As we neared the city, I realised more and more that my first impression of it had erred greatly on the side of undervaluation. If it seemed imposing from a distance, now it was of a magnificence hardly to be conceived. Every building was of pure white marble, which must have been plentiful in the surrounding mountains, and of a severe beauty and grandeur that simply took my breath away. You had no need to ask yourself where this architecture had come from. It was Greek, magnificently and marvellously Greek. Long, broad avenues of marble delicately cambered, and fringed with pollarded cypresses of a variety I'd never seen before, ran between the lines of buildings rectangularly as in the newest Yankee city, but broken here and there by gardens of sub-tropical plants. Carved work in a perfection of outline abounded everywhere, in ram's-horn and fruit-basket capitals of the columns, in gleaming white statuary by the wayside, in marble friezes and caryatides of the buildings. You would have called this city a magnified and transfigured vision of Athens in the golden age, yet here and there were places where the architects had seemingly experimented with foreign styles. More than once my eye caught a glimpse of winged figures in bas-relief and the florid honeysuckle decoration, and those impulses, if my memory serves me, came out of ancient Assyria. We were soon into a part of the city that was thickly populated, and it was plain our coming had thrown the people into an intense excitement. We too had a bodyguard now; nobody was let come near, yet despite the distance and the mask-like reserve that seemed to be the common attribute of the whole people, we knew we were being scanned with a mighty, repressed curiosity. We could see this also: whatever about our comrade caused him to be saluted with reverence by the scouts on the mountain, that emotion was shared by the populace down here, among whom word of us seemed to have spread like blown fire in a brushwood. Philipson's litter was about fifty yards ahead. As it passed, the city folk one and all prostrated themselves, and the spectacle of these people lowering their heads to earth before a stranger from the outer world was, to say no more of it, a striking one. The crowd, indeed, would have been imposing in any situation, for they were about as splendid a collection of human beings as I ever beheld, or could dream of. The long flowing robe, great stature, and clean-cut beauty of feature seemed to be universal; and so close the adherence to type that it struck me at once a newcomer's prime difficulty among this people would be the distinguishing one face from another. "Doubles," thought I, must be plentiful, and I found afterwards that this was indeed so.