FROM ANCIENT DAYS TO OUR OWN  
Since it is our good fortune to have readers sufficiently intelligent to encourage us to write a book in which romance is relegated to the second place, we shall doubtless be permitted to detail not only the modern, but also the ancient history of the places which we visit with our heroes. There is much charm for the poet, the historian, even the dreamer, in treading upon soil composed of the ashes of past generations; and nowhere more than in the region we are now treading do we find traces of those great historical catastrophes which, becoming less substantial and fainter in outline as the years roll past, finally disappear like ruins and the spectres of ruins amid the ever-thickening shadows of the past.
This is true of the city which we have just left, throbbing with shrieks of anguish, overflowing with carnage and blood, with its walls battered to pieces and its houses in flames. The rapid movement of our narrative, and our desire to enter modern Jaffa with our young conqueror, have hitherto prevented us from telling you what manner of place was the Jaffa of olden days.
Jaffa in Hebrew signifies beauty. Joppa in Ph?nician means height.
[Pg 589]
Jaffa is to the eastern gulf of the Mediterranean what Jiddah is to the Red Sea. It is the city of pilgrims. Every Christian pilgrim on his way to visit the tomb of Christ takes in Jaffa on the road. Every Mussulman hadji who goes to Mecca to visit the Prophet's tomb takes in Jiddah on his way.
When we read the great works of to-day on Egypt—works in which the most learned men of the day have united their efforts—we are astonished to find so few of these luminous points which, placed in the dark night of the past, illuminate and attract the traveller like beacons.
We are about to attempt what they have neglected to do.
The author who assigns to Jaffa (the Joppa of the Ph?nicians) the most ancient place in history is Pomponius Mela, who affirms that it was built before the deluge.
Est Joppe ante diluvium condita.
And Joppa must have built before the deluge, since the historian Josephus, in his "Antiquities," says, with Berosius and Nicolas of Damascus, not exactly that the Ark was built at Joppa—for that would be in contradiction with the Bible—but that it stopped there. They assure us that in their time fragments of it were still shown to incredulous travellers, and that they used as a remedy, which was efficacious in all cases as a universal panacea, the dust of the tar which was used to coat the Ark.
It was at Joppa, if we may believe Pliny, that Andromeda was chained to the rocks, to be devoured by the sea-monster; there she was delivered by Perseus, mounted on the Chimera and armed with the head of Medusa, which turned the beholder into stone.
Pliny affirms that during the reign of Adrian the holes through which Andromeda's chain had been passed were still visible; and Saint Jerome—a witness who cannot be accused of partiality—declares that he saw them.
The skeleton of the sea-monster, forty feet long, was thought by some of the people of Joppa to be that of the divinity Ceto. The water of the fountain in which Perseus[Pg 590] bathed after killing the monster was ever afterward tinged with his blood. Pausanias tells us so, and declares that he saw the rose-tinged water with his own eyes. Ceto, a goddess of whom Pliny speaks (colitur fabulosa Ceto), and who is called Derceto by historians, was the name which tradition gave to the unknown mother of Semiramis.
Diodorus relates the pretty fable of the unknown mother with the quaint charm which makes poetry of this fable without robbing it of its sensuousness.
"There is," he says, "in Syria a city called Ascalon, overlooking a deep lake in which fish abound, and near it is a temple dedicated to the celebrated goddess whom the Syrians call Derceto.
"She has a head and a face like a woman's; all the rest of the body is that of a fish. The learned men of the nation say that Venus, having been offended by Derceto, inspired her with a passion for a young priest as intense as that which she had awakened in Phedrus and Sappho. Derceto had a daughter by him; but she repented so bitterly of her fault that she caused the youth to disappear, abandoned the infant in a desert place full of rocks, and threw herself into the lake, where her body was transformed into that of a siren. For this reason the Syrians worship the fish as gods, and abstain from eating them.
"But the little girl was saved and fed by doves, who came in great numbers and made their nests among the rocks where she had been left to die.
"A shepherd found her and brought her up with as much care as if she had been his own daughter, and named her Semiramis, or 'the daughter of the doves.'"
If we may believe Diodorus, it is to this daughter of the doves, the haughty Semiramis, the wife and murderess of Ninus, who fortified Babylon and laid out those magnificent gardens, the envy and the admiration of the ancient world, that the Orientals owe the splendid costume which they wear to this day. When she had reached the height of her power, having conquered Egyptian Arabia, a part[Pg 591] of Ethiopia, Libya, and all Asia as far as the Indus, she felt the need of inventing a costume for her travels which should be at once convenient and elegant, in which she could not only perform the ordinary duties of life, but also ride horseback and fight. This costume was adopted by all the people whom she conquered.
"She was so beautiful,&q............