At the doors of the enclosures naked children sprawled about, all with gleaming white teeth and closely shaven heads, save for the one lock of hair, with which they are to be pulled up to heaven; women with tattooed faces and dangling ornaments pounded barley in primitive stone mortars, and baked thin cakes of bread on flat stones.
Leaving the river-side we struck out to the right for half a mile across the bare, parched ground, where tufts of rough grass were trying to get a footing in the white, barren soil. We climbed up the mound, passing bands of workmen tunnelling in the sides and removing the bricks which lay about in tumbled heaps or in bits of standing walls.
From the top of Babel we could look right over the tract of land once enclosed by the walls of Babylon. The descriptions of Herodotus enable the traveller to call up some sort of idea of the scene in his time. We learn from him that the city was built in the form of a square, surrounded by walls of enormous strength; each side of the square was fourteen miles long, each side had twenty-five gates of solid brass and was defended by square towers built above the wall; twenty-five streets went straight across the city each way from gate to gate. The city was thus cut into squares. The houses, three or four stories high, faced the street and were built at a little distance apart from each other; between them were gardens and plantations. A branch of the river ran through the city; its banks were one long quay. The larger buildings stood in the centre of a square, each apparently fortified and surrounded by walls of its own. It is of these smaller walls only that any trace can be detected. From the foot of Babel, where we stood, remains of earthen ramparts could be traced for two or three miles southwards; they then turned at right angles towards the river and extended as far as its eastern bank. The mounds they enclosed were presumably the site of the more important buildings. Babel itself is supposed to represent the temple of Belus. The Mujelibe, or Kasr, lying to the south of us, is identified with the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar and the hanging gardens; further south still was a lesser mound, Amram. We knew that Birs Nimroud, the great ruin which is looked upon as the Tower of Babel, lay beyond this again, although we could not see it from where we stood.
The whole gleamed white in the strong sunshine. On our right the Euphrates rolled along, as unconcerned in his course as the Sun-god overhead. We could trace the direction of the river southwards to the horizon, marked by the palms along its banks. They made a thin, dark line across a wide, light plain—an alluvial tract which is only waiting to yield its hidden gifts on the day when Man joins hands with Nature and distributes the waters of the river. But not so the actual soil of Babylon; that soil, consisting as it does of building dust and débris, is of a nature which destroys vegetation. "The Lord of Hosts hath swept it with the besom of destruction," and it is doomed perpetually to be a "dry land, a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth."
As we looked upon the great plain which stretched away all round until it carried the eye on into the sky above, we could almost believe with the ancients that the edge of the earth joined the dome of heaven and that both were supported by the waters of Apsn—the deep.
A great wave of silence rolled out of the desert and broke over us. It seemed natural to be immersed in silence; could anything else be expected from a land which had never been alive with the stir of humanity even in far-off ages, of which one might now feel the hush while listening for the echo? The desert had always been silent and would be silent for ever more—a dead, unconscious silence, with no significance save of absence of life. But when we looked at the site of Babylon stretched just beneath us, we became vividly conscious of a real, living silence; we were listening to the "hum of mighty workings"; voices of souls long since dead, the dust of whose bodies lay at our feet, were "wakening the slumbering ages." Had not Nebuchadnezzar entered into the House of the Dead in the great cavern Araltu, the Land of No Return? The dead had been stirred up, even the chief ones of earth, to greet him as he entered hell: "Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee, ..." and they looked at him narrowly, saying, "Is this the man that made the earth to tremble?"
And yet still for us "the wind uttered" and "the spirit heard" his vainglorious cry: "Is not this the great Babylon that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power and for the honour of my majesty?"
The silent answer to it lay at our feet. And, listening, we heard the solemn warnings of Daniel, the sorrowful forebodings of Jeremiah, and, above all, the ironical voice of Isaiah:—
"Let them stand up and save thee,
Mappers of heavens, Planet observers, Tellers of new moons,