Sublime

of silver with an adder’s head on top.” They were again defeated by the weather. Barbaro’s men had dug into a rubbish tip. They had missed by a few hundred yards the burial chamber of a Scythian princess, adorned with enough jewelery to ignite all their wildest Venetian dreams of oriental gold. It was not discovered until 1988.

Thus ended the protracted defiance of Nathaniel Courthope.

Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallic diplomat, poet and inveterate correspondent in the mid-to-late fifth century, wrote to his friend, a naval commander called Admiral Namatius: I whiled away some time talking with [the courier] about you; and he was very positive that you had weighed anchor, and in fulfilment of those half military, half naval duties o