ica, and upon that soil Thebes with its hundred gates, more splendid
than the most splendid of all the existing cities of the world; Thebes,
the pride of old Egypt, the first metropolis of arts and sciences, and
the mysterious cradle of so many doctrines which still rule mankind in
different shapes, though it has long forgotten their source. There I saw
Syria with its hundred cities, every city a nation, and every nation
with an empire's might. Baalbec, with its gigantic temples, the very
ruins of which baffle the imagination of man, as they stand like
mountains of carved rocks in the desert where for hundreds of miles not
a stone is to be found, and no river flows, offering its tolerant back
to carry a mountain's weight upon, and yet there they stand, those
gigantic ruins; and as we glance at them with astonishment, though we
have mastered the mysterious elements of nature, and know the
combination of levers, and how to catch the lightning, and to command
the power of steam and of compressed air, and how to write with the
burning fluid out of which the thunderbolt is forged, and how to drive
the current of streams up the mountain's top, and how to make the air
shine in the night like the light of the sun, and how to dive to the
bottom of the deep ocean, and how to rise up to the sky--though we know
all this, and many things else, still, looking at the temples of
Baalbec, we cannot forbear to ask what people of giants was that, which
could do what neither the efforts of our skill nor the ravaging hand of
unrelenting time can undo, through thousands of years. And then I saw
the dissolving picture of Nineveh, with its ramparts now covered with
mountains of sand, where Layard is digging up colossal winged bulls,
huge as a mountain, and yet carved with the nicety of a cameo; and then
Babylon, with its wonderful walls; and Jerusalem, with its unequalled
temple; Tyrus, with its countless fleets; Arad, with its wharves; and
Sidon, with its labyrinth of work-shops and factories; and Ascalon, and
Gaza, and Beyrout, and farther off Persepolis, with its world of
palaces.

All these passed before my eyes as they have been, and again they passed
as they now are, with no trace of their ancient greatness, but here and
there a ruin, and everywhere the desolation of tombs. With all their
splendour, power, and might, they vanished like a bubble, or like the
dream of a child, leaving but for a moment a drop of cold sweat upon the
sleeper'