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with him! That couldn’t happen with no King. And the priests of Marduk, by the time I came to serious work in the temple and palace, were really despising Nabonidus. And so were many other people too.
    “To tell you the truth, I never knew the whole secret of Nabonidus. If we could call him up, you know, as the Witch of Endor called up the dead prophet Samuel, disturbing his sleep, remember, so that Saul the King could talk to him…if we could call up Nabonidus he might tell us wondrous things. But that is not my mission now, to become a necromancer or a sorcerer, it’s to find the stairway to heaven, and I am done with the fog and the mist in which the lost souls linger begging for someone to call a name.
    “Besides, maybe Nabonidus has gone into the light. Maybe he’s mounted the stairs. He didn’t live his life in cruelty ordebauchery but devotion to a god who was not the god of his city, that’s all.
    “I only saw him once, and that was during the last days of my life, and he was all caught up in the plot of course, and he seemed to me a dead man already, a King whose time had passed, and he seemed also blessed with an indifference to life. All he wanted, on that last day when we met, or that night, was that Babylon would not be sacked. That’s what everybody wanted. That’s how I lost my soul.
    “But I’ll come to that awful part soon enough.
    “I was talking about being alive. I didn’t give a damn about Nabonidus. We lived in the rich Hebrew quarter. It was filled with beautiful houses; we made the walls then about six feet thick, which I know sounds mad to you today, but you cannot imagine how effectively it kept our houses cool; they were sprawling affairs, with many anterooms and big dining rooms, and all these rooms surrounded a large central courtyard. My father’s house was four stories high and the wooden rooms above were full of cousins and the elderly aunts, and they often didn’t come all the way down to the yard, but merely sat in the open courtyard windows taking the breeze.
    “The courtyard was Eden. It was like a small portion of the hanging gardens themselves, and the other public gardens all over the city. It was big. We had a fig tree, a willow tree, and two date palms, and flowers of all kinds, grape vines covering the arbor where we could take our evening meal, and fountains that never stopped sending their rivers of sparkling water down into the basins where the fish darted about like living jewels.
    “The brickwork was glazed and beautiful, and had many figures in it, having been built by some Akkadian before us, before the Chaldeans came, and it was full of blue and red and yellow and, flowers, but there was also plenty of grass in the courtyard, and then the room off it where the ancestors were buried.
    “I grew up playing among the date palms and flowers, and I loved it till the day…the day I died. I loved lying out there in the late afternoon listening to the water of the fountains, andignoring everybody who kept telling me I ought to be in the scriptorium copying psalms or some such. I wasn’t lazy by nature. I just sort of did what I wanted to do. I got away with things. But I wasn’t bad by any stretch; in fact, I was far and away the best scholar of the family, at least as I saw it, and many times, my uncles, though they didn’t want to admit it, would bring to me three versions of a Psalm by King David and ask me which I thought was the most nearly correct, and then they’d follow my judgment.
    “We had no official gathering place for prayers, of course, because we had such grandiose plans for going home and building the Temple of Solomon all over again; I mean no one was going to throw up any little street-side temple in Babylon. The temple would have to be done according to sacred dimensions, and after I was dead and cursed and had become the Servant of the Bones, the Jews did go home and build that temple. In fact, I know they did, because I saw it