perished of hunger. Moreover the ground was often heavy and difficult, full of hills and narrow valleys, requiring the personal efforts of every man to push the cars and waggons at particular junctures; efforts in which the Persian courtiers of Cyrus, under his express orders, took zealous part, toiling in the dirt with their ornamented attire.[68] After these thirteen days of hardship, they reached Pylæ; near the entrance of the cultivated territory of Babylonia, where they seem to have halted five or six days to rest and refresh.[69] There was on the opposite side of the river, at or near this point, a flourishing city named Charmandê; to which many of the soldiers crossed over (by means of skins stuffed with hay), and procured plentiful supplies, especially of date-wine and millet.[70] [65] Xenophon gives these nine days of march as covering fifty parasangs (Anab. i, 4, 19). But Koch remarks that the distance is not half so great as that from the sea to Thapsakus; which latter Xenophon gives at sixty-five parasangs. There is here some confusion; together with the usual difficulty in assigning any given distance as the equivalent of the parasang (Koch, Zug der Zehn Tausend, p. 38). [66] See the remarkable testimony of Mr. Ainsworth, from personal observation, to the accuracy of Xenophon’s description of the country, even at the present day. [67] Xen. Anab. i, 2, 24. [68] Xen. Anab. i, 5, 4-8. [69] I infer that the army halted here five or six days, from the story afterwards told respecting the Ambrakiot Silanus, the prophet of the army; who, on sacrificing, had told Cyrus that his brother would not fight for ten days (i, 7, 16). This sacrifice must have been offered, I imagine, during the halt—not during the distressing march which preceded. The ten days named by Silanus, expired on the fourth day after they left Pylæ. It is in reference to this portion of the course of the Euphrates, from the Chaboras southward down by Anah and Hit (the ancient Is, noticed by Herodotus, and still celebrated from its unexhausted supply of bitumen), between latitude 35½° and 34°—that Colonel Chesney, in his Report on the Navigation of the Euphrates (p. 2), has the following remarks:—