e and heathen Persia.
"To see the monks" she wanders through Osrhoeene, comes to Haran, near
which was "the home of Abraham and the farm of Laban and the well of
Rachel," to the environs of Nisibis and Ur of the Chaldees, lost to the
Roman Empire since Julian's defeat; thence by "Padan-aram" back to
Antioch. When crossing the Euphrates the pilgrims saw the river "rush
down in a torrent like the Rhone, but greater," and on the way home by
the great military road, then untravelled by Saracens, between Tarsus
and the Bosphorus, Silvia makes a passing note on the strength and
brigand habits of the Isaurian mountaineers, who in the end saved
Christendom from the very Arabs with whom our pilgrim couples them.

Again, Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the time of Justinian, is at the end,
as Silvia is at the beginning, of a definite period, the period of the
Christian empire of Rome, while still "Caesarean" and not merely
Byzantine, "patrician" and not papal, "consular" and not Carolingian.

And contemporary with Cosmas are two of the chief among the earlier or
primitive pilgrims, Theodosius and Antoninus the Martyr. The first-named
indulges in a few excursions--in fancy--beyond his known ground of
Palestine, going as far east as Susa and Babylon, "where no one can live
for the serpents and hippo-centaurs," and south to the Red Sea and its
two arms, "of which the eastern is called the Persian Gulf," and the
western or Arabian runs up to the "thirteen cities of Arabia destroyed
by Joshua,"--but, for the rest, his knowledge is not extensive or
peculiar. Antoninus of Placentia, on the other hand, is very
interesting, a sort of older Mandeville, who mixes truth and its
opposite in fairly even proportions and with a sort of resolute
partiality to favourite legends.

He tells us how Tripolis has been ruined by the late earthquake (July 9,
551); how silk and various woven stuffs are sold at Tyre; how the
pilgrims scratched their names on the relics shewn in Cana of
Galilee--"and here I, sinner that I am, did inscribe the names of my
parents"; how Bethshan, the metropolis of Galilee, "is placed on a
hill," though really in the plain; how the Samaritans hate Christians
and will hardly speak to them; "and beware of spitting in their country,
for they will never forgive it"; how "the dew comes down upon Hermon the
Little, as David says, 'The dew of Hermon that fell upon the hill of
Zion'"; how nothing can live or even float in the Dead Sea, "b