you."

"And with you."

With that they separated.

Two street-porters, loaded with his baggage, received Ben-Hur's
orders upon the wharf.

"To the citadel," he said; a direction which implied an official
military connection.

Two great streets, cutting each other at right angles, divided the
city into quarters. A curious and immense structure, called the
Nymphaeum, arose at the foot of the one running north and south.
When the porters turned south there, the new-comer, though fresh
from Rome, was amazed at the magnificence of the avenue. On the
right and left there were palaces, and between them extended
indefinitely double colonnades of marble, leaving separate
ways for footmen, beasts, and chariots; the whole under shade,
and cooled by fountains of incessant flow.

Ben-Hur was not in mood to enjoy the spectacle. The story of
Simonides haunted him. Arrived at the Omphalus--a monument of
four arches wide as the streets, superbly illustrated, and erected
to himself by Epiphanes, the eighth of the Seleucidae--he suddenly
changed his mind.

"I will not go to the citadel to-night," he said to the porters.
"Take me to the khan nearest the bridge on the road to Seleucia."

The party faced about, and in good time he was deposited in a public
house of primitive but ample construction, within stone's-throw of
the bridge under which old Simonides had his quarters. He lay upon
the house-top through the night. In his inner mind lived the thought,
"Now--now I will hear of home--and mother--and the dear little Tirzah.
If they are on earth, I will find them."

CHAPTER III

Next day early, to the neglect of the city, Ben-Hur sought the
house of Simonides. Through an embattled gateway he passed to a
continuity of wharves; thence up the river midst a busy press,
to the Seleucian Bridge, under which he paused to take in the
scene.

There, directly under the bridge, was the merchant's house, a mass
of gray stone, unhewn, referable to no style, looking, as the
voyager had described it, like a buttress of the wall against
which it leaned. Two immense doors in front communicated with
the wharf. Some holes near the top, heavily barred, served as
windows. Weeds waved from the crevices, and in places black moss
splotched the otherwise bald stones.

The doors were open. Through one of them business went in;
through the other it came out; and there was hurry, hurry in
all its movements.

On the wharf there were piles o