“One would think,” he then replied, “that the richest merchant in Antioch would have a house for business corresponding to his wealth; but if you would find him in the day, follow the river to yon bridge, under which he quarters in a building that looks like a buttress of the wall. Before the door there is an immense landing, always covered with cargoes come and to go. The fleet that lies moored there is his. You cannot fail to find him.”
“I give you thanks.”
“The peace of our fathers go with you.”
“And with you.”
With that they separated.
Two street-porters, loaded with his baggage, received Ben-Hur’s orders upon the wharf.
“To the citadel,” he said; a direction which implied an official military connection.
Two great streets, cutting each other at right angles, divided the city into quarters. A curious and immense structure, called the Nymphaeum, arose at the foot of the one running north and south. When the porters turned south there, the new-comer, though fresh from Rome, was amazed at the magnificence of the avenue. On the right and left there were palaces, and between them extended indefinitely double colonnades of marble, leaving separate ways for footmen, beasts, and chariots; the whole under shade, and cooled by fountains of incessant flow.
Ben-Hur was not in mood to enjoy the spectacle. The story of Simonides haunted him. Arrived at the Omphalus—a monument of four arches wide as the streets, superbly illustrated, and erected to himself by Epiphanes, the eighth of the Seleucidæ—he suddenly changed his mind.
“I will not go to the citadel to-night,” he said to the porters. “Take me to the khan nearest the bridge on the road to Seleucia.”