"The moon, too, wonders that her brother's horses run _lower than her own_, and the scorched clouds send forth smoke, As each region is most elevated it is _caught by the flames_, and cleft, it makes _vast chasms, its moisture being carried away_. The grass grows pale; the trees, with their foliage, are _burned up_, and the dry, standing corn affords fuel for its own destruction. But I am complaining of trifling ills. _Great cities perish_, together with their fortifications, and the flames _turn whole nations into ashes_; woods, together with mountains, are on fire. Athos burns, and the Cilician Taurus, and Tmolus, and Œta, and Ida, now dry but once most famed for its springs, and Helicon, the resort of the virgin Muses, and Hæmus, not yet called Œagrian. _Ætna burns intensely with redoubled flames_, and Parnassus, with its two summits, and Eryx, and Cynthus, and Orthrys, and Rhodope, at length to be despoiled of its snows, and Mimas, and Dindyma, and Mycale, and Cithæron, created for the sacred rites. Nor does its cold avail even Scythia; Caucasus is on fire, and Ossa with Pindus, and Olympus, greater than them both, and the lofty Alps, and the cloud-bearing Apennines. "Then, indeed, Phaëton _beholds the world see on fire on all sides_, and he can not endure heat so great, and he inhales with his mouth scorching air, as though from a deep furnace, and perceives his own chariot to be on fire. And neither is he able now to bear the ashes and _the emitted embers_; and on every side he is involved in a _heated smoke_. Covered with _a pitchy darkness_, he knows not whither he is going, nor where he is, and is hurried away at the pleasure of the winged steeds. They believe that it was then that the nations of _the Æthiopians contracted their black hue_, the blood being attracted. into the surface of the body. Then was Libya" (Sahara?) "made dry by the heat, the moisture being carried off; then with disheveled hair the Nymphs _lamented the springs and the lakes_. Bœotia bewails Dirce, Argos Amymone, and Ephyre the waters of Pirene. Nor do rivers that {p. 159} have banks distant remain secure. Tanais smokes in the midst of its waters, and the aged Peneus and Teuthrantian Caïcus and rapid Ismenus. . . . The Babylonian Euphrates, too, was on fire, Orontes was in flames, and the swift Thermodon and Ganges and Phasis and Ister. Alpheus _boils_; the banks of Spercheus burn; and the gold which Tagus carries with its stream melts in the flames. The river-birds, too, which made famous the Mæonian banks with song, grew hot in the middle of Caÿster. The Nile, affrighted, fled to the remotest parts of the earth and concealed his head, which still lies hid; his seven last mouths are empty, seven channels without any streams. The same fate dries up the Ismarian rivers, Hebeus together with Strymon, and the Hesperian streams, the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and the Tiber, to which was promised the sovereignty of the world."