Augustus Road

In ancient times, if the princesses were loyal, the siege would indeed last ten years.

——French poet Bonnard

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"Everyone, please pose, I want to take a photo!" A tour guide in national costume stood in front of a tripod camera and said dancing.

Several tourists from various countries suddenly smiled broadly and stood in front of the ruins of a colonnade, preparing to leave some visual records of their trip.

It was the evening of October 18, 2013, in Giresun on the northeastern border of Turkey, a small town adjacent to the Black Sea. It can also be regarded as a small tourist attraction, with rolling hills and river valleys, long and rough coastline, and lush cherries. Trees, hazelnut trees, compared to the other side of the Black Sea, the Crimean Peninsula, which is very famous and full of warm sunshine, here has a more quiet and rural beauty.

Just when the tour guide was about to press the shutter, he pursed his lips angrily and saw the young man among the tourists who had always been unsociable and disciplined. The man was about twenty years old, about 1.75 meters tall, from East Asia, and was black. He wears glasses, black hair, a gray casual jacket, his hair is long and not messy, and wears a pair of black-rimmed glasses, looking like a standard college student. At this moment, the man seemed not to have heard the tour guide's invitation to take a photo. He was standing alone in front of a cliff tens of meters high, carrying everyone on his back, looking up at the cliff, thoughtfully.

"This guest, please come and take a group photo. After that, we will board the bus and go to a hotel in the city to rest." Although the tour guide was unhappy, he still stepped forward politely and walked to the man's side.

Out of curiosity, other tourists also flocked to this cliff. Its cross section is actually a giant statue. This is a very common sight in Asia Minor - Anatolia, as the Turkish poet said , "This area is like the head of a beautiful mare, galloping from distant Asia and diving into the blue Mediterranean." If you compare it to a palm, the wrist is the towering cloud in eastern Asia Minor. The mountain peaks, the inwardly curved thumb is the Taurus Mountains, the palm is the undulating plateau and salt lakes, the terrain becomes gentler as you go west, with dense markets and towns, and finally each finger is the river everywhere. Reaching gently into the Aegean Sea. At the head of Asia, at the heart of Europe, countless people or empires have left their footprints here, including Hittite chariots, Lydian kings, Greek philosophers, Persian emperors, Roman eagles, Byzantine monks, Turkish Pastoralists, as Lord Hamilton of the Royal Geological Society declared in the mid-nineteenth century - "There are monuments in every small area of ​​Anatolia."

Seeing the guests flocking up, the tour guide took a look at the statue: a tall male figure, with a crown stretched out like a scorpion's claw, covered in military uniform, holding a strange-shaped scepter in his hand, and at his feet were Relief sculptures of groups of soldiers who were deliberately miniaturized, either on horseback or holding spears and bows, lined up in formation and charged in the direction pointed by the man's scepter... The whole sculpture gave people a sense of majesty and oppression of the emperor of the race.

"Oh, everyone, please pay attention, this is the legendary relief of Alexander." The expressive tour guide began to explain with joy.

"No, this is not a relief of Alexander at all." The young man turned around and rejected the tour guide, which made the other party extremely embarrassed. But before the other party could explain, the man pushed up the glasses on the bridge of his nose, with a proud expression, and spoke fluently He said in Turkish: "The existing statues of Alexander the Great are all images of young men without beards, but the owner of this sculpture has a braided beard, a standard Indo-European appearance - but His armor, including the soldiers' uniforms and weapons in relief, are all a mixture of Greek Corinthian and Persian styles - look at his scepter again!"

All the tourists were attracted by the man's words and couldn't help but look in the direction of his finger, which made the tour guide even more embarrassed. "The top of this scepter is a sun, and there is an inscription on it - Mitra, Mitra." Ra, yes, it is the name of the Persian sun god. This is the scepter that Mitra, the descendant of the god, can possess. Therefore, the owner of this relief is-"

The man breathed out, paused, and then said word by word: "He was the [***] monarch of the Black Sea in the first century BC, a powerful enemy of the Roman Republic, claiming to be a descendant of Darius of Persia, and the capital of Greece. The leader of the country, Mithridates VI!”

Next, he continued to speak quickly: "Yes, Giresun. The ancient Greeks called this place Calabi, which means the mountain with blooming cherry trees. The Romans called it the City of Friends of the Gods, which means that this place is full of gods." Temple. King Mithridates of Pontus converted this place into his palace. The place beneath our feet was originally a vast palace, hunting park and camp..."

The tourists came to a standstill in front of this excited man. Even if these people were domestic tourists, their knowledge was limited to those who were under great pressure and Cyrus. Who was Mithridates? Their interest soon faded. One of the fat women raised her hand and said to the tour guide, "Can we go down the mountain and have dinner at the hotel?"

Now, it was the tour guide's turn to smile mockingly at the man and ask, "Are you here for archeology?"

The male college student smoothed his hair with his hands and said with an unfazed look: "I am a Chinese student at x university, my name is Li Bida, majoring in linguistics."

The tour guide shrugged, clapped his hands, turned around and said to other tourists: "Let's go to the bus first to get on the bus and gather. Maybe Mr. Li will stay here for five more minutes to continue communicating with Mithra." The tourists around laughed a few times and left the cliff one after another.

Only Li Bi Da was left alone, still wandering in the same place. The evening breeze was blowing, and the light of the setting sun slowly filled the valley. The broken columns and reliefs were plated with gold, and the air was full of a cool taste. At this moment, Li Bi Da suddenly discovered that the giant sculpture of Mithridates, holding the scepter of the sun god, and the sun symbol on the top did not seem to be carved from ordinary stones. It reflected the setting sun and flashed an extremely dazzling light. The light gathered into a divergent light column, making Li Bi Da unable to open his eyes. Soon the light came to Li Bi Da's body and enveloped him. Before he could be surprised, his body turned into billions of particles and disappeared!

Five minutes later, the impatient tour guide muttered as he walked to the cliff where Li Bi Da had just stood, then he opened his mouth in astonishment.

Under the cliff, Li Bi Da had disappeared without a trace, not even a hair, and there was no trace of him for miles around. Only a pile of clothes, pants, and watches remained. The tour guide trembled and felt around the pile of clothes, only picking up a pair of glasses with black frames. The shadow of dusk gradually covered the canyon, and the surroundings were filled with inexplicable weirdness.

A few days later, Li Bi Da became one of the more than 5,000 passengers who disappeared in Asia Minor every year. ;