Rachel looked at the desert plain with its three “rubbish heaps,” as she called them, in silent astonishment.
“Is that where the bulls with wings and the other things in the British Museum come from?” she added at length.
“Some of them—yes.”
“And are those little men down there digging up other things now?”
“Yes. They are working for the Museum. By-and-by, in a few weeks, perhaps, you may read a column in your newspaper at breakfast time giving an account of the latest things found in that heap,” he pointed to the largest of them. “That mound below you is called Babil, and it covers the palace in which dwelt King Nebuchadnezzar, nearly three thousand years ago.”
“The Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible that I was reading about with Miss Moore only this morning?”
“Yes—the Nebuchadnezzar who conquered the city of Jerusalem and brought the Children of Israel captives to Babylon—the Nebuchadnezzar who set up the golden image to which Daniel would not bow down.”
“And the fiery furnace!” interrupted Rachel, eagerly, “that didn’t burn the three Children of Israel when Nebuchadnezzar threw them into it.... I remember!... And there’s a psalm about them when they were prisoners in Babylon.”
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion,” quoted Sheshà, in a dreamy voice. “There is one of the rivers of Babylon.” He pointed to the great stream—the Euphrates—on both sides of which the city was built.
“It doesn’t look as though there could ever have been a city here,” Rachel declared, gazing down upon the desert and the mounds of earth. “How could it have disappeared altogether like that?”