CHAPTER XIII.
Another characteristic, to which I would fain attract the reader’s regard, is the circumstance of their being erected in the vicinity of water. At Glendalough, what a magnificent lake salutes the Tower? In Devenish and at Killmalloch, is not the same the case? In other parts of the country, also, we find them similarly located. And even where nature has not been so lavish of her inland seas, yet is water, of some shape, always to be seen contiguous to our towers.
What use, it will be asked, do I mean to make of this argument? or how seek support from the accidental propinquity of this element? Remember my remark upon the article, before, in connection with the Egyptian Pyramids. Captain Mignan, besides, tells us that a tradition, handed down from time immemorial, says that “near the foot of the ruin of El Mujellebah,” which he takes to be that of the Tower of Babel, “is a well, invisible to mortals”; and, as all Eastern heathenism, whence ours was deduced, partook in some degree of the same usages and properties, I think it very probable the correspondence will apply in this as well as in other peculiarities; and the rather as from symptoms of vaults, which have already appeared, and the hollow sounds, or echoes, which invariably accompany, the proposition does not come unwarranted, however singly put forth or without something like argument to recommend its trial.
We know that in Hieropolis, or the “Holy city,” in Syria, where a Temple, with a Tower, was erected to Astarte, there stood adjacent a lake, where sacred fishes were preserved, in the midst of which was a stone altar, which was said, and really appeared, to float; whither numbers of persons used to swim every day to perform their devotions. Under this temple they showed the cleft where it was said the waters drained off after Deucalion’s flood, and this tradition brought on the extraordinary ceremony now about to be narrated, something similar to which our ancestors must formerly have practised here.
“I have,” says Lucian,[196] “myself seen this chasm, and it is a very small one, under the temple. Whether it was formerly larger and since lessened I cannot tell, but that which I have seen is small. In commemoration of this history they act in this manner: twice in every year water is brought from the sea to the temple, and not by the priests only, but by all Syria and Arabia. Many come from the Euphrates to the sea, and all carry water, which they first pour out in the temple, and afterwards it sinks into the chasm, which though small, receives a prodigious quantity of water, and when they do so, they say, Deucalion instituted the ceremony as a memorial of the calamity above named, and of his deliverance from it.”
Twice a year a man went up to the top of the Priap, and there remained seven days. His mode of getting up was thus:—He surrounded it and himself with a chain, and ascended by the help of that and certain pegs, which, stuck out of its sides for the purpose, lifting the chain up after him at each resting interval—a method of ascent which will be readily understood by those who have seen men climb up the palm trees of Egypt and Arabia. Having reached the summit he let down the chain, and by means thereof drew up all the necessaries in the way of food, and withal prepared himself a seat, or rather nest on his aërial tabernacle.
| View him now mounted on his sacred tower, He looks around with conscious sense of power. |
On these occasions crowds used to come with offerings, and the custom was for each to declare his name to the priests; upon which one below cried it out to him on the top, who thereupon muttered a prayer, which, in order to arrest the attention of the congregation, and enliven their devotion, he all the while accompanied by striking a bell.