Other ruins rise above the intricate mass of fallen columns which cover the area occupied by the ancient city. This huge pile of carved stones surmounted by a broken portico was once the royal palace. Yonder curving colonnade includes the fragments of the theater. Smaller temples are recognized here and there, and on the hillside at the edge of the oasis can be seen a number of the tall, square towers which were built as burial-places for the wealthier families. But the chief architectural glory of ancient Palmyra was its far-famed Street of Columns. This imposing avenue stretched from the western edge of the oasis to the Temple of the Sun, a distance of about three-quarters of a mile. On each side of it was a continuous, elaborately carved entablature, supported by nearly four hundred columns of reddish-brown limestone. About two-thirds of the way up these columns were corbels which, as the inscriptions still show, bore statues of prominent citizens. At every important crossing, whence other colonnaded avenues stretched to the right and left, four massive granite pillars supported a vaulted _tetrapylon_ or quadruple gate. Over a hundred of the columns of this beautiful avenue are still standing in their places, and large portions of the entablature remain unbroken. One can easily follow the course of the colonnade and understand its relation to adjoining structures; and the traveler must be sadly lacking in imagination who cannot sometimes, as the light of the twentieth century day grows dimmer, see a dream city of wondrous, unbroken beauty stand proud again beneath the calm, still gleaming of the desert stars. Not shattered stones but well-built homes and busy bazaars spread far outward from the foot of the mountain; a multitude of graceful pillars stand upright around the palaces and temples of a mighty capital, and between the long lines of statues on the reddish shafts of the great colonnade a splendid vista reaches to the triumphal arch and then, through its triple portals, to where the Temple of the Sun keeps silent watch over a city of imperial grandeur and a queen who sees visions of world-wide dominion. The few hundred residents of Tadmor are of Arab blood, but the Bedouins of the surrounding desert consider them a poor, degenerate race, as doubtless they are. Shortly before we visited the village, its sheikh had made a wonderful trip to Paris as guest of a French lady who had previously traveled through the desert under his guidance. It seemed very strange, in this lonely little hamlet among the ruins of a vanished people, to hear an Arab sheikh tell stories—and he loved to tell them—about his adventures in the most modern of twentieth century capitals.