Sisimithres speaking not in Greek but in Ethiopian for all the people to hear ordered Hydaspes to submit to the will of the gods who had saved the two young lovers and who did not approve of human sacrifice and exhorted him to end human sacrifices forever. So Hydaspes asked the people to observe the will of the gods and to sanction the marriage of Theagenes and Chariclea. This they did. Then Hydaspes consecrated the two as priest and priestess of the Sun and the Moon and on their heads he placed the mitres which he and Persinna had worn as symbols of their offices. Thus was fulfilled the oracle: “In regions torrid shall arrive at last; There shall the gods reward their pious vows, And snowy chaplets bind their dusky brows.” Then a great procession escorted them to Meroe there to fulfill the more mystic parts of wedlock. In this brief re-telling of Heliodorus’ long story, certain striking features of his structure appear. Geography and ethnography are important as in the other novelists. The eastern basin of the Mediterranean is the center of the adventures, the district which for centuries was the scene of the conflict for power between many nations. As in Xenophon, many geographical details are given, often with little accuracy.[110] As Maillon points out, imagination and fantasy falsify the historical and geographical allusions. Heliodorus gathers everything that can satisfy the taste for the strange and the marvellous. At a time when the critical spirit was so little developed in the historians, a writer of romance would naturally produce marvellous narratives and vague descriptions. Heliodorus confuses the Ethiopia of Herodotus with that of the Ptolemies and imagines an Ethiopian empire which did not exist during the domination of Egypt by the Persians.[111] As in Chariton, the superiority of the Greeks over the barbarians is part of the author’s faith. In the development of the plot Heliodorus makes his set more unified, less cinematic than Xenophon had done. The scene of action lies almost entirely in Egypt with a shift to Ethiopia for the final climax. This Egyptian set is to be sure varied by different local scenes: the Nile, an island village in its delta, towns such as Chemmis, Memphis, Syene and Philae, the battle-fields of Bessa and Elephantine, but nearly the whole plot develops in Egypt. The exceptions are in the sub-plot presented in Cnemon’s narrative of his life-history which is laid in Athens, and in Calasiris’ long account of his visit to Delphi. These however are clearly set off as insets in the unity of the Egyptian scene.