with occasionally. There are here and there little colonies of black emancipated slaves and brown fellaheen, who contrive to live under the shelter of a rock, and not only to raise as much food as is necessary for their own support, but a little also to spare for their mounted protectors or masters, who pay them a flying visit as they scamper through the wilds. As you approach to Chaldea and the banks of the Euphrates, the monuments of ancient civilisation begin to multiply. The power of Assyria and Babylonia was there sufficient to repress the wandering and the predatory propensities of the Bedouins, by either confining them to towns and villages, or giving to their restless life a more peaceful and protective character as the rural constabulary of an immense region studded with tents and covered with cattle. Now it is desolate, and covered with marshes, which are formed by the yearly inundations of the river; and instead of being employed, as in the days of Chaldea's glory, to irrigate the fields and the gardens of a rich and a fertile plain, they now serve only to make the place more desolate and more inaccessible to all the arts of man.

We arrived in safety at Hillah, or Hellah, a town of some ten or fifteen thousand inhabitants, and built on both sides of the river Euphrates-the eastern and the western division being connected by a bridge of boats. The river of Babylon is very small-nothing like the Thames-the bridge of Hillah is not one-third of the length of Waterloo or London Bridge; but then the Euphrates is liable to tremendous floods, which cover the whole country with water. The land is an immense flat, a deposit of mud and sand, and, therefore, what geologists might call a mountain,

being the top strata of the world-the reverse of Sinai, granitic, therefore low. Here Babylon once stood, the glory of the Chaldees' excellency, and the parent of political civilisation. Built upon sand, and mud, and bog—of bricks made of the very clay on which it rested-without any solid foundation for a basis-without even a fragment of primitive rock to sustain it, on the most ineligible spot which human judgment could select for raising a perma-. nent structure of any description whatever. By the most indomitable perseverance, and something like superhuman and fabulous strength, as a type of mundane greatness resting on superficial merits, it suddenly rose up like a tower unto heaven, and for ages prescribed its laws to the whole civilised world. Here art and science began to develop their energies. Here astronomy commenced its nocturnal and laborious observations. Here astrology devised its sublime and mysterious system of analogical harmonies. Here industry did what it has since done in Holland—it defied the inclemency of weather, the hostility of the elements, and the infertility of the soil; and in the midst of a howling wilderness of Nature it created a garden of Eden, and showed, even in the primitive ages of society, what man in all ages has in some such inhospitable region demonstrated, that many of the very wildest and most desolate spots on earth can be changed into green fields and smiling gardens, and made the happy home of a dense population of men and cattle, if there be only a strong governing power to direct the combined strength of society.

Babylon is the converse of Horeb. Horeb is the barren and desolate rock from which the stern but unitary law

was promulgated, upon which was destined gradually to rise the superstructure of Christian civilisation. Babylon is the sand, the clay, and the brick and mortar, and human skill and energy, out of which arose the whole political economy of that society which consists of various nations and tribes of men, governed by different laws, and holding various creeds and articles of faith, and aiming at different ends, opposing, superseding, overriding, overruling, and subverting one another. The one is the germ to be developed of a unitary system which is to cover the earth and embrace all nations; the other, of a system which was to be equally extensive, embracing within its area of expansion the whole habitable world. Babylon was first because its principle of division being doomed to everlasting reprobation, it must come to a final end without hope of redemption. Horeb is posterior because its unitary idea is the triumphant principle which, after being reviled, abused, corrupted, misapplied, and led captive by, and interleagued and intermarked with the Babylonian idea, is at last disenthralled, separated, and redeemed and purified from the conflicting elements of strife and sectarianism, which all come from Babel as a source, and are all, without exception, involved in its doom.

There is not a better spot on the wide surface of the globe for laying the foundation of a city, and the capital of an unstable and a crumbling empire. It was chosen by an unerring eye that saw the end in the beginning ; the same eye that chose Mount Horeb as its corresponding opposite.

I shall not trouble you with a description of the ruins,

for that can be no novelty to you. I shall merely relate the extraordinary adventure that occurred to me amidst the desolate relics of the queen of nations. There are three great ruins visible on the site; one is called the Birs Nimrod, and supposed to be the Tower of Babel. It is about two hundred and thirty feet in height, and is consequently considerably more than half of the tower in bulk and nearly one half in height. On the top of this a small piece of solid brick architecture still remains. The whole mound is evidently constructed-first of mere soil for the interior of the area, then of a solid mass of sunburnt brick; outside of this there once was a facing of fire-burnt brick. Many of these fire-burnt bricks still remain. But the ruin forms a quarry for building the town of Hellah; all whose houses are no doubt only reprints as the printers would say-of old Babylonian edifices. In digging for such materials numerous caverns have been opened or formed in the solid mass, so that the heap has a most irregular appearance, and contains a variety of circuitous paths, holes, crevices, vaults, and tunnels, in which one may lose one's wits with fear, if not one's way, with confusion.

In running round these various heaps of rubbish, our party separated into several divisions unintentionally: one looking at the fire-bricks and the inscriptions which faced them; others peeping into holes and corners, and others searching for astrological signets, many of which have been found here, and some of them ingeniously described as well as represented by excellent engravings in Landseer's "Sabæan Researches." In this state of party division Markland and I kept pretty close together,

in

though we often parted, for he was extremely anxious to find something small and curious. I had no hope of this, and all my thoughts were of a larger description; so I was generally in advance. As I hurried on, dressed in my Arab dress, a spear in my hand and a pair of pistols my girdle, I came to a huge fissure between two heaps of burnt brick and rubbish, much of it vegetable matter, and mixed up with a few live plants and weeds of a sickly description. I looked into this opening, and thinking it was a crooked passage through which I might pass, I stepped in, but cautiously. Luckily for myself I carefully observed every object before me, for there, eagerly kneeling on a projecting part of the wall, and handling a species of reptile resembling a locust or large caterpillar, which it thrust into its mouth with most voracious appetite, I beheld a creature as like a human being in outward form as a monster could be without belonging, soul, body, and spirit, to the human race divine. I had only time to note distinctly the long, thick, matted hair that covered his back and shoulders, the dirty, clotted, grisly beard that entirely concealed his mouth and chin, and the thick fur that wrapped all the inferior portion of his body like the legs of a goat in its blanket of hair, when the creature turned round and eyed me with looks of thrilling and petrifying power. I felt as if the head of the Gorgon Medusa was staring at me. My blood retreated from my face; my very heart instead of throbbing seemed unable to beat. I verily believe I should have stood there and died by conversion into stone or something quite as insensible to pain or pleasure if the creature had not uttered a savage or ferocious grin, and then screaming aloud, rushed