When I was overseas, I got the chance to walk through ancient Babylon, which had been rebuilt and preserved by Saddam Hussein in addition to a lavish palace addition next door. When I say “lavish”, don’t confuse the word with some empty top-shelf adjective; this palace is the embodiment of the word itself. Though it had long since been looted of every scrap of ornamentation the palace still radiated an air of quiet grandiosity.
I took a trip up there with some other guys from my comm shop for the day and spent hours just wandering through the palace, looking through room after room in awe. It was as if I had been transported back in time to some ancient world in which kings and emperors wielded their wealth as heavily as they did their swords.
Eventually I found the roof of the building and gazed out over the fertile plain; the palace had been built on the bank of the Euphrates River, and as far as I could see, jungle trees and lush, green grasses waved in the gentle breeze. Far from the harsh desert that Kuwait had been, Iraq was temperate, even tropical in places. As I looked out over the plain, I noticed the ruins of the ancient palace.
Once, the ruins had been King Nebuchadnezzar palace, every bit as opulent and beautiful as Saddam Hussein’s more modern (and much, much taller) palace; I have no doubt that Hussein was trying to outdo the ancient king with the construction of his ziggurat, but the ancient palace had stood there for thousands of years; I had to see it up close.
From the roof of Saddam’s palace, the old palace looked nothing so much like an immense stone labyrinth; there was no roof to any of it, just walls forming what appeared to be a giant maze. I quickly grabbed a few of my friends and told them we had to check out the maze, see what we could find. We walked over to the ancient ruins, our boots stirring up little clouds of dust as we headed up the unpaved dirt road.
The walls of the ruins were covered in half-obliterated carvings as we wound our way deeper and deeper into the passages; the stone was cracked in many places, and piles of rubble littered the ground. Eventually, we came to an immense door, leading into an absolutely pitch-black room. The cool, damp breeze that blew out of the doorway carried the harsh smell of bat guano with it; the ground around the doorway was covered in a thick layer of the stuff, dried to stucco-like consistency.
We ventured inside the doorway and shined our flashlights up in amazement. The roof of this underground room seemed to reach up and up, almost out of sight. I remember turning to my friend and calling the place Moria. The floor was completely coated with bat guano; every single inch of the place was covered in the thick goo. We shined our flashlights up and up and saw them: tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of bats, clinging to the roof far above us, clambering over one another like gravity-defying rats.
As our lights probed into their mass, they began to detach from the ceiling, disturbed by our presence in their domain. As one, the entire body of them swooped down off of the ceiling. The air was choked with their leathery wings and harsh squeaking.
We turned tail and run, four full-grown men, armed to the teeth, screaming like little girls, for the door, lost in the middle of the roiling cloud of bats. We made it out of the doorway, and the bats poured out around us like smoke from a fire, flapping off into the bright sunlight, disoriented. We ran all the way back to the main palace again, terrified almost out of our minds. Luckily, none of us had been bitten by the vermin, but that was no comfort for any of us. I think it took a couple of months for me to stop thinking I felt them flapping around my head at random times.
I went to the river to wash the muck off of my boots and slipped and fell face-first into it.
Babylon.
