“Allat consume you, eunuch!” Belshazzar buffeted him in the face. Then the royal gaze lit again on Daniel.
“Off! Off! What hinders that I kill you? All your babbling is folly. You shall cry to your Jehovah many times, and cry in vain!”
The aged prisoner shook off the soldiers; once more he stood fast. “Remember the prophecy, King of Babylon! Remember! You shall with your own lips summon me; with your own tongue pray to me; with your own hands stretch forth imploring me to speak the mandate of the God you now blaspheme!”
“Silence, dotard!” Belshazzar smote the captive on the mouth. Then again the king reeled, and did not resist when Mermaza caught him. The eunuchs carried him to bed. A frightened page roused the Egyptian court physician. “Raging fever,” quoth that wise man gravely, and ordered “poultices of lotus leaves, well soaked in lizards’ blood and in the fat of sucking pigs’ ears.” Before long the king was in violent delirium; his servants had to hold him on his bed, while he made the chamber ring as he cursed them. But one word was uppermost in the royal mind as he raved—“Jehovah, Jehovah!” When he repeated the word he would foam in hate. “Let me master Cyrus; let me conquer in the war, and I swear by every god and every fiend it shall be safer in Babylon to do murder by open day than to whisper the name of that foul spirit before me!”
Avil-Marduk smiled grimly when the next morning they told him of the king’s oath, taken in madness.
“Ah, well,” declared the pontiff, “happy for pure religion if his Majesty keeps this pious frame of mind when heaven gives back health. Yet he did ill when he spared Daniel. The Jew will be harmless in only one prison—the grave!”
But long since Daniel had been thrust back into a dungeon, scarcely less noisome than that which he had quitted. Ten armed men stood by when they replaced the fetters, all fearful of some withering spell; and the sentries pacing the galleries mumbled incantations to Nineb and to Ilu, shuddering every time they caught a glitter from the terrible Hebrew’s eye.
