soon is he had thus made his escape from the immediate scene of danger,
he dismounted and left his horse, that he might assume more completely
the appearance of a common soldier, and, with a few attendants who were
willing to follow his fallen fortunes, he went on to the eastward,
directing his weary steps toward the shores of the Aegean Sea.

[Sidenote: The Vale of Tempe.]
[Sidenote: Its picturesqueness.]
[Sidenote: Pompey's sufferings.]
[Sidenote: A drink of water.]

The country through which he was traveling was Thessaly. Thessaly is a
vast amphitheater, surrounded by mountains, from whose sides streams
descend, which, after watering many fertile valleys and plains, combine
to form one great central river that flows to the eastward, and after
various meanderings, finds its way into the Aegean Sea through a
romantic gap between two mountains, called the Vale of Tempe--a vale
which has been famed in all ages for the extreme picturesqueness of its
scenery, and in which, in those days, all the charms both of the most
alluring beauty and of the sublimest grandeur seemed to be combined.
Pompey followed the roads leading along the banks of this stream, weary
in body, and harassed and disconsolate in mind. The news which came to
him from time to time, by the flying parties which were moving through
the country in all directions, of the entire and overwhelming
completeness of Caesar's victory, extinguished all remains of hope, and
narrowed down at last the grounds of his solicitude to the single point
of his own personal safety. He was well aware that he should be pursued,
and, to baffle the efforts which he knew that his enemies would make to
follow his track, he avoided large towns, and pressed forward in by-ways
and solitudes, bearing as patiently as he was able his increasing