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Athanasius Kircher
2. Cedars on the plain of the
Nile
Kircher includes another extract from Moses bar Cepha's Geographica Arabica
Medicca, describing the plain of the Nile, a land of caves and abysses,
full of cedars.
Yes, these images, too, may have coalesced into the "cedarn cover," and the
caverns and caves of Kubla Khan.
Yet the selections that Lowes makes give us no sense that we are looking at
a coherent passage, the kind of narrative or description that might really
stick in Coleridge's mind.
The idea of a land full of cedars, for instance,
is hardly the kind of striking visual image that might have flared up in his
mind, and then stayed with him.
Ditto for a land full of caves and great
abysses ("est enim tota hae terra intus cava, et abyssos habens ingentes").
Yes, maybe. But the association is, at best, cross-lingual, and mainly
verbal.
Here are Lowes' translations of these snippets:
Text
...full of cedars, plena Cedris, ... |
 Other sources
William Bartram |