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 relieveing the blankness of the
ground, at the same time intensify its monotonous dreaminess.
Alwyn, beholding the mournful desolation of the scene, felt a
strong sense of disappointment,--he had expected something
different,--his imagination had pictured these historical ruins as
being of larger extent and more imposing character. His eyes
rested rather wearily on the slow, dull gleam of the Euphrates, as
it wound past the deserted spaces where "the mighty city the
astonishment of nations" had once stood, ... and poet though he
was to the very core of his nature, he could see nothing poetical
in these spectral mounds and stone heaps, save in the significant
remembrance they offered of the old Scriptual prophecy--"Babylon
is fallen--is fallen! Her princes, her wise men, her captains, her
rulers, and her mighty men shall sleep a perpetual sleep and not
wake, saith the King who is the Lord of Hosts." And truly it
seemed as if the curse which had blighted the city's bygone
splendor had doomed even its ruins to appear contemptible.

Just then the glow of the disappearing sun touched the upper edge
of Birs-Nimroud, giving it for one instant a weird effect, as