It was during this journey that he visited the celebrated ruins of Persepolis. He arrived in sight of the Forty Pillars on the 1st of December, 1686; and looking towards this scene of ancient magnificence, where the choicest of the population of a vast empire had once sported like butterflies in the sun, his eye encountered about fifty black Turcoman tents upon the plain, before the doors of which sat a number of women engaged in weaving, while their husbands and children were amusing themselves in the tents, or absent with the flocks and herds. Not having seen the simple apparatus which enables the Hindoos to produce the finest fabrics in the world, whether in chintzes or muslins, Kæmpfer beheld with astonishment the comparatively excellent productions of these rude looms, and the skill and industry of the Persepolitan Calypsos, whose fair fingers thus emulated the illustrious labours of the Homeric goddesses and queens. It was not within the power of his imagination, however, inflamed as it was by the gorgeous descriptions of Diodorus and other ancient historians, to bestow a moment upon any thing modern in the presence of those mysterious and prodigious ruins, sculptured with characters which no longer speak to the eye, and exhibiting architectural details which the ingenuity of these “degenerate days” lacks the acumen to interpret. Here, if we may conjecture from the solemn splendour of the language in which he relates what he saw, his mind revelled in those dreamy delights which are almost inevitably inspired by the sight of ancient monuments rent, shattered, and half-obliterated by time. Having gratified his antiquarian curiosity by the examination of these memorials of Alexander’s passion for Thaïs, who,— Like another Helen, fired another Troy,— he continued his journey to Shiraz, where beauties of another kind, exquisite, to use his own language, beyond credibility, and marvellously varied, refreshed the eye, and seemed to efface from the mind all recollection of the fact that the earth contained such things as graves or ruins. The effervescence of animal spirits occasioned by the air and aspect of scenes so delicious appeared for the moment to justify the enthusiasm of the Persian poet, who, half-intoxicated with the perfume of the atmosphere, exclaims:— Boy, bid yon ruby liquid flow, And let thy pensive heart be glad, Whate’er the frowning zealots say; Tell them their Eden cannot show A stream so pure as Rocknabad, A bower so sweet as Mosellay!