saloon sacred to Dionysos, surrounded on all sides with pillars furnished with numerous couches, and adorned with gilded cornices. The roof was enriched with ornaments suited to the character of the god, that is, in all probability orgeastic processions of Bacchantes and Bacchanals, with crowns of ivy and vine leaves. On the right hand this saloon opened into a grotto or cavern, in which the colours of rocks were imitated by an incrustation of precious stones, whose brilliance was in various parts relieved by ornaments of gold. The busts of the royal family sculptured of Parian marble were ranged round the grot. On the roof of the great saloon was erected a small symposion, in the form of a tent, exceedingly agreeable from its airiness and the fine prospect it commanded over the whole valley of the Nile. It was completely open in front, and the roof consisting of a series of semicircular hoops like the top of a calèche, it could be bent down and drawn forward at pleasure, and was covered with purple hangings. By a winding staircase constructed in a different part of the bark, you ascended to another hall, constructed and decorated after the Egyptian manner, being adorned with a number of round pillars composed of a succession of blocks of equal height, alternately white and black. Their capitals, likewise were round, but contracting rather than expanding at the top like an elongated rose-bud. In all this part of the column, technically denominated calathos, there were neither volutes nor rows of open and projecting foliage as in Greek architecture, but bells of the river lotos, or other flowers, intermingled with newly formed fruit of the date palm. To correspond with these columns, the walls of Egyptian edifices were frequently lined with black and white slabs alternating with each other. Of these the white were sometimes of alabaster. This bark was furnished with but one mast, one hundred and five feet in height, to which was fitted a single sail of byssus with purple fringe. The dimensions of the sail must, however, have been prodigious, but from the fineness of its fabric it could never have been hoisted in rough weather. If we turn now to the materials wherewith the ships of the ancients were constructed we shall find that they here differed as much from the practice of modern nations, at least in the north, as in the form and style of rigging. With us scarcely anything but oak or teak is employed in those parts which come in contact with the water, whereas the Greeks constructed their war galleys, in which speed was of the greatest moment, of fir,[1688] while they chiefly made use of pitch pine in the building of merchantmen, as that wood long resists the corrosive action of the sea. ----- Footnote 1688: Theoph. Hist. Plant. v. 6. 5. Plat. de Legg. iv. t. vii. 333. -----