Istar of Babylon: A Phantasy

by Margaret Horton Potter

Charmides shook his head. "No. Had she the aptitude, I should forbid it. A dancing-woman is not for a man's wife."

Hodo sighed, nodded, and seated himself resignedly, while Charmides moved over to the door and looked out upon the night. Presently he darted out and up the stairs, to return a moment later wrapped in a voluminous cloak of dark stuff: an article never unacceptable at this time of year. Re-entering the room, he turned eagerly to his friend.

"Come, Hodo! Now let us go forth into the city, up to the temple of the false Istar. For I am ignorant of all that happens within it at night. Demons and witches I have never beheld. Come you and show them to me. Rise up and come!"

The trader obeyed these suggestions with alacrity, there being no further prospect of seeing Ramûa that night. Before leaving the house, however, Charmides went to her to explain whither he was going, lest she might lie awake for him. Like a dutiful wife, she made no protest; though had he chosen, Charmides might have read in her eyes her little sense of disappointment and depression. However, Charmides did not choose. Hurrying quickly out of the house, he and Hodo crossed the silent square and reached the bank of the canal, across which, at a little distance, rose, like a huge shadow, the great palace of Bit-Shumukin, where the tiny windows set high in the bright-colored walls were marked in blotches of pale light.

Down in this quarter of the city the streets were deserted. Stillness lay over everything. The moonlight made a fairy day, that hid all the blemishes, the filth, the ruinous rubbish-heaps, and so beautified the things that were shapely that one might have been walking through a city of the silver sky. But the heavens were not perfectly clear. As the two walkers finally arrived upon the Â-Ibur-Sabû a heavy cloud suddenly hid Sin from their sight, and a faint growl of thunder rolled out of the mists, coming to their ears as from a great distance. Charmides straightened up, muffled himself a little closer in his cloak, and turned to Hodo.

"Where find we the second Istar?" he asked, crisply.

Hodo looked at him with a little smile. "Charmides is changed since that day that he took part in the rites of Ashtoreth," he observed, turning towards the north.

In the darkness the Greek frowned. It was the one incident in his life of which he could not bear to be reminded. And this—was this to put him back into that day? It was only with an effort that he shook off a sudden reluctance; but it passed as the moon suddenly shot a stream of light forth from the cloud, and he looked about him. They were well along the Â-Ibur, just opposite the royal granaries. So much the Greek realized. But otherwise the street had a most unfamiliar appearance. Many, many people were abroad in it: shadowy, dark-flitting forms, whether of men or of women it would have been hard to say. Cries, vague and incomprehensible to Charmides, yet each with its peculiar significance among frequenters of the streets by night, came weirdly out of the shadowy darkness. At short intervals on each side of the broad street a string of lamps stretching above a door-way would mark the entrance to some drinking or gambling den unknown to daylight. Into these places muffled figures were continually passing; but few emerged. It was yet too early for that. Charmides would have paused to look into one or two of them, but Hodo hurried along, glancing neither to the right nor left. Every few yards, now, the younger man was accosted by some creature of the night, a devotee of false Istar, or a priestess of Lil the ghost, the queen of Lilât, who was lord of darkness. Not once did Charmides make reply to the women; but, had it not been for Hodo, he would have liked very well to halt at some dark corner to watch more carefully all that was going on around him.

The Borsipite knew Babylon too well to stop on so transitory and uninteresting a site as the Â-Ibur-Sabû. Far to the north, almost under the shadows of Imgur-Bel, near the gates of Sin and the Setting Sun, in the square of the temple of the false Istar, all the viciousness of all humanity was visible to every man, and was permitted, in the name of religion, to go on between the hour of the first darkness and the gray of dawn.

On the right side of the square, on the usual platform, but without any ziggurat or tower near it, was the low, broad building miscalled "temple," dedicated to the worship of the goddess of night. This building by day was gray, silent, deserted, shut as to doors and windows, open to no one. By night one would not have known it for the same thing. Its unguarded gates were wide to any that chose to enter—and these were never few. The hundreds of miniature apartments that composed the interior of the place, glowed with light. In the first of these rooms the eager or the new-comers were waylaid, while the idle or the fastidious penetrated as near as possible to the central shrine, where she who represented the goddess, the living substitute elected every year on the first of Nisân, reposed in a dimly lighted grotto of unsurpassed splendor. To her many were summoned; and one out of every twenty, perhaps, remained. But the Chaldean visitor in Babylon that passed five nights in the city and saw not the queen of the temple of false Istar, was, indeed, an old and ugly man.