The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate

At Beroth they witnessed a sacrifice to the local Baal. The purple veil of the temple was drawn aside, revealing a huge squat bronzen statue of the god, horned and winged and gleaming with unguents. A fire crackled in Baal's potbelly.

Six matrons of the city's leading families stepped proudly forward to hand their first-born sons—children less than a year old, swaddled and bound—to shaven, skull-capped priests in gauzy purple robes. The priests paraded up the steps to the platform beside the god's outstretched hands and placed the children on these hands of hot metal. The screaming victims flopped like fish, rolled down the slope of the divine forearms, and fell through the gap between the god's elbows into the fire below. The twang of the harp, the clang of the sistrum, and the swelling sound of the hymn half drowned their shrieks; the stench of burning flesh mingled with the heavy odors of perfume and incense. Priests and priestesses, with their skirts hiked up to their waists and their eyelids painted green, pranced in the measures of a sacred dance.

When Myron and Bessas expressed their horror, Kothar snapped: "Hold your tongues, mortals, if you would not be torn to pieces! These folk take their religion to heart and will suffer no gibes from unclean out-landers."

After Beroth, they had passed through Sidon with its crowded, bustling harbor behind a meager breakwater, where fishermen's nets, dying in the sun, stretched from house to house like gigantic cobwebs. They paused at Old Tyre with its stinking dye works, filling the narrow streets with their reek, while New Tyre frowned across the water at them from its fortified island.

Myron had fraternized in the taverns with many Phoenician men of business. These were portly, full-bearded, hook-nosed men in robes and conical caps. Golden rings gleamed on their fingers and in their ears, and the dwarfish images of the Pataecian gods, in gold and crystal, hung round their necks.

The Punic merchants were men of a breed quite different from an adventurous pedant like Myron, or a bluff and brutal warrior like Bessas, or a mystical seer like Kothar. Despite a certain somber austerity of manner, they were often affable and sometimes even kindly, but in an abstracted way, because all the time they were really thinking of trade and profits ...

"Should you learn the shape of the earth, Master Myron, how would that affect our trade routes in the Western Ocean? Could our ships range on forever without fear of falling over the edge?"

"Aye, Master Myron, your servant has heard of your Greek Iliad. Can you purpose a plan whereby we could have it copied and sold at a profit?"

"The land of Kush? We know little of it here. But I will make it worth your while, friend Myron, to submit a confidential report on the openings in that land for imports and exports ..."

Yet these Phoenicians were no weaklings. They would fight like fiends in defense of their cities and their trade routes. They would defy stormy seas, man-eating savages, and strange gods in their eagerness to open up new lands to trade. But they looked upon Bessas' Aryan notions of honor as childish. Insult or rail at one and, instead of losing his temper in turn, he would merely say, well, do you wish to make a deal or do you not?

At length Myron wearied of their implacable commercialism. He was glad to reach Akko, the southernmost large Phoenician city.

In Akko the commander of the Persian garrison, to whom they applied for fodder, had warned them of a plague at Yapho, farther down the coast. They therefore turned inland, leaving behind them the white beaches around the mouth of the Belos, where men shoveled the gleaming sand into sacks to sell to the glassmakers. In Shechem, a Samaritan with his face tattooed blue had told them of a valley of ill fame ...

"Bessas!" exclaimed Myron. "This must be that Valley of Thieves whereof the man in Shechem warned us. He said that we should traverse it just before we reached Eshkol, and that it has an evil repute."

"Vaush! 'Twill prove the boys' mettle as well as their camping skill. We'll keep a double watch; the tent is small for three anyway."

"You mean, it's small for four. You occupy the room of two."

"I should say, it were small for two: one normal man like me and two half-sized Pygmies like you." Bessas continued: