us, Deipn. p. 607.]

CHAPTER IX.

Six weeks after these events a little troop of horsemen might have been
seen riding towards the gates of Sardis. The horses and their riders were
covered with sweat and dust. The former knew that they were drawing near
a town, where there would be stables and mangers, and exerted all 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
rock; the white marble buildings on its summit could be seen from a great
distance. These buildings formed the citadel, round the threefold walls
of which, many centuries before, King Meles had carried a lion in order
to render them impregnable. On its southern side the citadel-rock was not
so steep, and houses had been built upon it. Croesus' former palace lay
to the north, on the golden-sanded Pactolus. This reddis