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Persevering in their original course, they skirted Siberia and the north of the Caspian, crossed the Volga, then the Don, and thus in the fifth century of the Christian era, as I just now mentioned, came upon the Goths, who were in undisturbed possession of the country.
With a view further to increase the trade with the East, Philadelphus sent Dionysius on an expedition overland to India, to gain a knowledge of the country and of its means and wants. He went by the way of the Caspian Sea through Bactria, in the line of Alexander's march.
"Within four years and three months from the time Alexander crossed the Hellespont," says GROTE, "by one stupendous defeat after another Darius had lost all his Western empire, and had become a fugitive eastward of the Caspian Gates, escaping captivity at the hand of Alexander only to perish by that of the satrap Bessus.
Thus, then, as has been told, began the war of the Romans and the Persians, and to this end did it come. But I shall now turn to the narration of the events touching the Caspian Gates.
"We are not aground," says the captain, "unless there is a rock sticking up like a needle in the middle of the Caspian Sea!" "There is magic in this," say the sailors. "Hoist more sail," says the captain; and up go the white sails, swelling out in the wind, while the masts bend and creak. But still the ship lay shivering and did not move, out there in the middle of the sea.
Many were the pillows that were wet with the tears of the young girls, as they thought of the blue eyes of Sadko and his golden hair. And then, in the twelfth year since he walked into Novgorod with the coffer on his shoulder, he was sailing in a ship on the Caspian Sea, far, far away.
There is an abundance of iron and copper from the Urals, dried fish in tall piles from the Caspian, tea from China, cotton from India, silk and rugs from Persia, heavy furs and sables from Siberia, wool in the raw state from Cashmere, together with the varied products of the trans-Caucasian provinces, even including droves of wild horses.
The triumphal inscriptions of Pompeius himself enumerated 12 millions of people as subjugated and 1538 cities and strongholds as conquered it seemed as if quantity was to make up for quality and made the circle of his victories extend from the Maeotic Sea to the Caspian and from the latter to the Red Sea, when his eyes had never seen any one of the three; nay farther, if he did not exactly say so, he at any late induced the public to suppose that the annexation of Syria, which in truth was no heroic deed, had added the whole east as far as Bactria and India to the Roman empire so dim was the mist of distance, amidst which according to his statements the boundary-line of his eastern conquests was lost.
I reminded him I had desired the Government a year ago to obtain information as to all the countries between the Caspian and the Indus, and I intended now to give a more particular direction. He said Macdonald should have his eye upon the Caspian, and information as to those countries would be best obtained through natives.
But, while the Caspian has shrunk only to 85 feet below the Black Sea, the Dead Sea has shrunk to the enormous depth of 1,292 feet below the Mediterranean. Every now and then, some enterprising De Lesseps or other proposes to dig a canal from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and so re-establish the old high level.
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