southwards and seeing it from the point of view indicated in Fig. 2, and
then as at Fig. 3. A group of Arabs bargaining about coins and
attempting to sell curios to two British officers, who had dismounted
from their horses, made a tremendous hubbub and, as Brown noted, gave
the right local colour as to the confusion of tongues.

I am ill-equipped with books of reference out here, but in one of
Murray's handbooks I have unearthed the following note--all I can find
about this place:--

[Illustration: The Tower of Babel.]

[Illustration: Tower of Babel (Fig. 2).]

"BIRS NIMRÛD, about 2½ hours from Hillah, is a vast ruin
crowned apparently by the ruins of a tower rising to a height of 153½
ft. above the plain, and having a circumference of rather more than 2000
feet. The Birs, which was situated within the city of Borsippa, has been
wrongly identified with the Tower of Babel. It is the temple of Nebo,
called the 'Temple of the seven spheres of Heaven and Earth,' and was a
sort of pyramid built in seven stages, the stairs being ornamented with
the planetary colours, and on the seventh was an ark or tabernacle. The
Birs was destroyed by Xerxes and restored by Antiochus Soter. The Tower
of Babel was possibly the Esagila of the inscriptions, or the
E-Temenanki--a tower not yet identified. Not far from Birs Nimrûd are
the ruins of Hashemieh, the first residence of the Abbaside Khalifs."

Brown would have none of this. Anything is anathema to Brown which
destroys topographical romance. He is a fierce enemy to "higher
criticism," which does away with the whale in the book of Jonah or the