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 the triple Gate-way of the Sepulchre, nearly a mile away.

Both were handsome and healthy--true children of old Tadmor, that
glittering, fairy-like city which, Arabian legends say, was built by the
genii for the great King Solomon ages and ages ago. Midway between
the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, it was the meeting-place for the
caravans from the east and the wagon trains from the west, and it had
thus become a city of merchant princes, a wealthy commercial republic,
like Florence and Venice in the middle ages--the common toll-gate for
both the East and West.

But, though a tributary colony of Rome, it was so remote a dependency
of that mighty mistress of the world that the yoke of vassalage was
but carelessly worn and lightly felt. The great merchants and chiefs
of caravans who composed its senate and directed its affairs, and
whose glittering statues lined the sculptured cornice of its marble
colonnades, had more power and influence than the far-off Emperor at
Rome, and but small heed was paid to the slender garrison that acted as
guard of honor to the strategi or special officers who held the colony
for Rome and received its yearly tribute. And yet so strong a force was
Rome in the world that even this free-tempered desert city had gradually
become Romanized in manners as in name, so that Tadmor had become first
Adrianapolis and then Palmyra. And this influence had touched even these
children in the portico. For their common ancestor--a wealthy merchant
of a century before--had secured honor and rank from the Emperor
Septimus Severus--the man who "walled in" England, and of whom it was
said that "he never performed an act of humanity or forgave a fault."
Becoming, by the Emperor's grace, a Roman citizen, this merchant of
Palmyra, according to a custom of the time, took the name of his royal
patron as that of his own "fahdh," or family, and the father of young
Odhainat in the portico, as was Odhainat himself, was known as Septimus
Odaenathus, while the young girl found her Arabic name of Bath Zabbai,
Latinized into that of Septima Zenobia.

But as, thinking nothing of all this, they looked lazily on the throng
below, a sudden exclamation from the lad caused his companion to raise
her flashing black eyes