Budge_Ethiopic_Alexander

1 62 THE HISTORY OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
and when I had made him to suffer pain by the
beating he said unto me, "O king, beat me not,
"for I do not deserve to be beaten, and stripes
"can make my words no better." Then straightway
I believed his words, and I had compassion upon
him. And I rose up with that man, and after we had
marched for ten' days we arrived in a place beyond
which- was nothing except the flower which cometh
forth from Paradise; now this place is beneath the
earth, and here is the abode of fiends and devils,
and whosoever goeth therein they destroy. And
there was none of our men who passed from us
into that place that did not die. Then they went into
a garden wherein there was musk, and wherein
man could not enter except by the door thereof,
by reason of the thickness of the trees which were
therein. In the midst of that garden were figures
of the sun and moon, and in it w^ere two large
hedges between which was a temple which was
called "[The temple of] the sunrise and moonrise,"
The trees of for here the sun and the moon do rise, and inside
Moon"" '' the temple [p. gi] [enclosure] were two most beautiful
trees," like unto which no others exist. Now it was
told me that one of them was a male and the
other a female; the male was the sun, and the
female was the moon.^ Beneath them were strewn
^ In the Syriac (p. 104), fifteen days.
^ The whole subject of the talking trees is discussed by
Yule, Ser Marco Polo (2nd edit.), torn. i. p. 134 fif.
J The Greek adds that the male tree was called Helios,
and the female Selene, and that in native speech they