The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate

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Golden lamps, hung by chains from the sooty ceiling, smoked and flickered, sending forth an olivine odor. The little yellow flames burnt steadily for a time, then writhed and fluttered as though struck by a sudden draft. Yet no breeze could penetrate to this secluded chamber, whose only opening to the outer world was a doorway closed by a heavy, wooden, copper-studded door.

At one end of the cluttered room, a striped hyena paced to and fro in its cage. Its claws clicked on the stone and, as it turned at the end of its walk, its eyes shone green in the lamplight.

The time was before dawn on the morning of the third day of the month Nisanu, in the twentieth year of the reign of Xerxes—the Great King, the King of All Kings, the King of the Persians and the Medes, the King of the Wide World, the son of Darius, the chief of the Achaemenid clan. The place was a chamber of the west side of the small palace of Darius at Persepolis, in the rugged mountains of Parsa.

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