the advice of the best architects, he chanced one night in his sleep to
see a wonderful vision; a gray-headed old man, of a venerable aspect,
appeared to stand by him, and pronounce these verses:

An island lies, where loud the billows roar,
Pharos they call it, on the Egyptian shore.

Alexander upon this immediately rose up and went to Pharos, which, at
that time, was an island lying a little above the Canobic mouth of the
river Nile, though it has now been joined to the main land by a mole.
As soon as he saw the commodious situation of the place, it being a
long neck of land, stretching like an isthmus between large lagoons and
shallow waters on one side, and the sea on the other, the latter at the
end of it making a spacious harbor, he said, Homer, besides his other
excellences, was a very good architect, and ordered the plan of a city
to be drawn out answerable to the place. To do which, for want of chalk,
the soil being black, they laid out their lines with flour, taking in
a pretty large compass of ground in a semicircular figure, and drawing
into the inside of the circumference equal straight lines from each end,
thus giving it something of the form of a cloak or cape. While he was
pleasing himself with his design, on a sudden an infinite number of
great birds of several kinds, rising like a black cloud out of the river
and the lake, came and devoured every morsel of the flour that had been
used in setting out the lines; at which omen even Alexander himself was
troubled, till the augurs restored his confidence again by telling him
it was a sign that the city he was about to build would not only abound
in all things within itself, but also be the nurse and feeder of many
nations.

The great battle of all that was fought with Darius, was not, as most
writers tell us, at Arbela, but at Gaugamela, which, in their language,
signifies the camel's house, forasmuch as one of their ancient kings
having escaped the pursuit of his enemies on a swift camel, in gratitude
to his beast settled him at this place, with an allowance of certain
villages and rents for his maintenance. It came to pass that in the
month Boedromion, about the beginning of the Feast of Mysteries at
Athens, there was an eclipse of the moon, the eleventh night after
which, the two armies being now in view of one another, Darius kept
his men in arms, and by torchlight took a general review of them. But
Alexander, while his soldiers slept, spen