CHAPTER II: THE DYING WORLD


In the upper story of a house in the Museum Street of Alexandria,
built and fitted up on the old Athenian model, was a small room. It
had been chosen by its occupant, not merely on account of its quiet;
for though it was tolerably out of hearing of the female slaves who
worked, and chattered, and quarrelled under the cloisters of the
women's court on the south side, yet it was exposed to the rattle of
carriages and the voices of passengers in the fashionable street
below, and to strange bursts of roaring, squealing, trumpeting from
the Menagerie, a short way off, on the opposite side of the street.
The attraction of the situation lay, perhaps, in the view which it
commanded over the wall of the Museum gardens, of flower-beds,
shrubberies, fountains, statues, walks, and alcoves, which had
echoed for nearly seven hundred years to the wisdom of the
Alexandrian sages and poets. School after school, they had all
walked, and taught, and sung there, beneath the spreading planes and
chestnuts, figs and palm-trees. The place seemed fragrant with all
the riches of Greek thought and song, since the days when Ptolemy
Philadelphus walked there with Euclid and Theocritus, Callimachus
and Lycophron.

On the left of the garden stretched the lofty eastern front of the
Museum itself, with its picture galleries, halls of statuary,
dining-halls, and lecture-rooms; one huge wing containing that
famous library, founded by the father of Philadelphus, which hold in
the time of Seneca, even after the destruction of a great part of it
in Caesar's siege, four hundred thousand manuscripts. There it
towered up, the wonder of the world, its white roof bright against