Page 128 - The Prophet-statesman a Drama of Daniel

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None could retire from the banquet-hall until the king would make the
announcement that the feast was at an end.

The prophet had retired. All were deeply impressed and a pall of fear and

apprehension rested upon the guests, but most of them shared with the king the idea
that the blow predicted by the prophet could not possibly fall as promptly as the sage’s
words would indicate. For had not the Medes and Persians that day retired and were
not the mighty walls and gates of Babylon still impregnable?

The king was about to declare the feast at an end when there were distant cries of
alarm, the sound of the hasty movement of many feet, and before one soul had retired,
the doors of the banquet-hall burst open and in poured a stream of hardy warriors with

swords drawn. The leaders rushed toward King Belshazzar and without the slightest
hesitation, hewed him in pieces with their swords. The others deployed about the great
hall and massacred men and women, lords and ladies, without distinction. The
banquet-hall of feasting, debauchery and blasphemy, became a place of carnage, a

charnel-house. The ornate tiles of Nebuchadnezzar’s throne-room were covered with
the blood of the favored aristocracy of Babylon.

When the slaughter of the king and his erstwhile guests was complete, the carnage

ceased. Gobryas was there, Aspatha was there. They had personally led their troops
under the walls and through the opening from which the water had been almost
completely diverted.

Totally unobserved by the keepers of the walls and gates, all of whom lay in a
drunken stupor, the picked troops of the Medes and Persians had poured in and had
slain the unprepared garrison wherever they found them. History has no record of a
more complete surprise-attack, or one more totally effective, the attackers losing

scarcely a man.

But after the king and his guests had been killed, Gobryas gave command that the

massacre should cease, and that none of the palace attendants, who had fled and
hidden trembling in various parts of the huge building, should be harmed.

Gobryas demanded of one of these, to be escorted to the apartment of the
dowager-queen. He was immediately admitted, as the old Queen Rhea, on this

dreadful night had not retired.