"The plague! The plague! It is come upon us! Behold the gods visit their wrath upon men! Woe, woe to them that see light in Babylon to-day!"
Istar shuddered at the cry. From another place farther to the north the words of horror and grief were repeated. The reign of death was thus proclaimed in the city. Now there was a great ringing in Istar's ears. Lights shot up before her eyes. It seemed to her that over all the city, from the five millions of human tongues, rose that cry of woe: "The plague! The plague!"
The memory of her dead child was with her. A few more paces she staggered through, half consciously. Then, of a sudden, some one appeared beside her—some one whom she knew and had forgotten. At sight of the well-known face the woman's brain gave way. With a long, heart-broken sob, she fell helpless, lifeless, into the reverent arms of Charmides, her bard.
XX
PESTILENCE
It was thus that, on the night of July 3d, in the year 538 B.C., Persian rule began in Babylon, and native rule in the Great City was ended forever.
Historically this was true. In actual fact, on the morning of July 4th—ay, and for many weeks thereafter—no man knew the real ruler of the city, and no man greatly cared to know him. Every soul within the walls was occupied with a far more terrible and more engrossing matter, and officer and priest alike obeyed orders of Cyrus that passed through the lips of Amraphel, without caring whence they were issued or why. Cyrus the king, his sons, and the most of his army remained encamped without the walls. Gobryas had returned to the governorship of Sippar. Amraphel, unable to find any loop-hole for escape, remained shut up in his palace, miserably afraid, not even venturing to sacrifice in the temple for dread of the curse that hung over the city. Every place of worship, indeed, was deserted. In the middle of the temple of Bel-Marduk the hideous pile of dead still lay behind their barricade, just as they had fallen on the night of the massacre. Men not cowards at other times fled that building and the square and all the neighborhood, as a place of the damned. The air around was thick with the stench of death; and no command of Cyrus could force one of his men near enough to the spot to wall up the open space between the shattered doors.
Plague reigned supreme in Babylon. The black death, that horror of horrors that occasionally swept upon the great nations of the East, like the scourge of God smiting every man in its path, leaving behind it a wake of dead, dying, and miserable bereft, had entered into the beleaguered city. It was for this that Amraphel stopped ears and eyes and remained a prisoner behind the thick, white walls of his palace, where the chorus of woe could not penetrate to him. And day by day Daniel the Jew interpreted, to those that would hear, the meaning of this further wrath of God against them that had so long allowed themselves to be governed by such a one as Nabonidus, descendant of Nebuchadrezzar. Indefatigably Daniel, plague-marked and immune long years ago, preached the wrathful word of his death-bearing Lord; and such was his success among these pagans that it became a not uncommon thing to behold some woman, swollen and spotted, inexpressibly repulsive and pitiable to look at, with the final frenzy upon her, kneeling in street or hovel before the wooden image of a demon, and frantically calling upon the god of the Jews to remove from her both the curse of life and the after-terrors of hell, and to plunge her into the longed-for peace of utter annihilation.