Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 19

brought down the river from up in the mountains, especially the huge pine trees with massive boles and long straight trunks used in the construction industry. Someone told me they built houses six and seven storeys high in Rome, tenements for the working classes they said; they needed endless wooden beams to hold the things up. I couldn’t imagine how people lived like that, all existing on top of one another. And the same man told me these rickety buildings burnt down regularly, catching light with embers falling from cooking stoves or fires lit to keep people warm in the frosty Roman winters. That’s why they needed so much timber I suppose, to rebuild the same pitiful apartments all over again.

I often saw bale after bale of animal hides too being stowed in ship’s holds, roped together and swung up over the gunwales. They always stank because they were generally untreated – raw ox hides, sheep skins and goat skins, the latter used for the manufacture of parchment, which incidentally made Asia Minor famous after its invention in the city of Pergamon some centuries ago. I was told that it was the deliberate restriction on the supply of papyrus from Egypt that caused the Pergamon library to create the wonder writing material and now it’s so widely used that Egypt has lost out.

Then there were the grain ships which carried wheat in huge quantities for the Roman army so that they could all have their daily bread in whatever far-flung outpost they had been billeted.

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS