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PHARILLON

ancient world. Clitophon (it was thus that the Bishop named his hero) paused there in his walk, and looked down the four vistas, over whose ranks rose temples and palaces and tombs, and he tells us that the crossways bore the name of Alexander, and that the Mausoleum close to them was Alexander's tomb. He does not tell us more, being in search of a female companion named Leucippe, whom he deems of more permanent interest, but there is no reason to doubt his statements, for Achilles Tatius himself lived here and dare not cause his characters to lie. The passage gleams like a jewel among the amorous rubbish that surrounds it. The vanished glory leaps up again, not in architectural detail but as a city of the soul. There (beneath the Mosque of Nebi Daniel) is the body of Alexander the Great. There he lies, lapped in gold and laid in a coffin of glass. When Clitophon made his visit he had already lain there for eight hundred years, and according to legend he lies there still, walled into a forgotten cellar. And of this glory all that tangibly remains is a road: the alignment of the Rue Rosette. Christian and Arab destroyed the rest, but they could not destroy the direction of a road. Towards the harbour they did divert it, certainly; the great thoroughfare contracts into the Rue Sidi Metwalli and becomes heaven knows what in the neighbourhood of the Rue des Sœurs. But in its eastern stretch it runs with its old decision, and the limestone and stucco still throw over it the shadows that marble once threw.

Of the two gates there survives not even a description. They may have been masterpieces of