He set the wine down untasted, and covered his eyes with his hands.
"Enough!" he muttered. "Who shall strive against Nisroch, or flee from him who hath the four winds of heaven for his wings? The Seven Stars have spoken, and it is well!"
Then there came on him a great trembling and fear; for he looked on his daughter, and wondered who should protect her when he was gone. His own head, the life of the Great King, the fate of the empire, seemed as nothing compared to the safety of that beloved being—the child of his bosom—the one ewe lamb of his fold!
It was the divining cup of his race from which Ishtar had unwittingly been about to give him to drink, and he would have been as loath to defile his father's tomb, or question his father's honour, as to doubt its gift of prophecy, or make light of the warning it proclaimed.
He believed firmly enough that a pure maiden, looking into this mysterious vessel at any crisis of her fate, would there behold reflected, as in a mirror, a presentiment of that good or evil which the future held for her in store. And what had she seen now? By her own confession, to her obvious dismay, a hideous sea of blood!
He dismissed her from his presence gently, kindly, yet with a stern sorrow that forbade her to remonstrate or disobey. Then, alone at last, in the hall of his stately palace, he rent his mantle from hem to hem with a great cry of anguish, and sat down on the bare floor, unnerved, unmanned, in a paroxysm of horror and despair.
Above him, grand and imposing in the shadows of coming night, loomed his own sculptured image on the wall—proud, erect, triumphant—driving at speed in his war-chariot over a field of slain.
So darkness gathered round original and likeness: the fierce conqueror helmed and plated, bow in hand—the prostrate figure, with rent garments, bowed in misery to the dust. And the stars came out in golden lustre—mellow, benignant, radiant—smiling down, as it would seem, in peace and good-will on the sleep of Babylon the Great.