a most productive territory with numerous cultivators, so as to furnish shelter and means of hostility for all the king’s enemies. Tissaphernes calculated that the message now delivered would induce the Greeks to become alarmed with their actual position and to cross the Tigris with as little delay as possible. At least this was the interpretation which the Greek officers put upon his proceeding; an interpretation highly plausible, since, in order to reach the bridge over the Tigris, he had been obliged to conduct the Greek troops into a position sufficiently tempting for them to hold,—and since he knew that his own purposes were purely treacherous. But the Greeks, officers as well as soldiers, were animated only by the wish of reaching home. They trusted, though not without misgivings, in the promise of Tissaphernes to conduct them; and never for a moment thought of taking permanent post in this fertile island. They did not, however, neglect the precaution of sending a guard during the night to the bridge over the Tigris, which no enemy came to assail. On the next morning they passed over it in a body, in cautious and mistrustful array, and found themselves on the eastern bank of the Tigris,—not only without attack, but even without sight of a single Persian, except Glus, the interpreter, and a few others watching their motions. [121] I reserve for this place the consideration of that which Xenophon states, in two or three passages, about the Wall of Media and about different canals in connection with the Tigris,—the result of which, as far as I can make it out, stands in my text. I have already stated, in the preceding chapter, that in the march of the day next but one preceding the battle of Kunaxa, the army came to a deep and broad trench dug for defence across their line of way, with the exception of a narrow gut of twenty feet broad close by the Euphrates; through which gut the whole army passed. Xenophon says, “This trench had been carried upwards across the plain as far as the Wall of Media, where indeed, the canals are situated, flowing from the river Tigris; four canals, one hundred feet in breadth, and extremely deep, so that corn-bearing vessels sail along them. They strike into the Euphrates, they are distant each from the other by one parasang, and there are bridges over them—Παρετέτατο δ᾽ ἡ τάφρος ἄνω διὰ τοῦ πεδίου ἐπὶ δώδεκα παράσαγγας, μέχρι τοῦ Μηδίας τείχους, ἔνθα δὴ (the books print a full stop between τείχους and ἔνθα, which appears to me incorrect, as the sense goes on without interruption) εἰσιν αἱ διωρύχες, ἀπὸ τοῦ Τίγρητος ποταμοῦ ῥέουσαι· εἰσὶ δὲ τέτταρες, τὸ μὲν εὖρος πλεθριαῖαι, βαθεῖαι δὲ ἰσχυρῶς, καὶ πλοῖα πλεῖ ἐν αὐταῖς σιταγωγά· εἰσβάλλουσι δὲ εἰς τὸν Εὐφράτην, διαλείπουσι δ᾽ ἑκάστη παρασάγγην, γέφυραι δ᾽ ἔπεισιν. The present tense—εἰσιν αἱ διώρυχες—seems to mark the local reference of ἔνθα to the Wall of Media, and not to the actual march of the army.