Mountain
mountain, no. 11
Listen to the story
The map closes its northern and eastern edges with bands of sea, but Africa ends in the south at a long chain of mountains that runs along the whole continent. No such range exists. Older research took it for the Atlas, stretched far beyond its real length; later research reads it as a sign that more land lay to the south, for which the narrow scroll had no room. The idea is old: the Greek historian Herodotus already describes a ridge of sandy hills from Egyptian Thebes to the Pillars of Heracles.