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Updated: June 8, 2025
After a prosperous journey they returned with a response from Apollo, pointing out certain ceremonies which had been neglected in the feast of the Latin games, and bidding them, if possible, force the waters of the Alban lake away from the sea into its ancient course, or, if this could not be done, to divide the stream by canals and watercourses, and so to expend it in the plain.
For "the steel-blue rim of the ocean" is but three miles distant from this heather-clad, wind-swept height, which rises some seven hundred feet above it. Moreover, as one gazes down, the eye meets many a miniature forest of pine and birch, clothing portions of the lower hills, or nestling in the crevices of the numerous watercourses which divide them.
The track first led us across the maritime plain, here about two miles broad, and composed of sand overlying limestone, with boulders in the dry shallow watercourses, and with no vegetable life save a few scrub acacias and certain salsola.
All the strongholds of the Mound-Builders rise near abundant watercourses, and the best proof that can be given of the intelligence which guided their constructors in their choice of sites, is the fact of the number of flourishing cities such as Newark, Portsmouth, Cincinnati, Saint Louis, Frankfort, and New-Madrid, etc., which were built upon the ruins of various earthworks.
For into this high road of the mastodon and the bison smaller pathways entered from each side, as lesser watercourses run into a river: the avenues of the round-horned elk, narrow, yet broad enough for the tossing of his lordly antlers; the trails of the countless migrating shuffling bear; the slender woodland alleys along which buck and doe and fawn had sought the springs or crept tenderly from their breeding coverts or fled like shadows in the race for life; the devious wolf-runs of the maddened packs as they had sprung to the kill; the threadlike passages of the stealthy fox; the tiny trickle of the squirrel, crossing, recrossing, without number; and ever close beside all these, unseen, the grass-path or the tree-path of the cougar.
The Sheik Atalan was charmed at our admiration of his much-prized hygeen, and to prove its speed and easy action we were no sooner mounted than he led the way at about ten miles an hour, down the steep slopes, across the rough watercourses, and up the hill-sides, assuring my wife that she might sip a cup of coffee on the back of the animal she rode, without spilling a drop: although an exaggeration, this is the usual figure of speech by which an Arab describes the easy action of a first-rate hygeen.
Omer, across the same pastures and watercourses, we were faced by two hills standing up abruptly out of the plain; and on the top of one rose the walls and towers of a compact little mediaeval town. As we took the windings that led up to it a sense of Italy began to penetrate the persistent impression of being somewhere near the English Channel.
Whether we would find practicable watercourses, such as rivers and lakes, or whether mountain ranges would oppose their granite walls to farther progress, was yet to be ascertained. Its recommendation was that it was the most direct course, and whatever obstacles it might present would, when overcome, always leave us that much nearer our goal.
The village of Chilmark a stone bridge, crossroads, a church with Norman tower and frondlike Renaissance tracery, and an irregular line of school, shops, and cottages strung out between the stream and chalky beech-crested hillside occupied one of those long, winding, sheltered crannies that mark the beds of watercourses along the folds of Salisbury Plain.
The country of course was all scrubs and sandhills. We saw a few currajong-trees during our day's stage, and where we camped there were a number of well-grown eucalyptus-trees with yellow bark. These seemed to me very like the yellow jacket timber that grows on watercourses in parts of New South Wales and Queensland. The water I had sent out to this place was just sufficient to fill up the camels.
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