Wow, thankyou Lime.
Pure genius that last post.
That must have taken quite some effort, and certainly had me laughing. Well, I think you've conclusively proved what we all knew. This passage can not be intended to be taken literally and the Bible still be accurate. It was also not meant to refer just to the known countries. If it was more 'as in a deam', why do the mountaineering in the first place?
My prefered explanation is the flat Earth one. I'm pretty happy with the idea that the Jews and just about everybody else believed in a flat earth as given in my Encyclopedia Judaica.
This is one of the subjects where I've never heard the fundamentalist rationalisation of though.