Page 81 - The Prophet-statesman a Drama of Daniel

CHAPTER XIX

THE BLOW FALLS

A whole year had passed since the king had seen the vision of the great tree and

Daniel had given him the interpretation. Princess Hanniel was now nearly nine months
old.

The spirit of pride and self-exaltation in King Nebuchadnezzar seemed

periodically to come to high-tide and to overflow and submerge his whole being, until
it became a terrible obsession. Seated upon his throne, and clad in all of his royal
robes, on this particular morning, he was irritable, unreasonable and almost violent to
all who entered his presence. Never had his courtiers seen him in a worse humor, and

they trembled with fear as to the manner in which this evil temper might manifest
itself.

They saw his descend from his lofty throne, stalk across the tiled floor of the

throne-room and disappear through the doorway leading to the staircase. At a safe
distance they followed him and saw that he ascended the stairway and went out on the
spacious roof of the palace, the very point from which he had viewed the furnace into
which he had cast the Hebrew officials who refused to worship his image, and saw not

only the noble three, but a fourth as well.

It was a perfect perspective from which to view the great city, the highest point in
it, and with unobstructed vision on four sides.

He strode from parapet to parapet and feasted his eyes on the wonders of the
metropolis, the spacious and lofty public buildings, the sumptuous homes, the well-
kept parks, the bridges across the Euphrates, all of which had been brought into being

since his accession to power.

His eyes rested with the most complete satisfaction on that masterpiece of genius,

“the hanging gardens,” a mountain within a city which he had built to gratify the
desire of his adored Rhea to gaze upon green mountains like those in her native
Media. Then over the walls of the city swept his gaze until his eyes again rested for a
moment on that great golden image, a replica of himself, as it still stood, impressive
and glistening, in the broad plain of Dura.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes to one as a result of a job well done, a