he conformity between the underlying
conceptions, that, at almost the first monition, Isis, whose veil no
mortal had raised, lifted it from her black breast and suckled there
the infant Jesus. Then, presently, in temples that had teemed, the
silence of the desert brooded. The tide of life retreated, an entire
theogony vanished, exorcised, both of them, by the sign of the cross.

At sight of the unimagined emblem, a priesthood who in secret
sanctuaries had evolved nearly all but that, flung themselves into
crypts beneath, pulled the walls down after them, burying unembalmed
the arcana of a creed whose spirit still is immortal.

In Egypt, then, only tombs and necropoles survived. But it is
legendary that, in the solitudes of the Thebaid, dispossessed eidolons
of Ra, appearing in the shape of chimeras, terrified anchorites, to
whom, with vengeful eyes, they indicated their ruined altars.

IV

BEL-MARDUK

The inscriptions of Assyrian kings have, many of them, the monotony of
hell. Made of boasts and shrieks, they recite the capture and sack of
cities; the torrents of blood with which, like wool, the streets were
dyed; the flaming pyramids of prisoners; the groans of men impaled;
the cries of ravished women.

The inscriptions are not all infernal. Those that relate to
Assurbanipal--vulgarly, Sandanapallos,--are even ornate. But
Assurbanipal, while probably fiendish and certainly crapulous, was
clearly literary besides. From the spoil of sacked cities this
bibliofilou took libraries, the myths and epics of creation, sacred
texts from Eridu and Ur, volumes in the extinct tongues of Akkad and
Sumer, first editions of the Book of God.

These, re-edited in cuneiform and kept conveniently on the second
floor of his palace, fell with Nineveh, where, until recently
recovered, for millennia they lay. Additionally, from shelves set up
in the days of Khammurabi--the Amraphel of Genesis--Nippur has yielded
ghostly tablets and Borsippa treasuries of Babylonian ken.

These, the eldest revelations of the divine, are the last that man has
deciphered. The altars and people that heard them first, the marble
temples, the ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, are dust. The
entire civilization from which they came has vanished. Yet, traced
with a wooden reed on squares of clay, are flights of little arrows,
from which, magically, it all returns. Miraculously with these books a
world revives. Fashioned, some of them, at an epoch