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Near a small oasis, Palmyra offers the fascinating
sight of a city struck by the most radical adversity. Everything seems
to meet here to give an intensive dramatic sense to the landscape, to a
point very rarely seen anywhere else in the world. First of all
there are the natural surroundings, a stony corner of a dead planet in
the process of being submerged under a shroud of golden-brown sands.
Then a medieval fortress atop a piton, stuck like a huge lugubrious nail
under ruthless hard-blue skies. And finally, the bleached skeleton of a
city with its spine miraculously intact, or almost, a long row of
columns which wind and the passage of time have made pink like topaz.
Such is this graveyard of an old Arab merchant metropolis of the
beginning of our era of harmonious Greco-Roman arrangement. Someone,
however, lingers on - Zenobia, who in spite of her prowess and
misfortune, did not reach the size of a myth. This would deserve more
research. Cleopatra reached this Pantheon of history. Was the nose of
Zenobia shorter than the Egyptian queen's? No doubt you will be too
attentive to the beauty of the site to ask yourself this question.
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