IV
OVER ANCIENT BABYLON
FROM Aleppo to the City of the Abbaside
Khalifs, over ancient Babylon and
Nineveh!—O seers of Chaldea, did you
ever behold this in your visions,—did you
ever read of it in your book of stars?
Indeed, the railroad and the aeroplane are rumbling to-day over buried Babylon. And in the golden silence of the desert the modern capitalist, after the Man of Neishapur, will sing,
Awake! for steam is scattering to flight
The Beduin tribes into eternal night.
For after all, Nineveh and Babylon might only be asleep. To be sure, wherever there are streams of opalescent water, human life is imperishable, immortal. But sleep is often mistaken for death; and the apoplexy of a nation is of longer duration than that of an individual. Under the magic wand of modern industrialism, therefore, Babylon and Nineveh might rise again and put Paris and New York to
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