was going up the Nile by night to Memphis, he was seized by Egyptian
soldiers, bound and thrown into the dark hold of a boat, which, after a
voyage of many days and nights, cast anchor on a totally unknown shore.
The prisoners were taken out of their dungeon and led across a desert
under the burning sun, and past rocks of strange forms, until they
reached a range of mountains with a colony of huts at its base. These
huts were inhabited by human beings, who, with chains on their feet, were
driven every morning into the shaft of a mine and there compelled to hew
grains of gold out of the stony rock. Many of these miserable men had
passed forty years in this place, but most died soon, overcome by the
hard work and the fearful extremes of heat and cold to which they were
exposed on entering and leaving the mine.

[Diodorus (III. 12.) describes the compulsory work in the gold mines
with great minuteness. The convicts were either prisoners taken in
war, or people whom despotism in its blind fury found it expedient
to put out of the way. The mines lay in the plain of Koptos, not
far from the Red Sea. Traces of them have been discovered in modern
times. Interesting inscriptions of the time of Rameses the Great,
(14 centuries B. C.) referring to the gold-mines, have been found,
one at Radesich, the other at Kubnn, and have been published and
deciphered in Europe.]

"My companions," continued Aristomachus, "were either condemned murderers
to whom mercy had been granted, or men guilty of high treason whose
tongues had been cut out, and others such as myself whom the king had
reason to fear. Three months I worked among this set, submitting to the
strokes of the overseer, fainting under the fearful heat, and stiffening
under the cold dews of night. I felt as if picked out for death and only
kept alive by the hope of vengeance. It happened, however, by the mercy