Shamash, the Sun-god, was nearing the western gate of heaven. The gate-bolts of the bright heavens were giving him greeting.
The Euphrates and its wooded banks lay between us and the horizon; above the river-line we saw a row of jet black palms in an orange setting, and below it a row of jet black palms standing on their heads in the rippled golden water. Shamash has reached the summit of the Mount of Sunset; he slowly descends; the orange changes to red, the general conflagration becomes streaked and barred; the waters of the river grow black, almost as black as the reflected palms, the streaks slowly die away. Shamash has entered into the Kirib Shame, the "innermost part of heaven, that mysterious realm beyond the heavenly ocean, where the great gods dwell apart from mankind."
"O Shamash, thou art the judge of the world, Thou directest the decisions thereof...."
Thus prayed the dwellers of the city four thousand years ago. And with the same light with which you lit the pomp and splendour of the works of their time, you light the decay and ruin and hideous desolation of the present.
"Verily there is a God which judgeth the earth," say we, four thousand years later.
And as you smiled on those who worshipped you as the supreme God and Creator of all things, so you smile on us who look upon you, bound and fixed, with no will of your own, following the inevitable laws of Nature. Will you, four thousand years hence, light with the same light sojourners in this land, and will they wonder at our conception of your nature and function, as we wonder at the faith that your ancient worshippers had in you? Or will you, before them, have run your allotted course and consumed the whole world, whether in the fiery furnace of your wrath or in the uncontrolled madness of your broken bonds?
The next morning we visited Babel, the mound we had passed the day before. We walked for more than a mile through the palm-groves by the river. Under the shade of the trees were numerous huts made of mud, covered and enclosed with piles of fine brushwood. There were various signs of human occupations. Two cows were toiling peacefully up and down an entrenchment, drawing water in skins over a rough windlass; the skins emptied themselves into a channel, and the water wandered about in vaguely directed irrigation. On the bank beside them lolled an Arab with a long pole, who prodded the sleepy beasts in the moments when he was more awake than they were. A large mass of brushwood was moving in front of us; it looked like one of the huts endowed with a pair of very thin brown legs. As we overtook it the mass half-turned towards us, and a woman's form, doubled in two, looked small in the middle of it.