bright and countless as the stars in that other world above; while rearing its head, like some ghostly giant, high over shaft and column, fortress, palace, and obelisk, rose a lofty tower that seemed to demand of heaven its secrets, and bade defiance to the sky.

Here, on the summit of this tower stood a human figure, gazing fixedly on the planets already visible, scanning the heavens with rapt attention; calm, serious, abstracted, wrestling, as it were, with all its mental forces, for the triumph of intellect, the mastery of thought.

It was Assarac, priest of Baal, reading the stars, as a student reads a book writ in some symbolical language of which he holds the key.

Assarac the priest, the man for whom in that voluptuous climate, amidst that gorgeous people, delighted in splendour, in pleasure, in luxury, in warfare, glory, arts, arms, and magnificence, the world could furnish but one attraction—the insatiable craving of ambition—to lull which he must rule supreme; therefore he trained himself, night and day, with the weapons of victory, seeking diligently that knowledge which constitutes power.

The act of worship is amongst all creation indigenous and peculiar to man. As he alone stands erect and raises his front without effort towards heaven, so he bends the knee in reasoning adoration, neither cowering down with his head in the dust, nor grovelling on his belly, like other creatures, in abject fear; but wanton, unstable, and extravagant even in his noblest aspirations, this viceroy of earth has been ever prone to waver in his allegiance, eager to amplify his worship of the one true God into a thousand false religions, more or less beautiful, poetical, and absurd. Amongst these, none could be less unworthy than that earliest form of superstition which attributed to the celestial bodies certain properties of power and knowledge, such as could affect the present no less than they predicted the future. Man's intellect felt elevated and purified by scientific communion with the book of Fate as written on the luminous pages of the sky, while his soul seemed scarce debased by an adoration that lifted it at least to the visible and material heaven. On the wide-stretching plains of Western Asia, in the warm cloudless Assyrian night, with the lamps of heaven flashing out their radiance in uninterrupted splendour from the centre to the boundless horizon, it was no wonder that students and sages should have accepted for deities those distant worlds of fire on which eyes, brain, hopes, thoughts, and aspirations were nightly fixed—the guides of their science, the exponents of their history, the arbiters of their fate.

While the rude camel-driver, as he plodded by night through the trackless desert, relied, no less than the early mariner, for progress and safety on the stars, priests in their temples, kings in their palaces, consulted the same changeless, passionless, inscrutable witnesses, for the web of policy, the conduct of warfare, the furtherance of love, desire, ambition, or revenge. Ere long, by an inevitable process in the human mind, the instructor of their course came to be looked on as the originator of events; and that which began only with an assumption that it could foretell, was soon credited with the power to bias, to prevent, or to destroy.

Then arose an idolatry which seemed irresistible to the noblest and boldest nations of the ancient world, which, notwithstanding their own sublime creed, possessed a strong fascination for the Chosen People themselves. Yav, Nebo, Bel, and Ashtaroth[1] came to be worshipped as living deities, reigning and revealing themselves through the planets that bore these names. The Seven Stars[2] were believed to time the inevitable march of the universe to their seven tones of mysterious music, unheard by mortal ears only because it never ceased nor faltered in its eternal diapason. The twelve months of the year were sacred, each to its especial luminary. Thirty stars were worshipped as the Consulting Gods. Twelve to the north, twelve to the south, were believed respectively to compel the destinies of living men and dead, the whole twenty-four bearing the title of Judges of the World. And finally, lest superstition should overlook one single object of its adoration, or idolatry fail in the smallest detail to sin against its Creator, priests, temples, sacrifices, and votive offerings were assigned to those countless worlds that gem a Southern night, under the collective title of the Host of Heaven.

Assarac looked abroad, above, around, below—with the confident glance of a monarch who reviews his powers, with the critical attention of a calculator who sums up his total, with the visionary gaze of a prophet who forecasts his destiny, yet not entirely without something of that astute and wary expression which on the magician's face seems to scan and dominate, while it half mistrusts, the implements of his art.

He was yet a young man, to count by years, and his dark almond-shaped eyes had lost none of the fire and softness which are only combined before middle life; but above his black eyebrows there were lines traced deep in the tawny forehead, and at his temples a few white hairs already mingled with the black bushy ringlets that, confined by a fillet of gold, were drawn back in clustering profusion to his neck and shoulders. His arms, but for the heavy gold bracelets that clasped their wrists, were bare, as were his strong muscular legs from knee to ankle; he wore sandals, fastened by straps; of embroidered leather crossing and recrossing so as to form no slight protection for foot and instep. His long gown of white linen, open to the breast and looped so as to give the legs freedom of action at the knee, was bordered with cunning needlework wrought in tissue of gold and scarlet silk, its arrow-headed characters displaying many a dark sentence and time-honoured record. A tasselled cord fastened it at the waist, and a deep fringe also of scarlet tissue, hung below its edges, while an ample cloak, white and embroidered like the gown, fell from one shoulder and trailed behind the priest as he stood erect and motionless, looking out into the night.

On his solid earrings, on his golden bracelets, on the fillet that bound his forehead, on the very clasps that secured his sandals, was graven the mystic circle that, with or without its winged figure, constituted a memorial and a symbol of fate, omnipotence, and eternity. If he worshipped the stars, he could yet conceive of a power so supreme as to control and dominate their influence: nor could his religion in its aspirations for this ineffable essence find a better emblem of its ideal than that geometrical figure which has neither beginning nor end.

He bore in his hand a lotus-flower lately gathered, and was careful, with something of superstitious reverence, to preserve its freshness; though once, when it caught his eye by chance, a smile of mingled scorn and curiosity wreathed his full red lips; but he looked aloft again the next instant with a keener and more rapt attention in his gaze. If he speculated on the symbolical interpretation of the plant, it was not there he sought the power and lore that should enable him to control his kind.

Though he carried two knives in his girdle, though his limbs were massive and muscular, his chest deep and his head erect, the man's habits seemed those of peace and study, not of action and warfare. His face, for all its indications of intellectual virility, was somewhat too rounded in outline, too full and flaccid, rather perhaps unmanly than effeminate, and bearing an expression of sustained effort, as of one who continually strives to hide and overcome a