the willows, elms, and tamarisk shrubs, The lotus, and the reeds, and galingal, Which by the lovely river grew profuse.[213]
And there they have continued to grow. The swampy district below Hissarlik bristles with reeds and bulrushes; the whole plain is thick with trefoil (the ‘lotus’ of the Iliad); while the banks of the famous stream, once choked with Trojan dead, are fringed—Dr. Virchow relates—with double rows of willows intermixed with tamarisks and young elms. If no such robust trunk is now to be seen as that of the elm-tree, by the help of which Achilles struggled out of the raging torrent, the deficiency is accidental, not inherent. Potential trees are kept perpetually in the twig stage by the unsparing ravages of camels and browsing goats. To judge of the former sylvan state of the Troad, one must ascend the valley of the Thymbrius—the modern Kimar Su.[214] There the valonia-oak, the ilex, the plane, and the hornbeam, attain a fine stature; pine-groves clothe the declivities; hazel-bushes and arbutus, hops and wild vines, trail over the rocks, and cluster in the hollows. Along the Asmak, dense growths of asphodel send up flower-stalks reaching a horse’s withers; the elm-bushes are entangled with roses and arums; the turf is sprinkled with coronilla, dandelion, starry trefoil, red silene; fields are sheeted white with the blossoms of the water-ranunculus; the ‘flowery Scamandrian plain’ that gladdened the eyes of the ancient bard is still visibly spread out before the traveller of to-day. Homer, indeed, as Dr. Virchow remarks, knew a good deal more about the Troad than most of his critics, even if he did, on occasions, subordinate topographical accuracy to poetical exigency.
The plane-tree nowhere shows to more splendid advantage than in Greece and Asia Minor; but the only specimen commemorated in the Greek epics grew at Aulis, and sheltered the altar upon which the hecatombs of the expeditionary force were offered during the time of waiting terminated by the sacrifice of Iphigenia. It was the scene, too, of a portent; for one day, in full view of the astonished Achæans, a serpent crept up its trunk to devour the nine callow inmates of a sparrow’s nest among its branches, and on the completion of a sufficiently ample meal by the deglutition of the mother-bird, was then and there turned into stone.[215] The decade of consumed sparrows—mother and chicks—signified, according to the interpretation of Calchas, the ten years of the siege of Troy; and the reality of the event was attested to later generations by the display, in the temple of Artemis at Aulis, of some wood from the identical tree within the living compass of whose branches it had occurred.[216] Had the petrified snake been producible as well, the evidence would have been complete.