The young priest smiled. “Tombs are but folly,” he answered. “Do you remember, little maid, what I said to you of the soul, and how it lives and returns after many thousand years to inhabit the same, or perhaps another body?” Rachel nodded, too overwhelmed to speak. “Well, then, are not tombs folly?” he repeated, still smiling. “But come, of Egypt you have had a glimpse already. Now shall you behold Babylon.” He turned and led the way towards another gallery running parallel with the Egyptian one, and, as Rachel followed him, she wondered for a moment why the people strolling about in the Museum did not stare in amazement at the wonderful figure of Sheshà in his priestly robe. No one took the slightest notice, however, and she remembered that Miss Moore had on a previous occasion seen and heard nothing. “They’re not mixed up with _seven_, I suppose,” she reflected, before Sheshà began to speak again. He talked, she thought, rather as though he were translating from another language, trying to make what he said quite modern. “But sometimes,” thought Rachel, “he forgets—and then he says ‘_behold_,’ and ‘_verily_,’ and old-fashioned words like that!” “Let us first look at some of the wonders which, long buried, have come at last to this Museum,” he suggested, pausing in front of a huge statue. It represented a creature with the body of a bull, and the face of a man with a long curled beard cut square—while from the shoulders of the beast sprang two great wings. “Here is one out of many such marvels,” he added. Rachel looked at the monster, full of curiosity. “Was _this_ dug up by the people you were talking about to Aunt Hester to-day? I mean—at lunch time—when you were—Mr. Sheston?” Sheshà smiled. “I was the same person then as now. It was only my body that was different.... Yes, little maid, this was found by the explorers not far from Babylon. Now glance with me at these pictures in stone.” He turned into a narrow gallery close at hand, and pointed to the walls against which were fastened large slabs of stone sculptured most beautifully with scenes of hunting, with processions in which kings rode in chariots under graceful canopies like parasols hung with fringe, or stood looking down upon long lines of prisoners chained together. “These came from the palace of one Tiglath Pileser, a king who lived more than seven hundred years before Christ was born. He was one of the conquerors of Babylon.” “But I do want to see Babylon itself!” exclaimed Rachel. “You did mean I should _really_ see it, didn’t you?” “Patience!” murmured Sheshà. “Patience! You are just about to see Babylon first as it is now—and then as it was in the days of its splendour. Shut your eyes. Beat seven times with your foot on this stone floor—and have no fear of what befalls. You are safe with me.”