Page "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" Paragraph 12

" The Babylonians also have a citadel twenty stades in circumference.

The foundations of its turrets are sunk thirty feet into the ground and the fortifications rise eighty feet above it at the highest point.

On its summit are the hanging gardens, a wonder celebrated by the fables of the Greeks.

They are as high as the top of the walls and owe their charm to the shade of many tall trees.

The columns supporting the whole edifice are built of rock, and on top of them is a flat surface of squared stones strong enough to bear the deep layer of earth placed upon it and the water used for irrigating it.

So stout are the trees the structure supports that their trunks are eight cubits thick and their height as much as fifty feet ; they bear fruit as abundantly as if they were growing in their natural environment.

And although time with its gradual decaying processes is as destructive to nature's works as to man's, even so this edifice survives undamaged, despite being subjected to the pressure of so many tree-roots and the strain of bearing the weight of such a huge forest.

It has a substructure of walls twenty feet thick at eleven foot intervals, so that from a distance one has the impression of woods overhanging their native mountains.

Tradition has it that it is the work of a Syrian king who ruled from Babylon.

He built it out of love for his wife who missed the woods and forests in this flat country and persuaded her husband to imitate nature's beauty with a structure of this kind.