Sarchedon: A Legend of the Great Queen

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

Far back into the desert, varied here and there by clammy clotted spots, lay a single track of footprints, closer together, less sharp, round, and clearly-defined, as they dragged towards the end. Many a weary furlong had he travelled, the king of beasts, on his journey here to die; and yet he never was to reach the patch of arid reeds that instinct bade him seek for a last shelter—the scanty covert where-with nature prompted him to shield his death agony from the remorseless bird of prey.

It is a royal sport to-day. It was a royal sport, no doubt, thousands of years ago, to rouse the kingly lion from his haunt of reeds, or rock, or cool dank quivering morass, in those wide plains that stretch between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Mesopotamia of the ancients, the Naharaina of its present migratory tribes. A royal sport, when followed by a queen and all her glittering train, defiling from the lofty porches of Babylon the Great, the tramp of horse and ring of bridle, with steady footfall of Assyrian warriors—curled, bearded, erect, and formidable—with ponderous tread of stately elephants, gorgeous in trappings of scarlet, pearls, and gold, with stealthy gait of meek-eyed camels, plodding patient under their burdens in the rear. Scouring into the waste before that jewelled troop, herds of wild asses bruised and broke the shoots of wormwood beneath their flying hoofs, till the hot air was laden with an aromatic smell; the ostrich spread her scant and tufted wings to scud before the wind, tall, swift, ungainly, in a cloud of yellow dust; the fleet gazelle, with beating heart, and head tucked back, sprang forward like an arrow from the bow, never to pause nor stint in her terror-stricken flight, till man and horse, game and hunter, pursuer and pursued, were left hopelessly behind, far down beyond the unbroken level of the horizon. Was not her speed of foot the strength and safety and glory of her being? Nor could the desert falcon strike her save unawares, nor the cruel Eastern greyhound overtake her save when she had lately drunk her fill from the spring.

But the monarch of the desert, the grim and lordly lion, sought no refuge in flight, accepted no compromise of retreat. Driven from his covert, he might move slowly and sullenly away; but it was to turn in savage wrath on the eager horseman who approached too near, on the daring archer who ventured to bend his bow within point-blank distance of so formidable an enemy. Nevertheless, even the fiercest of their kind must yield before man, the conqueror of beasts; before woman, the conqueror of man: and on the shaft which drank his life-blood, and transfixed the lion from side to side, was graven the royal tiara of a monarch's mate, were cut those wedge-shaped letters that indicated the name of Semiramis the Great Queen.

Fainter and fainter drooped the mighty frame of the dying beast; one by one large red drops plashed heavily on the sand beneath him, as the first bright stars of a Chaldean sky blazed from the clear depths of heaven. The perishable was fast fading below. Was that indeed eternal which shone so pure and pitiless above?

Great Babylon lay spread out, massive, mysterious, and indistinct, in the shades of coming night. Here and there, huge piles of building loomed vast and shadowy against the sky, far below these, amidst the tents, houses, palaces, and gardens within the town, glittered and flashed a world of lamps and torches, scattered bright and countless as the stars in that other world above; while rearing its head, like some ghostly giant, high over shaft and column, fortress, palace, and obelisk, rose a lofty tower that seemed to demand of heaven its secrets, and bade defiance to the sky.

Here, on the summit of this tower stood a human figure, gazing fixedly on the planets already visible, scanning the heavens with rapt attention; calm, serious, abstracted, wrestling, as it were, with all its mental forces, for the triumph of intellect, the mastery of thought.

It was Assarac, priest of Baal, reading the stars, as a student reads a book writ in some symbolical language of which he holds the key.

Assarac the priest, the man for whom in that voluptuous climate, amidst that gorgeous people, delighted in splendour, in pleasure, in luxury, in warfare, glory, arts, arms, and magnificence, the world could furnish but one attraction—the insatiable craving of ambition—to lull which he must rule supreme; therefore he trained himself, night and day, with the weapons of victory, seeking diligently that knowledge which constitutes power.

The act of worship is amongst all creation indigenous and peculiar to man. As he alone stands erect and raises his front without effort towards heaven, so he bends the knee in reasoning adoration, neither cowering down with his head in the dust, nor grovelling on his belly, like other creatures, in abject fear; but wanton, unstable, and extravagant even in his noblest aspirations, this viceroy of earth has been ever prone to waver in his allegiance, eager to amplify his worship of the one true God into a thousand false religions, more or less beautiful, poetical, and absurd. Amongst these, none could be less unworthy than that earliest form of superstition which attributed to the celestial bodies certain properties of power and knowledge, such as could affect the present no less than they predicted the future. Man's intellect felt elevated and purified by scientific communion with the book of Fate as written on the luminous pages of the sky, while his soul seemed scarce debased by an adoration that lifted it at least to the visible and material heaven. On the wide-stretching plains of Western Asia, in the warm cloudless Assyrian night, with the lamps of heaven flashing out their radiance in uninterrupted splendour from the centre to the boundless horizon, it was no wonder that students and sages should have accepted for deities those distant worlds of fire on which eyes, brain, hopes, thoughts, and aspirations were nightly fixed—the guides of their science, the exponents of their history, the arbiters of their fate.

While the rude camel-driver, as he plodded by night through the trackless desert, relied, no less than the early mariner, for progress and safety on the stars, priests in their temples, kings in their palaces, consulted the same changeless, passionless, inscrutable witnesses, for the web of policy, the conduct of warfare, the furtherance of love, desire, ambition, or revenge. Ere long, by an inevitable process in the human mind, the instructor of their course came to be looked on as the originator of events; and that which began only with an assumption that it could foretell, was soon credited with the power to bias, to prevent, or to destroy.