【英文原著类】HISTORIC GIRLS(女演员).pdf

HISTORIC GIRLS
HISTORIC GIRLS
E. S. BROOKS
1
HISTORIC GIRLS
ZENOBIA OF PALMYRA:
THE GIRL OF THE SYRIAN DESERT.
[Afterward known as "Zenobia Augusta, Queen of the East."] .
250.
MANY and many miles and many days' journey toward the rising sun,
over seas and mountains and deserts,--farther to the east than Rome, or
Constantinople, or even Jerusalem and old Damascus,--stand the ruins of a
once mighty city, scattered over a mountain-walled oasis of the great
Syrian desert, thirteen hundred feet above the sea, and just across the
northern border of Arabia. Look for it in your geographies. It is known as
Palmyra. To-day the jackal prowls through its deserted streets and the
lizard suns himself on its fallen columns, while thirty or forty miserable
Arabian huts huddle together in a small corner of what was once the great
court-yard of the magnificent Temple of the Sun.
And yet, sixteen centuries ago, Palmyra, or Tadmor as it was originally
called, was one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Nature and art
combined to make it glorious. Like a glittering mirage out of the sand-
swept desert arose its palaces and temples and grandly sculptured
archways. With aqueducts and monuments and gleaming porticos with
countless groves of palm-trees and gardens full of verdure; with wells and
fountains, market and circus; with broad streets stretching away to the city
gates and lined on either side with magnificent colonnades of rose-colored
marble--such was Palmyra in the year of our Lord 250, when, in the soft
Syrian month of Nisan, or April, in an open portico in the great colonnade
and screened from the sun by gayly colored awnings, two young people--a
boy of sixteen and a girl of twelve--looked down upon the beautiful Street
of the Thousand Columns, as lined with bazaars and thronged with
merchants it stretched from the wonderful Temple of the Sun to the triple
Gate-way of the Sepulchre, nearly a mile away.
Both were handsome and