From the Troad to Constantinople the road lies over a tract hallowed by the footsteps of antiquity, and at every step Pietro felt his imagination excited by some memorial of the great of other days. On arriving at the Ottoman capital, where he purposed making a long stay, one of his first cares was to acquire a competent knowledge of the language of the country, which he did as much for the vanity, as he himself acknowledges, of exhibiting his accomplishments on his return to Italy, where the knowledge of that language was rare, as for the incalculable benefit which must accrue from it during his travels. Here he for the first time tasted coffee, at that time totally unknown in Italy. He was likewise led to entertain hopes of being able to obtain from the sultan’s library a complete copy of the Decades of Livy; but after flitting before him some time like a phantom, the manuscript vanished, and the greater portion of the mighty Paduan remained veiled as before. While he was busily engaged in these researches, the plague broke out, every house in Galata, excepting that of the French ambassador, in which he resided, was infected; corpses and coffins met the sickened eye wherever it turned; the chief of his attendants pined away through terror; and, although at first he affected to laugh and make merry with his fears, they every day fed so abundantly upon horrors and rumours of horrors, that they at length became an overmatch for his philosophy, and startled him with the statement that one hundred and forty thousand victims had already perished, and that peradventure Pietro della Valle might be the next. This consideration caused him to turn his eye towards Egypt; and although the plague shortly afterward abated, his love of motion having been once more awakened, he bade adieu to Constantinople, and sailed for Alexandria. Arriving in Egypt, he ascended the Nile to Cairo, viewed the pyramids, examined the mummy-pits; and then, with a select number of friends and attendants, departed across the desert to visit Horeb and Sinai, the wells of Moses, and other places celebrated in the Bible. This journey being performed in the heart of winter, he found Mount Sinai covered with snow, which did not, however, prevent his rambling about among its wild ravines, precipices, and chasms; when, his pious curiosity being gratified, he visited Ælau or Ailoth, the modern Akaba, and returned by Suez to Cairo. Among the very extraordinary things he beheld in this country were a man and woman upwards of eight feet in height, natives of Upper Egypt, whom he measured himself: and tortoises as large as the body of a carriage!