And now the coming sun shone in unclouded brilliancy over the lovely gardens, that extended for many a mile beyond the marble suburbs of the Egyptian metropolis, the mightiest work of that famed conqueror, who, building it in the very wantonness of pride, deemed it, perchance, the slightest of his wonderful achievements. The roads which issued from that great city, circulating, like arteries from the human heart, wealth and prosperity to the extremities of her dominion, wandered among brakes and thickets of the coolest verdure; nor had the almost tropic sun of those now scorched and sterile climes the power to pierce the embowering foliage, which covered those magnificent highways with a continuous vault of living freshness. The glossy leaves of the dark fig, and the broad canopy of the aspiring palms, towering a hundred feet aloft to bask in the full glare of day above his head—a pavement of the milk-white marble of Canopus, cool as the snows of Atlas beneath his feet—and the waters, drawn from the distant Nile, glancing and murmuring in their marble channels on either side the highway—the wayfarer might travel on his path, enjoying the breezy coolness of more temperate climes, although he stood beneath the intolerable brightness of an Egyptian sky. Far in the depths of those fairy gardens, girdled, as it were, by groves of almost impenetrable richness, watered by a hundred fountains, drawn through their secret canals, from the one mighty river, which was to Egypt what the soul is to the human frame, adorned by luxury that could be made to minister happiness to the living, stood the mansion of the dead, the mausoleum of the Ptolemies, the palace-tomb of Cleopatra. Portico above portico, gallery over gallery, it towered a pile of snow-white alabaster, more ample in its vast accommodations, more splendid in its sculptures, more rich in its materials than the proudest dwelling of a line of kings. The lower stories of the building, surrounded by triple colonnades of Corinthian architecture, were constructed of gigantic blocks of stone fitted and dovetailed, as it were, into each other, with a firmness that might well endure forever. But in these enormous walls there was no opening—door nor window, nor the smallest crevice, to admit the blessed light of day to those huge receptacles of the meanest relics of mortality.