Rachel gasped. It sounded like a fairy tale. Yet she remembered something like it—Where was it? In the Bible, surely!
Just as the thought of the Bible crossed her mind, a group of men passed close to her. They were dressed rather differently from the other people around her, their faces, too, looked different, and their eyes were very sad.
“Who are those men?” she enquired, looking back over her shoulder. “They look so unhappy—and homesick, somehow.” Rachel knew what it was to be homesick!
Salome glanced at them carelessly. “They are Hebrews who call themselves the Children of Israel. Our king, the great Nebuchadnezzar—may he live for ever—conquered their country and took their treasures from Jerusalem, their chief city, and brought many of them here to Babylon to live. They hate us, and we despise them.”
Rachel started as the words of the psalm darted into her mind. “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down.... We hanged our harps upon the willows....” She had heard this sung in church, and it had meant nothing to her but just “a psalm.” Yet, here before her very eyes now, was one of “the rivers.” There were “the willows” fringing streams which flowed through the innumerable gardens, and she had just met some of the captive Jews! Rachel gasped again as all these things became “real” to her—something that had actually happened—was, in fact, happening before her eyes.
“It’s awful to be homesick,” she murmured, rather to herself than to Salome, who, without replying, ran on in front of her to a flight of steps at the end of the bridge.
“This is one of the entrances to the Hanging Garden,” she explained, looking back. “We must hasten, lest my mistress calls for me.”
Rachel followed her from terrace to terrace, too overwhelmed with delight at the glimpses of beauty she caught right and left to say a word. She saw that the whole garden was supported, tier above tier, by gigantic arches, and Salome told her each terrace was made of plates of lead, holding earth so deep that great forest trees could grow in it. If she had not known this, the whole place would have seemed to Rachel as though blossoming by magic in the heart of a forest growing in mid-air. She could scarcely believe it was not the work of some magician.
By the time they reached the uppermost terrace, on a level with the city wall, she was not only breathless, but struck dumb by the beauty and wonder of everything round her.