the river Choaspes was so much esteemed for
its freshness, its clearness, and its salubrity, that the Persian kings
would drink no other; they had it carried with them wherever they went;
even when they undertook long warlike expeditions, the water of the
Choaspes was considered a necessary provision for the journey.

The City of Lilies, in the days of the Rab-shakeh, was a perfect
fairy-land of beauty, surrounded as it was by fruit-gardens and
corn-fields; the white houses standing out from amongst dark palm trees,
and the high walls encircled by groves of citron and lemon trees. As the
Rab-shakeh walks along the air is scented with their blossoms, and with
the sweet fragrance of the countless Shushan lilies, growing beside the
margin of the sparkling rivers.

Above him, in the midst of the city, stands his lordly home. It may well
be a magnificent place, for it is the palace of the greatest king in the
world, the mighty King of Persia. The palace in which the Rab-shakeh
lives is not the old palace in which Daniel stayed when he visited
Shushan; it is quite a new building, built only forty years before by
the great Ahasuerus, the husband of Queen Esther. It was to celebrate
the opening of this gigantic palace that the enormous and magnificent
feast of which we read in Esther i., was given by the Persian monarch,
who was its founder.

This new palace was built on a high platform of stone and brick, and the
view from its windows of the green plain, of the shining rivers, of the
gardens filled with fruit trees and flowers, and of the snow-clad
mountains in the distance, was magnificent in the extreme. In the centre
of the palace was a large hall filled with pillars, one of the finest
buildings in the world, and round this hall were built the grand
reception rooms of the king.

The ruins of Shushan, the City of Lilies, were discovered by Sir Fenwick
Williams in the year 1851, and the bases of the very pillars which
supported the roof of the great Rab-shakeh's splendid home may be seen
this very day on the plain between the two rivers.

But who was this Rab-shakeh, and how came he to live in the most
glorious palace in the world? He was a Jew, a foreigner, a descendant of
those Jews whom Nebuchadnezzar took captive, and carried into Assyria.
Yet, although one of an alien race, we find him in one of the highest
offices of the Persian court, namely, the office of Rab-shakeh.

This word Rab, so often found in the Bible,