If a land impregnated with salt is cursed, this region ought to be barren; but it is not. It is a rich, picturesque, rolling country, and a beautiful river flows through its waving harvest-fields, just now white for the sickle. Sometimes a bold cliff stands majestically on the river-side, and an old feudal castle hangs on the summit, where once the lord of the domain held high revel and strong rule, a robber on land and a pirate on the river he would be called now, since his race has run out, and kings who do the same things that he did are reckoned as the lawful plunderers as well as rulers of the people. So the robber told Alexander, and the king couldn’t see it, but it was true nevertheless. They make salt curiously in these parts. The water is pumped up from springs or wells into troughs, which are raised on scaffolding thirty or more feet high; and below these troughs a solid mass of brush is piled, a wall some ten feet thick, standing on a reservoir; this brush wall reaches hundreds and thousands of feet along, according to the extent of the works employed. The pumps are moved by water-power, and slowly and steadily, ceaselessly, day and night, they raise the water into the troughs above, through which it trickles upon this brush and drops down, down, down into the basins below; this exposes the water to the action of the air and rapidly evaporates it; so that what runs through the heap and finally reaches the reservoir below is exceedingly strong, and by completing the process with boiling is readily converted into salt.