In the garden of Merodach's harem, the Queen Parysatis held a feast in honour of her daughter, the Princess Candace, who was eleven years old. The Queen Parysatis lay upon a pile of cushions looking at a tragedy that was being enacted by a company of eunuchs. The Princess Candace was standing beside a deep basin of silver, seventy cubits in diameter, called the Sea of Silver; and she threw sugar-plums to a troop of little girls, who dived after them, gleaming fish-like in the luminous depths. When she saw the King, her father, she stopped throwing sugar-plums, and the little girls came out of the water, and sate upon the silver rim, their wet, naked limbs glimmering in the moonlight. Then the Princess Candace did homage before Merodach, bowing down before him and touching his feet; and he stretched forth his hand to her, and led her to a couch, because he loved his children, and she was as beautiful as the new moon before it is a day old. Now it chanced that at that time the High-priest Bagoas, who was High-priest of the temple of Bel at Nippur, was in the palace of the King; and Merodach sent for him, desiring him to speak comfortable doctrine and words cheering to the heart; and Bagoas came in unto Merodach, and did homage before him, bowing down before him and touching his feet; and there was no one in the cities of Babylonia more powerful than Bagoas, unless it were the King himself. "As I walked in the garden in the evening," said Merodach, "I became afflicted with a sense of human transience and of the vanity of greatness. In a little time, I said, I shall be but a handful of dust. Then I comforted myself with the thought that I should live in the memory of man, through my monuments, while man survives upon the earth; but in a little time man himself disappears, I said, and even the stars are lost in darkness." And Bagoas smiled. "It is true, O King, man cometh upon the earth and rules it for a little space, like a god. In hollow ships, he sails over the pathless sea; and he has mapped out the heavens naming the stars; and he follows the courses of the planets round the sun; and he knoweth the seasons of reaping and sowing, by the constellations rising or setting in the sky. His cunning mind has devised screws to draw water up out of the earth, and pulleys and levers to uplift masses beyond his strength. He is a master of populous cities, a weaver of delicate textures, a limner of images in fair colours; he is a tamer of horses, skilled in the knowledge of flocks and herds; with hooks he draweth fish out of the sea, and with an arrow transfixes a bird on the wing; he fashions the metals in fire, beating the gold and stubborn bronze to his will. He understands the laws of Nature, and has named the force which draws the earth round the sun, and the moon round the earth; but time is his master, and he cannot find a remedy against death." "Nor fashion a thumb for man," said Merodach.