their remaining powers; but yet their pace did not seem nearly fast
enough to satisfy the impatience of two men, dressed in Persian costume,
who rode at the head of the troop.

The well-kept royal road ran through fields of good black, arable land,
planted with trees of many different kinds. It crossed the outlying
spurs of the Tmolus range of mountains. At their foot stretched rows of
olive, citron and plane-trees, plantations of mulberries and vines; at a
higher level grew firs, cypresses and nut-tree copses. Fig-trees and
date-palms, covered with fruit, stood sprinkled over the fields; and the
woods and meadows were carpeted with brightly-colored and sweetly-scented
flowers. The road led over ravines and brooks, now half dried up by the
heat of summer, and here and there the traveller came upon a well at the
side of the road, carefully enclosed, with seats for the weary,
and sheltering shrubs. Oleanders bloomed in the more damp and shady
places; slender palms waved wherever the sun was hottest. Over this rich
landscape hung a deep blue, perfectly cloudless sky, bounded on its
southern horizon by the snowy peaks of the Tmolus mountains, and on the
west by the Sipylus range of hills, which gave a bluish shimmer in the
distance.

The road went down into the valley, passing through a little wood of
birches, the stems of which, up to the very tree-top, were twined with
vines covered with bunches of grapes.

The horsemen stopped at a bend in the road, for there, before them, in
the celebrated valley of the Hermus, lay the golden Sardis, formerly the
capital of the Lydian kingdom and residence of its king, Croesus.

Above the reed-thatched roofs of its numerous houses rose a black, steep