Rachel started. “There are seven Wonders of the World,” she began, eagerly. “I’ve seen one of them already—the Great Pyramid, you know. And now——”
“I have heard of the Pyramid in the land of Egypt,” Salome interrupted. “But come now and see more closely our wonder—the Garden that is like no other in the world.”
She took Rachel’s hand, and in a few moments they had entered the city through a gate which Rachel noticed was covered with tiles of blue enamel as brilliant as the sky above them. And on either side of the gate, like sentinels, stood huge winged bulls carved in stone. But how different they looked here, she thought, in the golden sunshine, with the wonderful blue tiles behind them, and their great shadows, black as ink, stretching on either hand!
“This is one of the new gates built by our king,” Salome told her. “He has caused inscriptions to be written about them so that all the world may know what adornments he has added to our fair city of Babylon. Our city that shall last for ever,” she added proudly.
Rachel glanced at her, and thought of a great rubbish heap she had recently seen—“the mound called Babil which covers the palace in which dwelt King Nebuchadnezzar nearly three thousand years ago”—she remembered the very words of Sheshà.... How amazing it was to be walking with this little girl in the very city that now lay under a mound of earth! To be talking to a little girl who lived nearly three thousand years ago, and had no idea that her home was even now being dug up in fragments by men living in the world to-day!... For a moment it all seemed too puzzling to be true. Rachel rubbed her eyes with her disengaged hand, and half expected the whole vision to disappear. Yet when she looked again, the lovely scene still lay before her, and she could feel the warmth of Salome’s little brown hand within her own.
“I must be getting used to the Past,” she reflected. “Because now I can feel as well as see the people. They didn’t seem quite real when I was with Sheshà in Egypt. But now it’s different. Is it because these people didn’t live quite so far back into the Past as King Cheops and his slaves, I wonder?”
She glanced again at the grave, strangely clad little girl at her side, who talked as though she were quite grown up.
“I mustn’t say anything about the rubbish mound, or tell her anything about the sort of world I belong to,” she reflected hurriedly. “She wouldn’t understand. I suppose she thinks I’m living in her times, but have just never happened to see Babylon before. And that’s quite true!” she added to herself, with a little inward chuckle.
While such thoughts as these were hurrying through her mind, she was looking right and left, full of eager curiosity, for the bridge she was crossing was thronged with amazing figures.