told the traveller, “This is the road to Byzantium.”
In the land of “Geryon’s sons,” the paths which scaled the sierras were
attributed to the toils of Hercules. In Bœotia, at a most remote era,
there was a broad carriage-road from Thebes to Phocis, and at one of its
intersections by a second highway the homicide of Laius opened the “long
process” of woes, which for three generations enshrouded, as with “the
gloom of earthquake and eclipse,” the royal house of Labdacus. We have
some doubts about the nature, or indeed the existence, of the road along
which the ass Borak conveyed Mahommed to the seventh heaven: but we have
no grounds for questioning the fact of the great causeway, which Milton
saw in his vision, leading from Pandemonium to this earth, for have not
Sin and Death been travelling upon it unceasingly for now six thousand
years?
From that region beyond the moon, where, according to Ariosto—and Milton
also vouches for the fact,—all things lost on earth are to be found,
could we evoke a Carthaginian ledger, we would gladly purchase it at the
cost of one or two Fathers of the Church. It would inform us of many
things very pleasant and profitable to be known. Among others it would
probably give some inkling of the stages and inns upon the great road
which led from the eastern flank of Mount Atlas to Berenice, on the Red
Sea. This road was in ill odour with the Egyptians, who, like all close
boroughs, dreaded the approach of strangers and innovations. And the
Carthaginian caravans came much too near the gold-mines of the Pharaohs
to be at all pleasant to those potentates: it was
—“much I wis
To the annoyance of King Amasis.”
But it is bootless to pine after knowledge irretrievably buried in
oblivion. Otherwise we might fairly have wished to have stood beside
King Nebuchadnezzar when he so unadvisedly uttered that proud vaunt which
ended in his being condemned to a long course of vegetable diet. For
doubtless he gazed upon at least four main roads which entered the walls
of Babylon from four opposite quarters:—
“From Arachosia, from Candaor east,
And Margiana, to the Hyrcanian cliffs
Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales:
From Atropatia and the neighbouring plains
Of Adiabene, Media, and the south
Of Susiana, to Balsara’s havens.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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