What did they mean, he wondered? or had they any meaning at all beyond the faint, far-off suggestions of thought that may occasionally and with difficulty be discerned through obscure and reckless ecstasies of language which, “full of sound and fury, signify nothing”?  Was there, could there, be anything mysterious or sacred in this “wiste field” anciently known as “Ardath”?  These questions flitted hazily from time to time through his brain, but he made no attempt to answer them either by refutation or reason, ... indeed sober, matter-of-fact reason, he was well aware, played no part in his present undertaking.

It was late in the afternoon of a sultry parching day when he at last arrived at Hillah.  This dull little town, built at the beginning of the twelfth century out of the then plentifully scattered fragments of Babylon, has nothing to offer to the modern traveller save various annoyances in the shape of excessive heat, dust, or rather fine blown sand,—­dirt, flies, bad food, and general discomfort; and finding the aspect of the place not only untempting, but positively depressing, Alwyn left his surplus luggage at a small and unpretentious hostelry kept by a Frenchman, who catered specially for archaeological tourists and explorers, and after an hour’s rest, set out alone and on foot for the “eastern quarter” of the ruins,—­namely those which are considered by investigators to begin about two miles above Hillah.  A little beyond them and close to the river-bank, according to the deductions he had received, dwelt the religious recluse for whom he brought the letter of introduction from Heliobas,—­a letter bearing on its cover a superscription in Latin which translated ran thus:—­“To the venerable and much esteemed Elzear of Melyana, at the Hermitage, near Hillah.  In faith, peace, and good-will.  Greeting.”  Anxious to reach Elzear’s abode before nightfall, he walked on as briskly as the heat and heaviness of the sandy soil would allow, keeping to the indistinctly traced path that crossed and re-crossed at intervals the various ridges of earth strewn with pulverized fragments of brick, bitumen, and pottery, which are now the sole remains of stately buildings once famous in Babylon.

A low red sun was sinking slowly on the edge of the horizon, when, pausing to look about him, he perceived in the near distance, the dark outline of the great mound known as Birs-Nimroud, and realized with a sort of shock that he was actually surrounded on all sides by the crumbled and almost indistinguishable ruins of the formerly superb all-dominant Assyrian city that had been “as a golden cup in the Lord’s hand,” and was now no more in very truth than a “broken and an empty vessel.”  For the words, “And Babylon shall become heaps,” have certainly been verified with startling exactitude—­“heaps” indeed it has become,—­nothing but heaps,—­ heaps of dull earth with here and there a few faded green tufts of wild tamarisk, which while faintly