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Without dirt, there could never have been cities or great kings.

So claimed the people of Babylon, who knew full well that their civilization had been fashioned

out of mud.

Back in the beginning, when all the earth had been ocean, Lord Marduk, King of the gods,

had built a raft of reeds, covered it with dust, mingled it with water to form a primordial

slime and out of this, raised a home for himself, the Essegiola, the first building in the world.

And this could still be seen eons later standing in the heart of Babylon, but it had needed

no temple to make the Babylonians appreciate what could be done with earth and water.

They knew it in their bones.

I will take blood, Marduk had announced in the earliest days of the world, and I will

sculpt flesh, and I will form the first man.

So that was the form of vampire novelist Tom Holland.

Dominate, that was book Persian fire talking about Babylon.

Well, when I wrote that, I had no idea that Marduk had actually sounded like Winston Churchill,

but that wasn't Churchill at all.

That was like, I will take Marduk.

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