Imatges de pàgina
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January 27th. SAFELY back, and welcome! How have you enjoyed this first excursion in the East?

Perfectly. It has been a day of unmingled pleasure; company agreeable, air soft and bland, horses lively, and the path through the mulberry orchards, and around the sandy Bay of St. George, quite delightful. Then the scenery

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at Dog River, what can surpass it? I was so enchanted with the grand, wild gorge, that I could scarcely tear myself away to examine the remains of antiquity for which the spot is celebrated; but I did look at them all, and at some with a feeling of awe and reverence quite new in my experience.

It is an assemblage of ancient mementoes to be found no where else in a single group, so far as I know. That old road, climbing the rocky pass, along which the Phoenician, Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Frank, Turk, and Arab have marched their countless hosts for four thou

ANCIENT SCULPTURES.

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sand years, have much to tell the student of man's past history, could we but break the seal, and read the long roll of revelations. Those faintly-cut emblems of Sesostris, those stern, cold soldiers of Chaldea, those inscriptions in Persian, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, each embodies a history of itself, or rather tells of one written elsewhere, which we long to possess. I have drawings of these figures, and copies of the inscriptions, which you may study at your leisure. They, of course, imply much more than they directly reveal.

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I was told that a large part of the river issues from a cave some six miles above the sea. Have you ever visited the spot?

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