of the traveler, and finally buried his body under
its drifts when he laid down to die. A large army of fifty thousand
men, under a former Persian king, had been overwhelmed and destroyed
in this way, some years before, in some of the Egyptian deserts.
Alexander's soldiers had heard of this calamity, and they were
threatened sometimes with the same fate. They, however, at length
escaped all the dangers of the desert, and began to approach the green
and fertile land of the Oasis.

The change from the barren and dismal loneliness of the sandy plains
to the groves and the villages, the beauty and the verdure of the
Oasis, was delightful both to Alexander himself and to all his men.
The priests at the great temple of Jupiter Ammon received them all
with marks of great distinction and honor. The most solemn and
magnificent ceremonies were performed, with offerings, oblations, and
sacrifices. The priests, after conferring in secret with the god in
the temple, came out with the annunciation that Alexander was indeed
his son, and they paid him, accordingly, almost divine honors. He is
supposed to have bribed them to do this by presents and pay. Alexander
returned at length to Memphis, and in all his subsequent orders and
decrees he styled himself Alexander king, son of Jupiter Ammon.

[Illustration: A FOCUS.]

But, though Alexander was thus willing to impress his ignorant
soldiers with a mysterious veneration for his fictitious divinity, he
was not deceived himself on the subject; he sometimes even made his
pretensions to the divine character a subject of joke. For instance,
they one day brought him in too little fire in the _focus_. The focus,
or fire-place used in Alexander's day was a small metallic stand, on
which the fire was built. It was placed wherever convenient in the
tent, and the smoke escaped above. They had put upon the focus too
little fuel one day when they brought it in. Alexander asked the
officer to let him have either some wood or some frankincense; they
might consider him, he said, as a god or as a man, whichever they
pleased, but he wished to be treated either like one or the other.

On his return from the Oasis Alexander carried forward his plan of
building a city at the mouth of the Nile. He drew the plan, it is
said, with his own hands. He superintended the constructions, and
invited artisans and mechanics from all nations to come and reside in
it. They accepted the invitation in great numbers, and