A prodigious stimulus was thus given to Greek intellectual
activity. There were men who had marched with the Macedonian army
from the Danube to the Nile, from the Nile to the Ganges. They
had felt the hyperborean blasts of the countries beyond the Black
Sea, the simooms and sand-tempests of the Egyptian deserts. They
had seen the Pyramids which had already stood for twenty
centuries, the hieroglyph-covered obelisks of Luxor, avenues of
silent and mysterious sphinxes, colossi of monarchs who reigned
in the morning of the world. In the halls of Esar-haddon they had
stood before the thrones of grim old Assyrian kings, guarded by
winged bulls. In Babylon there still remained its walls, once
more than sixty miles in compass, and, after the ravages of three
centuries and three conquerors, still more than eighty feet in
height; there were still the ruins of the temple of cloud
encompassed Bel, on its top was planted the observatory wherein
the weird Chaldean astronomers had held nocturnal communion with
the stars; still there were vestiges of the two palaces with
their hanging gardens in which were great trees growing in
mid-air, and the wreck of the hydraulic machinery that had
supplied them with water from the river. Into the artificial lake
with its vast apparatus of aqueducts and sluices the melted snows
of the Armenian mountains found their way, and were confined in
their course through the city by the embankments of the
Euphrates. Most wonderful of all, perhaps, was the tunnel under
the river-bed.

EFFECT ON THE GREEK ARMY. If Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon, presented
stupendous and venerable antiquities reaching far back into the
night of time, Persia was not without her wonders of a later
date. The pillared halls of Persepolis were filled with miracles