Belshazzar gave his usual answer—a laugh. “This is not your mountainous Iran. Other gods created Chaldea. Years ago there lay a broad stagnant lake beyond yonder rising, nestled in a deep hollow in the plain. The kings drained and enclosed it, planted trees, and stocked it with game. Here are still found the wild bulls—the aurochs—left nowhere in all Babylonia saving here. To kill one was the glory of the kings of old. The preserve is many furlongs on each side. The beasts run wild, and are fierce as in the virgin forest.” “Ahura grant we meet them!” The prince had spoken so naturally that Belshazzar darted one glance at him—arrow-swift. But it sped quickly as it came, and Darius added:— “Yet must you hunt the bull with lions?” “After you have once faced an auroch you will not marvel that only the king of beasts dare bay him.” When Belshazzar had remounted the chariot, the whole company were away; and once past the hillock, Darius wondered as he saw a sweep of woodland, trees and thickets, stretching north and south far as the eye might reach, the whole enclosed by a brick rampart too high for the bound of the hardiest lion. Merely to enclose so huge an area was a task nigh equal to building the temple-tower of Bel. At a ponderous gate they found a company of soldiers, who opened and saluted. Instantly the forest closed round them. Meadow lands and farms were lost from view. It was like traversing one furlong, yet in that journey entering another world. The paths were leaf-strewn and scarcely trodden. The cypresses and cedars bowed in canopy overhead, and with them rarer trees, native doubtless of India or Ethiopia, but here long grown wild. There were acacias beside the meandering streams, and tamarisk thickets. The woods grew wilder the deeper they penetrated. “And how old is this strange forest?” demanded the Persian of his Babylonish charioteer, at which the fellow answered:— “Esarhaddon drained and fenced it more than a hundred and twenty years ago. Since then it grows wild. Except for the guards and gamekeepers no man enters the preserve on peril of his head, unless the roving lions get before the executioner.” The words were broken short by the rush of a frighted creature. “Whir!” quicker than the telling a wild ass had sped across their path: one sight of his shining gray coat—the leaves closed after him. Belshazzar forbade the eager grooms to unleash the dogs. “No hound can run down an ass, and the game we seek is fiercer.” So they fared onward till, in a clearing, they came to the huts of two old foresters, who, after thanking the gods for suffering his Majesty and his noble guest to deign to visit their forest, reported that they had just discovered an auroch of most marvellous size. “Marduk grants,” ran their tales, “that the beast should be a monster terrible as the ‘divine bull Alu’ slain by the hero Gilgamesh. To-night he is deep in the jungle; but if the gods favour, his Majesty shall find him in the morning.”