Not far from Pelusium another tragedy took place four centuries after Herodotos had been there. The fugitive Pompey was welcomed to the shore by Septimius, the general of the Roman forces in Egypt, and Akhillas, the commander of the Egyptian army, and murdered by them as he touched the land. Akhillas then hastened to Alexandria, to besiege Cæsar in the royal palace, and the burning of the great library was the atonement for Pompey’s death. Down even to the middle ages Pelusium was still the seaport of the eastern Delta. It held the place now occupied by Port Said. It was from its quays that the vessels started for the Syrian coast. In one that was bound for Tyre, Herodotos took his passage and ended his Egyptian tour. But he had visited certain cities in the Delta into which we have been unable to follow him, owing to the uncertainty that still hangs over their exact position. Besides the places already described, we know that he saw Butô, which is coupled with Khemmis, as well as Paprêmis and Prosôpitis, and probably also Busiris. Khemmis—which must be carefully distinguished from the other Khemmis, the modern Ekhmîm—was, he tells us, a floating island “in a deep broad lake by the side of the temple at Butô,” where Lêtô, the Egyptian Uaz, was worshipped. Brugsch identifies this island of Khemmis with the town and marshes of Kheb, where the young Horus was hidden by his mother Isis out of the reach of Set. Kheb was in the nome called that of Menelaos by the Greeks, the capital of which seems to have been Pa-Uaz, “the temple of Uaz,” transformed by Greek tongues into Butô, and of which another city was Kanôpos. Butô, or at least the twin-city where the great temple of the goddess stood, is probably now represented by Tel Fera’în, not far to the west of Fuah, at the extremity of the Mahmudîyeh canal. It was thus within easy distance of Kanôpos on the one side and of Sais on the other, and Herodotos might have visited it from either one of them. But after all it is not certain that he did so. Butô is mentioned again by him in a passage which shows that it could not have been Pa-Uaz, but must have rather lain on the eastern side of the Delta, in the land of Goshen, where the desert adjoined the “Arabian nome.” It is where he tells us about “the winged serpents” which fly in the spring-time from Arabia to Egypt, on the confines of which they are met and slain by the sacred ibises. Anxious to learn something about them, he visited the spot where the yearly encounter took place, and there saw the ground strewn with the bones and spines of the slaughtered snakes. This spot, he further informs us, is in the Arabian desert, where it borders on “the Egyptian plain,” “hard by the city of Buto.”