Bay of Palma

In the far-off days of the last crusades, a knight of Majorca in the Mediterranean Sea stood on the shore of his island home gazing over the water.

Raymond Llull, from the beach of Palma Bay, where he had played as a boy, now looked out southward, where boats with their tall, brickish brown sails ran in from the great sea.

The knight was dreaming of Africa, which lay away to the south of his island.

He had heard many strange stories from the sailors about the life in the harbors of that mysterious African seaboard, but he had never once in his thirty-six years set eyes upon one of its ports.