Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/228

 116 ON THE TRACK OF^ALEXANDER THE GREAT

traders, strings of camels, and flocks of sheep, all pressing towards the bazaars. From time to time some poor blind wretch of the ragged rout would have to scramble headlong to the side of the way to escape the horses' hoofs ; but he never ceased for a moment the piteous cry for alms that formed part of the general chorus. Such scenes as these must have seemed doubly sad to Darius, as he fled before Alexander from Ragha, now Rai, whose ruins lay on our road five or six miles to the southeast.

We were in a musing mood. The hour was more conducive to thought than to conversation. The ground seemed sown with the seeds of a historic past. Darius Codomannus, who was uppermost in our thoughts, had been born under an un- lucky star. The astrologers who cast the horoscope on his natal day must surely have scanned the heavens with anxiety, for there was an ill omen somewhere ; but the star of Macedon was still below the horizon, and none had the prescience to foresee how soon it would be in the ascendant. When the conjunction came, disaster for Persia followed.

Defeat after defeat, in fatal threefold sequence, had been Darius's lot from the day when his hosts ^st met the flower of Grecian arms under Alexander. The battle at the River Granicus in 334 B.C. was but the first of the triple wave of woe that was surging forward, impelled by destiny. Issus and Arbela followed in 333 and 331, and the great billow was now cresting to break. Flight and pursuit from the south had ever been the cruel sequence in the story. The royal seat at Persepolis had been abandoned to Alexander and his reveling hosts. I was able to imagine that scene, for I had wandered once through those ruined halls, left desolate after the orgy and Greek torch had celebrated a night of triumph over the last of the Achaemenians. At Ecbatana (and I thought of it when in Hamadan) Darius had made a halt with his dispirited troops, 'having sent forward the women and what property he still had left, with the covered wagons,' for safety to the Caspian

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