Babylon

Babylon is not visited directly in the supplied scenes; it enters Maren’s life through reading and images. The ancient place becomes both an object of tentative study and a source of monstrous imagery, linking her growing attention to Jason with her contemplation of beauty that conceals danger.

Babylon in Maren’s Reading

While working in the library, Maren takes down The Legends of Babylon and sits opposite Jason, a boy who has been watching her. Much of the book goes over her head, but she enjoys trying to understand it. After noticing her subject, Jason writes that she might like Reginald Toomey’s I Dreamed of the Tigris, offering to lend his copy if it is unavailable in the catalog. Babylon thus opens a quiet exchange: Maren’s reading gives Jason a reason to approach her, while the effort of reading matters to her in its own right.

Stone Carvings and Monstrous Allure

Weeks later, Maren pores over photographs of Babylonian stone carvings in the British Museum. She describes the carved monsters as beautiful, polished in granite, but the beauty is inseparable from threat: one creature tempts an adventurer with the ghostly perfumes of the hanging gardens, though their flowers have been dust for a thousand years. The spell leaves him human for only a moment or two longer. Babylon’s imagery therefore makes attraction precarious, joining splendor to deception and transformation. In these scenes, it is not a backdrop but an imaginative landscape through which Maren reads the perilous pull of the beautiful and the monstrous.