And yet still for us "the wind uttered" and "the spirit heard" his vainglorious cry: "Is not this the great Babylon that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power and for the honour of my majesty?"
The silent answer to it lay at our feet. And, listening, we heard the solemn warnings of Daniel, the sorrowful forebodings of Jeremiah, and, above all, the ironical voice of Isaiah:--
"Let them stand up and save thee, Mappers of heavens, Planet observers, Tellers of new moons, From what must befall thee."
As we listened again we heard the noise "like as of a great people; a tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered together....
"A sound of battle is in the land and of great destruction....
"A sound of a cry cometh from Babylon and great destruction from the land of the Chaldeans....
"One post ran to meet another post, and one messenger to meet another to shew the king of Babylon that his city is taken."
Then we heard a sound of much feasting and revelling; we heard a solemn hush when there came forth fingers of a man's hand and wrote upon the wall. Even as we listened to the hush it seemed to grow into the great hush of ages, and we remembered that we stood alone in the living silence of these great dead, surrounded by the dead silence of an uninhabited land.
Overhead the Sun-god silently vaunted his eternal existence; at our feet the Euphrates rolled fresh waters of oblivion from an eternal source to an eternal sea.
The Syrian desert between Baghdad and Damascus; two white tents, a prowling jackal, and a starry sky.
There was a sense of stir in camp; a rattle of tins and a neighing of animals; a faint odour of lighted charcoal was wafted in at the tent door. I opened one eye; X still slumbered peacefully at the opposite side of the tent. Arten appeared at the door with a jug of water and a light. "One o'clock," he said laconically as he placed them on the ground and retired. The stars were still shining, my bed was very warm. True, it was one o'clock in Turkish time only, but no Christian ought to be roused at that hour. X fell out of bed with a determined thump. "It's late," she said. I made no response, but, knowing from experience that X was always right, tried to reconstruct my ideas about time and reconcile the fact that it was late with its being one o'clock in the morning. Besides, if X ordained that it was late, in another half-hour the tent ropes would be loosened regardless of the stage our toilet had reached, and a falling tent, when one has just got one's back hair into shape, is exasperating if not damaging. I got up, and just managed to hurl myself through the door, mostly clothed, as the tent collapsed on the ground. X was already seated cross-legged on a rug outside, holding one blue hand over a few charcoal embers while she munched a piece of dry bread held in the other. "You need not think I have eaten all the butter," she said, "because there wasn't any." Satisfied with the explanation, I munched my bread in silence and swallowed a cup of thick tea; we had been carrying water for three days and it was getting opaque.