"Ah!" she breathed. "Ah, now I understand! And what is this city called?"
"Nineveh—the Opal of the East."
Again Semiramis came close to Menon's side, and, at his pleading, once more took his head into her lap.
"This monarch of thine," said she, as she nodded thoughtfully, "is right. He is wise and strong. My people are fools to murmur against the justice of his tax. For listen! I, too, will some day build a city, more grand, more vast in its reach and splendour, aye, even than this Opal of the East. Its walls shall top thine highest towers—its gardens shall hang between the earth and sky. Ah, laugh if thou wilt, yet Schelah hath seen it all—as I have seen—as it rises on her kettle's smoke."
At Menon's look of wonder, she told him that Schelah was a witch who dwelt in a cave among the hills, who wrought strange spells, told fortunes, and healed disease with her arts and herbs.
"A withered crone is she," the maiden said, "ugly and of crooked limbs, whose very name the farmers fear; and yet she is not an evil witch, but kind and gentle to those who understand. Why, I fear her no more than—than—"
"Than me?" asked Menon, with a smile.
"Than thou," she nodded happily, "and I fear thee none at all. Yet tell me more."
He told her of the battles he had seen; of the siege of Zariaspa, where Ninus, baffled of desire, needs turn away till a mightier army could be raised, and engines devised to batter down the walls. He told her of other wars, long, fierce, triumphant in the end; and as he spoke Semiramis saw it all, even as she once had seen a dim and ghostly Babylon which rose from out old Schelah's kettle-smoke.
She saw vast, rolling plains, where armies met with a rending crash and roar; where warriors, locked in a grip of rage, fought desperately and died; where chariots charged as against a cliff, to totter and overturn, and the sands ran red with blood. She heard the cries of men and the clang of blows, exultant shouts of victory and the shrieks of those who fled—the rumble of wheels and hoofs that shook the earth—the clamour of ranks that reeled through tossing clouds of dust. Her bosom heaved; her cheeks, her lips, grew crimson with the rush of blood; her dark eyes kindled, and she trembled as in a chill.