can or farmer, to whom the taxes were let by auction; but such
was the importance of Egypt that the same jealousy which made them think
its government too great to be trusted to a man of high rank, made them
think its revenues too large to be trusted to one farmer. The smaller
branches of the Egyptian revenue were, however, let out as usual, and
even the collection of the customs of the whole of the Red Sea was not
thought too much to trust to one citizen. Annius Plocamus, who farmed
them in this reign, had a little fleet under his command to collect them
with; and, tempted either by trade or plunder, his ships were sometimes
as far out as the south coast of Arabia. On one occasion one of his
freedmen in the command of a vessel was carried by a north wind into
the open ocean, and after being fifteen days at sea found himself on the
coast of Ceylon. This island was not then wholly new to the geographers
of Egypt and Europe. It had been heard of by the pilots in the voyage of
Alexander the Great; Eratosthenes had given it a place in his map; and
it had often been reached from Africa by the sailors of the Red Sea in
wickerwork boats made of papyrus; but this was the first time it had
been visited by a European.

In the neighbourhood of the above-mentioned road from Koptos to Berenice
were the porphyritic quarries and the emerald mines, which were briskly
worked under the Emperor Claudius. The mountain was now named the
Claudian Mountain.

As this route for trade became known, the geographers began to
understand the wide space that separates India from Africa. Hitherto,
notwithstanding a few voyages of discovery, it had been the common
opinion that Persia was in the neighbourhood of Ethiopia. The Greeks had
thought that the Nile rose in India, in opposition to the Jews, who said
that it was the river Gibon of the garden of Eden, which made a circuit
round the whole of the land of Cush, or Ethiopia. The names of these
countries got misused accordingly; and even after the mistake was
cleared up we sometimes find Ethiopia called India.

The Egyptian chemists were able to produce very bright dyes by methods
then unknown to Greece or Rome. They dipped the cloth first into a
liquid of one colour, called a mordant, to prepare it, and then into
a liquid of a second colour; and it came out dyed of a third colour,
unlike either of the former. The ink with which they wrote the name of
a deceased person on the mummy-cloth, like our o