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 of art--carvings, sculptures, enamels, alabaster libraries, obelisks, sphinxes, colossal bulls.