MANY and many miles and many days' journey toward the rising sun,
over seas and mountains and deserts,--farther to the east than
Rome, or Constantinople, or even Jerusalem and old
Damascus,--stand the ruins of a once mighty city, scattered over
a mountain-walled oasis of the great Syrian desert, thirteen
hundred feet above the sea, and just across the northern border
of Arabia. Look for it in your geographies. It is known as
Palmyra. To-day the jackal prowls through its deserted streets
and the lizard suns himself on its fallen columns, while thirty
or forty miserable Arabian huts huddle together in a small corner
of what was once the great court-yard of the magnificent Temple
of the Sun.

And yet, sixteen centuries ago, Palmyra, or Tadmor as it was
originally called, was one of the most beautiful cities in the
world. Nature and art combined to make it glorious. Like a
glittering mirage out of the sand-swept desert arose its palaces
and temples and grandly sculptured archways. With aqueducts and
monuments and gleaming porticos with countless groves of
palm-trees and gardens full of verdure; with wells and fountains,
market and circus; with broad streets stretching away to the city
gates and lined on either side with magnificent colonnades of
rose-colored marble--such was Palmyra in the year of our Lord
250, when, in the soft Syrian month of Nisan, or April, in an
open portico in the great colonnade and screened from the sun by
gayly colored awnings, two young people--a boy of sixteen and a
girl of twelve--looked down upon the beautiful Street of the
Thousand Columns, as lined with bazaars and thronged with
merchants it stretched from the wonderful Temple of the Sun to