CHAPTER XIII.
SHOWING HOW OUR TRAVELLERS CROSSED THE ANCIENT TAURIDA, AND WITH WHAT TEAM THEY QUITTED IT.
The Crimea! the Taurisian Chersonese of the ancients; a quadrilateral, or rather an irregular lozenge, which seems to have been lifted by enchantment from the Italian shores; a peninsula which M. de Lesseps would transform into an island with two strokes of his knife; a corner of the earth which has been the coveted possession, and the objective, of all the jealous peoples who dispute for the empire of the East; an ancient kingdom of the Bosphorus, which the Heracleans subdued six hundred years before the Christian era; which yielded to Mithridates, the Alains, the Goths, the Huns, the Hungarians, the Tartars, the Genoese; a province which Mahomet II. made a rich dependency of his empire, and which Catherine II. annexed definitively to Russia in 1791!
How is it possible that this country, blessed by the gods, and disputed for by mortals, should escape the network of mythological legend? Have not wiseacres sought in the marshes of Sivach the traces of the gigantic works of the problematic people of Atlantis? Have not the poets of antiquity placed one of the entrances to the infernal regions near Cape Kerberian, the three "moles" of which form the heads of Cerberus? Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, become a priestess of Diana "in Tauris," was here on the point of sacrificing to the goddess her brother Orestes, cast upon the shores of Cape Parthenium.
And now the Crimea in its southern part—worth more than all the arid islands of the archipelago—with its Tchadir Dagh rising four thousand feet to a table-land, whereon a feast could be laid for all the deities of
