Book 2
11
Thereupon our garlands fell away of themselves, and we were set free and taken into the city and to the table of the blessed. The city itself is all of gold and the wall around it of emerald. Lucian’s city is not necessarily a paredy on the New Jerusalem, though the scholiast so understood it. It has seven gates, all of single planks of cinnamon. The foundations of the city and the ground within its walls are ivory. There are temples of all the gods, built of beryl, and in them great monolithic altars of amethyst, on which they make their great burnt-offerings. Around the city runs a river of the finest myrrh, a hundred royal cubits wide and five deep, so that one can swim in it comfortably. For baths they have large houses of glass, warmed by burning cinnamon; instead of water there is hot dew in the tubs.
