above the level of the streets, I sat down and looked about
me.

Everywhere around me stretched the ruins of the great city, now as
fallen and as deserted as Babylon herself. The majestic loneliness
of the place was something awful. Even the vision of companies and
battalions of men crossing the plain towards the north with the
moonlight glistening on their spear-points, did little to lessen this
sense of loneliness. I knew that these were the regiments which I was
destined to command, travelling to the camp where I must meet them. But
in such silence did they move that no sound came from them even in the
deathly stillness of the perfect night, so that almost I was tempted to
believe them to be the shadow-ghosts of some army of old Kor.

They vanished, and musing thus I think I must have dozed. At any rate it
seemed to me that of a sudden the city was as it had been in the days
of its glory. I saw it brilliant with a hundred colours; everywhere was
colour, on the painted walls and roofs, the flowering trees that lined
the streets and the bright dresses of the men and women who by thousands
crowded them and the marts and squares. Even the chariots that moved to
and fro were coloured as were the countless banners which floated from
palace walls and temple tops.

The enormous place teemed with every activity of life; brides being
borne to marriage and dead men to burial; squadrons marching, clad
in glittering armour; merchants chaffering; white-robed priests and
priestesses passing in procession (who or what did they worship? I
wondered); children breaking out of school; grave philosophers debating
in the shadow of a cool arcade; a royal person making a progress
preceded by runners and surrounded by slaves, and lastly the multitudes
of citizens going about the daily business of life.

Even details were visible, such as those of officers of the law chasing
an escaped prisoner who had a broken rope tied to his arm, and a
collision between two chariots in a narrow street, about the wrecks of
which an idle mob gathered as it does to-day if two vehicles collide,
while the owners argued, gesticulating angrily, and the police and
grooms tried to lift a fallen horse on to its feet. Only no sound of the
argument or of anything else reached me. I saw, and that was all. The
silence remained intense, as well it might do, since those chariots must
have come to grief thousands upon thousands of years ago.

A cloud seemed to pass b