open thy door.
Open thy door that I may enter.
If thou dost not open thy door,
I will attack it, I will break down the bars,
I will cause the dead to rise and devour the living.[29]

[Footnote 29: Records of the Past.]

Ishtar was admitted. But Aralu was the land whence none return. Once
in, she could not get out until, ultimately, the incommunicable name
was uttered. The epic says that, in the interim, there was on earth
neither love nor loving. In possible connection with which
incantations have been found, deprecating "the consecrated harlots
with rebellious hearts that have abandoned the holy places."[30]

[Footnote 30: Lenormant: _op. cit._]

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 flouris