In addition to the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, there was the _Illumination of Bel_, an encyclopaedia of astrology in seventy-two volumes which the suburban library of Borsippa contained. During the captivity many Jews must have gone there. In the large light halls they were free to read whatever they liked, religion, history, science, the romance of all three. The books, catalogued and numbered, were ranged on shelves. One had but to ask. The service was gratis. Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, was the most respectable place on earth. For ten thousand years man had there consulted the stars. But though respectable, it was also equivocal. During a period equally long--or brief--the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, stranger or neighbour, that asked. In the service of the goddess their brothers occasionally feigned that they too were girls. Meanwhile, from the summit of a seven-floored pyramid, mortals contemplated the divine. Beneath was cosmopolis, the golden cup that, in the words of Jeremiah, made the whole world drunk. Seated immensely on the twin banks of the Euphrates--banks that bridges above and tunnels beneath interjoined--Babylon more nearly resembled a walled nation than a fortified town. Within the gates, in an enclosure ample and noble, a space that exceeded a hundred square miles, an area sufficient for Paris quintupled, observatories and palaces rose above the roar of human tides that swept in waves through the wide boulevards, surged over the quays, flooded the gardens, eddied through the open-air lupanar, circled among statues of gods and bulls, poured out of the hundred gates, or broke against the polychrome walls and seethed back in the avenues, along which, to the high flourishes of military bands, passed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins, Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes, burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms--prostitutes, pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep--the flux and reflux of the gigantic city. In that ocean, the captive Jews, if captive they were, rolled, lost as a handful of salt spilt in the sea. Yet, from the depths, a few had swum up and, filtering adroitly, had reached the dignity of high place. One was pontiff. Others were viceroys. In addition to being pontiff, Daniel was chancellor of the realm. Ezra was rector of the university. As pontiff of a college of wizards, Daniel may have known the future. As Minister of Wisdom, Ezra may have known, what is quite as difficult, the past. For the moment there was but the present. Over it ruled Belshazzar. Yet, ruler though he was, there were powers potenter than his own: Baalim, outraged at the elevation of a parvenu god; a priesthood consequently disaffected; and, without, at the gates, the foe.