III
A BABYLONISH HOUSEHOLD
Babylon, the largest, richest, and most powerful city in the world, and of Oriental cities probably the most beautiful, presented, to the discerning eye, not a few glaring incongruities. Though its population had always been large, and was at the present time greater than ever before or after, the actual area of the city was, nevertheless, much too great for the number of people that dwelt in it. There have been kingdoms of fewer acres than those over which the monster city spread. Between the two walls, Imgur and Nimitti-Bel, were grain-fields of sufficient extent to supply the entire population with sesame, barley, and wheat in the event of a prolonged siege. This part of Babylon, therefore, called city by courtesy, was really more in the nature of farm-lands than anything else. While within the inner wall, indeed almost in the heart of the city, were many bare and unsightly acres, used for nothing better than dumping-grounds, or for encampments of the troops of dogs that wandered freely through the streets as scavengers. In some quarters, however, and especially along the banks of the five canals cut from the Euphrates, and winding out towards Borsip on the west and Cutha on the east, every available inch of soil was occupied. Houses jutted over the streets and were crowded together, side by side and back to back, without any attempt at system: tenement districts such as the worst cities of later times never dreamed of. Here the three-story, flat-roofed buildings would be rented out, room by room, to as many people as poverty obliged to live in them. And these were myriad. For as Babylon was the wealthiest of cities, so she concealed in her depths nests of filthy, swarming life, of suffering and of privation such as only human beings could see and still tolerate.
On the edge of one of these districts, between the square of Nisân and the square of the gods, on the north bank of the canal of the New Year, in two tiny rooms, with a little space also on the roof, lived the widow Beltani, her daughters, and their male slave. The slave was Beltani's sole inheritance from her husband. He was her luxury, her delight, the outlet of her not unfrequent tempers, and one of the three sources of a very limited income. Her daughters were the other two means of livelihood, but to them—though as girls go they were pretty—she was indifferent. Beltani herself was not, like so many of the Babylonish women, in trade. She did the work of the household; cooked—what there was to cook; washed—also what there was to wash; kept the rooms clean, as was consistent with tradition; and, hardest of hard tasks, managed the general income so that, in the two years of their unprotected life, none of the four had starved outright, and none of them had gone naked, while the rent was also paid as regularly as it could not be avoided. Besides this, Beltani held the patronage of two of the great gods; and by their help, together with frequent incantations, had kept the devils of the under-world from inflicting upon her any particularly direful misfortune. Images of the god Sin, of Bel-Marduk, and of the demons of Headache and the West Wind, were the only ornaments of her rooms. Each of these, however, had its shrine, and was regularly addressed three times a day; and it is to be hoped that if any demon had a due sense of proportion, he would refrain from inflicting any further ill of life upon these poor and pious creatures.
Neither chair nor rug had Beltani. Four pallets, such as they were, three in an inner room, one in a corner of the living-room; a wooden movable table and a brick stationary one; some vessels of clay, two iron pots, three knives, and a two-pronged fork, together with an iron brazier that was kept upon the roof, and lastly, three or four rough, wooden stools, formed the furniture of the house. Nevertheless laughter, and that from very pretty throats, was a thing not unheard in this poverty-stricken place; and as many human sensations, from joy of life to pain of death, had run their course in these rooms as in the magnificent abode of Lord Ribâta Bit-Shumukin, just across the canal.
At sunset on the day of the great sacrifice to Nebo and Nergal, Beltani stood in the door-way of her living-room, watching the gory light burn over the city, and, fist on hip, shouting gossip to neighbor Noubta of the next tenement.
"Have you been on the Â-Ibur to-day, Beltani?" called the Bee, when one of their intimates had been pretty well demolished at that distance.
"No. Few enough holidays are mine to take. From morning to night the girls run about the city, and some one must be at home to manage."
"Ay, there's your slave. What good is he if he can't take the rooms in charge once in a month? We have no slave, and my man's at work on the reservoir all day; but I slipped out this morning and went off to see the sights. Such crowds! All the city was out. I've a rent in my fresh tunic."