and almost incredible dissipation
of the ancient world perhaps reached its acme. Like Alexandria,
Antioch was furiously addicted to horseracing.

Further down the coast Sidon produced its famous glass, and Tyre its
famous purple dye. Inland from these lay the handsome city of
Damascus, famed for its gardens and for its work in fine linen. Still
farther south was Hierosolyma, or Jerusalem, of which it is perhaps
not necessary here to give details. Its population was reckoned at a
quarter of a million.

On the coast of Egypt, after you had caught sight, some thirty miles
away, of the first glint from the huge marble lighthouse standing 400
feet high upon the island of Pharos, you arrived at Alexandria, the
second city of the Roman world and the great emporium for the trade of
Egypt, of all Eastern Africa as far as Zanzibar, and of India. From it
came the papyrus paper, delicate glass-work, muslin, embroidered
cloths, and such additions to luxury as roses out of season.
Alexandria, built like Antioch on a rectangular plan, with its chief
streets 100 feet in width, contained a Jewish quarter, controlled by a
Jewish headman and a Sanhedrin; an Egyptian quarter; and a Greek
quarter, in which were the splendid buildings of the Library with its
600,000 volumes, and the University, devoted to all branches of
learning and science--including medicine--and provided with botanical
and zoological gardens. Here also were the temple of Caesar and the
fine harbour buildings. Its population, exceedingly money-loving and
pleasure-loving, and comprising representatives of every Oriental
people, may have numbered three-quarters of a million. The circuit of
the city was about thirteen miles, and its chief street some four
miles in length.

[Illustration: FIG. 8.--EMBLEM OF ANTIOCH.]

Behind it lay Egypt, with its irrigation and traffic canals kept in
good order; with its monuments in far better preservation than
now--the pyramids, for example, being still coated with their smooth
marble sides, and not to be mounted by the present steps, from which
the marble has been torn; with its rich corn-lands, its convict mines
and quarries, the Siberia of antiquity; with its string of towns along
the Nile and its seven or, eight millions of inhabitants--mostly
speaking Coptic--and full of strange superstitions and peculiar
worship of animals.

Coming westward we reach the prosperous Cyrene, and then, by the
rather out-of-the-world Bight of Tripo