spoke!"
"And farther west from Cipangu lie rich lands flowing with wealth! To the far north is Cathay, land of milk and honey; in the middle is Seres, where silk covers the ground; to the south is India, filled with spices!..."
In Abencerrajes Hall of Alhambra Palace, eight beehive-like pendentive columns hung down from the painted ceiling, tracing dreamlike right angles and arcs. This strange aesthetic design came precisely from the right-angle theorem of the ancient sage Pythagoras, and had then been carried to even greater brilliance by Arab architects skilled in structure.
At that moment, daylight fell from above, refracted through the beehive dome and sprinkled over the faces of the assembled great nobles and scholars, revealing different subtle expressions, like different colors of refracted light. Before this crowd of varied thoughts, the "navigator" Columbus looked excited, gesturing nonstop before the