"For twenty years," I said, "I have devoted myself to study amid hazards and troubles of every kind, _diversa exsilia et desertas quærere terras_: many of the pages of my books have been written under canvas, in the deserts, upon the ocean; I have often held the pen without knowing how I should for a few instants prolong my existence.... If Heaven grant me a repose which I have never tasted, I will try in silence to raise a monument to my country; if Providence refuse me that repose, I must think only of shielding my last days from the cares which have embittered the first. I am no longer young, I no longer have the love of fame; I know that literature, the commerce of which is so sweet when it is secret, only draws down storms upon us from the outside. In any case, I have written enough if my name is to live; far too much if it is to die." It is possible that my _Itinéraire_ may survive as a manual for the use of Wandering Jews like myself: I have scrupulously noted the halting-places, and drawn a map of the roads. All the travellers to Jerusalem have written to congratulate me and thank me for my accuracy; I will quote one witness[722]. * I see before me, of the sites of Syria, Egypt and Carthage, only the spots in harmony with my solitary nature; these pleased me independently of antiquity, art or history. The Pyramids struck me not so much on account of their size, as of the desert against which they were set; Diocletian's Column did not catch my eye as did the segments of the sea along the sands of Lybia. At the Pelusian mouth of the Nile, I should not have wished fora monument to remind me of the scene thus depicted by Plutarch: "The enfranchised slave, casting his eyes over the shore, spied the old remains of a fishing-boat, which, though not large, would make a sufficient pile for a poor naked body that was not quite entire. While he was collecting the pieces of plank, and putting them together, an old Roman, who had made some of his first campaigns under Pompey, came up, and said to Philip: "Who are you that are preparing the funeral of Pompey the Great?' "Philip answered: "'I am his freedman.' "'But you shall not,' said the old Roman, 'have this honour entirely to yourself. As a work of piety offers itself, let me have a share in it; that I may not absolutely repent my having passed so many years in a foreign country; but, to compensate many misfortunes, may have the consolation of doing some of the last honours to the greatest general Rome ever produced[723].'" Cæsar's rival no longer has a tomb near Lybia, and a young Lybian slave-girl has received burial at the hands of a Pompey not far from the Rome whence the great Pompey was banished. From these freaks of fortune one conceives how the Christians used to go and hide themselves in the Thebaïde[724].