Chapter LXIV: The Destruction of Jerusalem

[Sidenote: To the Tower of Antonia]

The sounds of the footsteps increased. Overwhelmed as I was by the trial that my mind had just undergone, I sat nearly unconscious of external things till I was roused by a strong grasp from behind and saw myself surrounded by armed men. I was passively bound; and indifferent to fortune, was flung into a litter and conveyed to the Tower of Antonia. In this vast circle of fortifications, the citadel of the former Roman garrison, the Jewish government was now held, or rather Onias lorded it over the population. He had discovered my dwelling, and the first fruit of his knowledge was my seizure and that of my family. He was now playing the last throw of that desperate game to which his life had been given. Power was within his reach, yet there I stood to thwart him once more, and he was resolved to extinguish the first source of his danger. Yet I was popular, and with all his daring, he desired to cast the odium of my death on the Sanhedrin. I was to be tried on the ground of treating with the enemy; my family were seized, to shake my courage by their peril, and I was to be forced to an ignominious confession as the price of saving their lives.

At the mouth of a dungeon a torch was put into my hands. I was left to make my way, and the iron door was closed that had shut out many a wretch from light and life. At the bottom of the steps I found a man sleeping tranquilly on the stone. The glare of the torch disturbed him; he started up, and, looking in my face, exclaimed in the buoyant and cheerful tone by which I should have recognized him under any disguise:

[Sidenote: The Captain Tells of Constantius]

“By Jupiter! I knew that we were to meet! If I had to sleep to-night at the bottom of the sea, I should wager my simitar to a straw that our bodies would be found lying side by side. I presume we mount the scaffold together to-morrow for the benefit of Jewish morality. Well, then, since our fates are to be joined, let us begin by—supping together.”

It was the captain! He laid his store on the ground; but I was heartsick, and could only question him of Naomi, and the misfortune which had betrayed him into the hands of the tyrant.

“Our history is the briefest in the world,” was the answer; “we found ourselves pursued, and we fled. The pursuers followed faster than my fair mistress could run, or I could carry her. So we were overtaken before we could clear the rocks, and our captors were forthwith carrying us to the Roman camp, in great joy at their prize. But it was intended to be an unlucky day for the legions. We came across a Jewish troop, headed by a fine, bold fellow, who dashed upon the captors and fluttered them like a flight of pigeons. Nothing could promise better than the affair, for my new captor turned out to be an old friend, and one of the most gallant that ever commanded a trireme. Many a day the Cypriot and I chased (Nemesis forgive us for it!) the pirates through the Cyclades: I, however, did not know then what pleasant personages the brothers of the free-trade might be.”

He smiled, and the sigh that followed the smile told how little he had since found to compensate for his old adventures.

“A Cypriot. Your captor was my son, my Constantius!” I exclaimed.

“The very man. When he had found me out under my Arab trappings, he was all hospitality, and invited me to share the honors of his princely father’s house. His troop soon scattered every man to his home, and I was gazing at the head of an incomparable knave and early acquaintance, Jonathan, nailed up over the gate for some villainy which he had not been as adroit as usual in turning to profit, when Constantius, myself, and that lovely girl, whom I shall never see more”—he bent his brows at the recollection—“were seized by the guard, separated, and sent, I suppose, alike to the dungeon.”

[Sidenote: The Egyptian’s Papers]

Shortly after midnight I was brought before the tribunal. Onias was my accuser, and I was astonished at the dexterity, number, and plausibility of his charges—magic, treachery, the betrayal of my army, the refusal to push the defeated enemy to a surrender, lest by the cessation of the war my ambition should be deprived of its object; and last and most astonishing, the assassination of my kinsman, Jubal, through fear of his testimony!

I made my defense with the fearlessness of one weary of life. Some of the charges I explained; others I promptly repelled. To the imputation of treachery I answered in a single sentence.

“Read that correspondence with the enemy and judge which is the traitor.”

I took the Egyptian’s papers from my sash and flung them on the table. The aspect of my accuser at the words was one that might have made his sternest hater pity him. He gasped, he trembled, he gnashed his teeth in rage and terror, and finally took refuge in the ranks of his followers. But the judges themselves were in visible perplexity; they looked over the papers, held them to the lamps, and examined them in all imaginable ways, until the chief of the Sanhedrin rising, with a frown that fixed all eyes on me, flung the papers at my feet. The deepest silence was round me as I took up the rejected proofs. To my astonishment they were utterly blank!

[Sidenote: The Secret of the Signet]

I now recollected that on my entrance I had been pressed upon by the crowd. In that moment the false papers must have been substituted. I saw the Egyptian gliding away from the side of Onias, and saw by the countenance of my accuser that the tidings of the robbery had just reached him. He now declaimed against me with renewed energy. He was eloquent by nature; the habit of public affairs had given his speaking that character of practical vigor and reality which is essential to great public impression; his fortunes hung in the scale—perhaps his life; and he poured out the whole collected impulse in a torrent of the boldest and most nervous declamation upon my head. Still my name was high; my rank was not to be lightly assailed; my national services were felt; and even the corrupt judicature summoned for my ruin were not so insensible to popular feeling as to violate the forms of law to crush me. The trial lasted during the night. I had the misery to see my wife, my children, Constantius, Naomi, my domestics, my fellow warriors, every human being whom there was a chance of perplexing, or terrifying into testimony, brought forward against me.

As a last resource, on the secret suggestion of the Egyptian, who had his own revenge to satisfy, the adventures of the pirates’ cavern were declaimed upon, and the captain was summoned from his cell. His figure and noble physiognomy made him conspicuous, and a general murmur of admiration arose on his advance to the tribunal. Miriam was at my side. I felt her tremble; her color went and came, and she drank in every tone of his voice with an intense anxiety. But when, in answer to the questions of Onias, he detailed his story, and in answer to the charge of his being an enemy denied that he was either Roman or Greek, Miriam’s spirit hung upon every word.

“A soldier’s best pedigree,” said he, concluding, “is his sword. I know no more than that I was reared in the house of a Cypriot noble, to whom I had been brought by a trader of Alexandria. My protector made me a sailor, and would have made me his heir, but Roman insolence disgusted me, and I left my command, bearing with me no other inheritance than a heart too proud for slavery, my simitar, and this signet, which I have worn from my infancy.”

He took from his bosom a large sculptured gem fastened to a chain of pearls. Miriam put forth her trembling hand for it, read with a starting eye her own name and mine, and exclaiming, “My son! my son!” tottered forward and fell fainting into his arms.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Farewell]

I flew to them both, and never did a wo-worn heart beat with keener joy than when I, too, clasped my son, my long-lost, my first-born. Yet the cloud gathered instantly. Had he not come to take the earliest embrace of his parents in the crisis of their fate—the promise of an unbroken lineage, found only in the day when my country was in the jaws of destruction—the father awaking to those loveliest and happiest ties of nature only when the ax of the traitor or the sword of the enemy was uplifted to cut them asunder forever—the prince, the patriot, the warrior, summoned to the first exercise of his noble rights and duties—when in the next hour a heap of dust might be all that was left of his family and his people!

I clung to my son with a fondness thirsting to repay its long arrear. His desertion in the hands of strangers; the early hardships; the loss of a mother’s love and a father’s protection; the insults and privations that the struggler through the world must bear; the desperate hazards of his life; even the errors into which necessity and circumstance had driven him, rose up in judgment against me; I reproached myself even for the accident, perhaps the irresistible accident, that gave my infant to the roaring waters. But the tears and exclamations of the people round us recalled us. I might then have walked from the hall without any man’s daring to lay a hand upon me, for the public feeling, touched by the discovery of my son, was loud for my instant liberation. But I was not to be satisfied with this imperfect justice, and I demanded that the tribunal should proceed.

[Sidenote: “Shed Not the Innocent Blood”]

The presence of my family was felt too strong for the fears of my persecutor, and he demanded that they should retire. An impression, like the warning of a superior spirit, instantly told me that the parting was forever! The same impression was evidently on their minds, for their parting was like an eternal farewell. The whole group at once gathered round me. Constantius and Salome knelt before me for final forgiveness. My son and his betrothed bowed their heads to ask my blessing. Miriam and Esther came last, and silently hung upon my neck, dissolved in tears of matchless anguish and love. I lifted my eyes and heart to Heaven, and tho oppressed with the terrible conviction of my own fate, put forth my hands and blessed them in the name of the God of Israel. I saw them pass away. My firmness could bear no more; I wept aloud. But with my sorrow there was given a hope—a light across the gloom of my soul. When I saw their stately forms solemnly move along through the fierce and guilty multitude, and the distant portal shut upon them, I thought of the sons and daughters of the great patriarch passing within the door of the ark from the midst of a condemned world.

The night wore on; the people, exhausted by the length of a trial, protracted for the purpose, had left the hall nearly empty; and Onias, now secure of a tribunal that dreaded nothing but the public eye, urged the decision. The judges were his creatures through corruption or fear; his followers alone remained. Sure to be crushed, the fluctuations of hope were gone; and I listened to the powerful and high-wrought harangue of my enemy without a feeling but of admiration for his extraordinary powers, or of pity for their perverter. While he stood, drinking in with ears and eyes the wonder and homage of the audience, I myself called for sentence.

“Scorning,” said I, “to reason with understandings that will not comprehend, and consciences that can not feel, I appeal from the man of blood to the God of mercies; from the worse than man of blood, from the corrupter of justice, to HIM who shall judge the judge; to Him who shall yet pass sentence on all in the sight of earth and heaven.”

The chief of the tribunal rose; my condemnation was upon a lip quivering and pale; he had already in his hand the border of the robe which he was to rend, in sign that the accused was rent from Israel.

A confusion at the portal checked him, and the words resounded: “Shed not the innocent blood!” The voice was as a voice from the sepulcher, melancholy, but searching to the very heart. The guard gave way, and a man, covered from head to foot with a sepulchral garment, rushed up the immense hall. At the foot of the tribunal he flung off the garment, and disclosed a face and form that well might have ranked him among the dwellers of the grave.

“I have come from the tombs,” exclaimed he; “I had lain down to die in the resting-place of my fathers, in the valley of Jehoshaphat. A man in white raiment stood beside me and commanded me to come and bear witness of the truth. The Romans were round me—he led me through them; the battlements were before me—he led me through them; riot, fury, and frenzy stood in my path through your city—he led me through them; and lo! here I come, and proclaim by his command: ‘Shed not the innocent blood.’”

[Sidenote: Onias the Accused]

Onias stood paralyzed. No memory of mine could recall the haggard features of the stranger. The chief of the tribunal in manifest confusion required his name.

“My name,” he answered, with a wild wave of his hand, “is nothing—air—is gone. What I was, is past; what I shall be, the tomb alone must tell; but what I am, is the witness, commissioned to proclaim Onias the betrayer of the blood of your nobles, the slave of Rome, the traitor to his country, the apostate to his religion.”

All hands were lifted up in astonishment. Onias, sick at heart, made a feeble gesture of denial.

“Dares the traitor deny his own handwriting?” was the indignant reply. “Let him read his treason, committed within these twelve hours.”

He stalked over to the guilty Onias and held his letters to the Roman general before his shrinking eye.

While my eyes were fixed on the portal through which had vanished my last hope of happiness, I was startled by an outcry, and I saw the gleam of steel at my throat. Onias, in despair of smiting me by the arm of the law, had made a frenzied effort to destroy me by his own. Quick as lightning the stranger threw himself between us and grasped the assassin; they struggled—they were involved in the large and loose robe and fell together. I sprang forward to separate them. But the deed was done. Onias lay rolling upon the ground; the dagger was in the stranger’s grasp, and it was crimson to the hilt. I could feel no vindictiveness against the dying, and I offered him my hand. He threw a violent expression of scorn into his stiffening features, and cried at convulsive intervals:

“No compassion—no hypocrisy for me—I die as I lived. I hated you, for you thwarted me.—You have the best of the game now; but if I had lived till to-morrow, I should have been lord of Jerusalem.—The Romans will settle all.—You and yours would have been in my power.—You shall perish.—That boy is your son; he was brought to me in his infancy; I hated you as my rival; and I swore that you should never see your first-born again. I sold him to the Alexandrian.—You shall not live to triumph over me; your dungeon shall be your tomb; another night, and you sleep no more, or sleep forever.”

He gathered his mantle over his face and died.

His followers, after the first consternation, demanded vengeance on the stranger. But it was now my time to protect him, and I declared that no man should strike him but through me.

[Sidenote: The Last of Jubal]

“This is noble and generous,” interrupted he, “but useless. I, too, am dying; but I rejoice that I am dying by the wound meant for you. Have I at last atoned? Have you forgotten? Can you forgive? Then, prince of Naphtali, lay your hand upon this heart, and while it beats believe that there you are honored. Time has changed me; misery has extinguished the last trace of what I was. Farewell, my kinsman, friend, chieftain—and remember—Jubal.”

I caught him in my arms; my heart melted at his sufferings, his generous attachment, his heroic devotion, his deep repentance.

“You have more than atoned,” I exclaimed; “you are more than forgiven. Live, my manly, kind, high-hearted Jubal; live for the honor of your race—of your country—of human nature.”

He looked up with a smile of gratitude, and faintly uttering, “I die happy,” breathed in my arms the last breath of one of the most gallant spirits that ever left the world.

Loud shouts abroad and blazes that colored the roof with long columns of lurid light put an end to the deliberation of the tribunal. The enemy were assaulting the citadel, and the mockery of justice was summarily closed by returning me to my dungeon, to await times fitter for the calmness of judicial murder.

[Sidenote: The Dungeon’s Heat]

The assault continued for some hours; but to my cell, sunk in the very foundations of the fortress, day never came; and I lay, still buried in darkness, when I heard sounds like the blows of pickaxes, and from time to time the fall of heavy bodies, followed by a roar. The air grew close, and chill as the dungeon had been, I experienced a sensation of heat still more painful. The heat increased rapidly. I tried to avoid it by shifting my place in the vault. But the evil was not to be baffled—the air grew hotter and hotter. I flung myself on the pavement to draw a cool breath from the stones; they began to glow under me. I ran to the door of the dungeon; it was iron, and the touch scorched me. I shouted, I tore at the walls, at the massive rings in the floor, less perhaps from the hope of thus escaping than from the vague eagerness to deaden present pain by violent effort. But I tore up the pavement and broke down the fragments of the walls in vain. The walls themselves began to split with the heat; smoke eddied through the crevices of the immense stones, and the dungeon was filled with fiery vapor. My raiment encumbered me; I tore it away, and on the floor saw it fall in ashes. I felt the agonies of suffocation; and at last, helpless and hopeless, threw myself down, like my raiment, to be consumed.

I had scarcely touched the stone when I felt it shake and vibrate from side to side. A hollow noise like distant thunder echoed through the vault; the walls shook, collapsed, opened, and I was plunged down a chasm, and continued rolling for some moments in a whirl of stones, dust, earth, and smoke.

When it subsided, I found myself lying on the green sward, in noonday, at the bottom of a valley, with the tower of Antonia covered with the legionaries, five hundred feet above me. The remnants of huge fires round pillars of timber explained the mystery. The enemy had undermined the wall, and by burning the props, had brought it down at the moment of the assault. Onias, the planner of the attack, for which he was to be repaid with the procuratorship of Judea, had placed me in the spot where ruin was to begin, and cheered his dying moments with the certainty that, acquitted or not, there I must be undone!

[Sidenote: Preparations]

I long lay confused and powerless beside my dungeon! But the twilight air revived me, and I crept through the deserted entrenchments of the enemy until I reached one of the gates, where I announced my name, and was received with rejoicings. The heart of my countrymen was heroic to the last, and deeply was its heroism now demanded; for the whole force of the enemy had been brought up for final assault, and when I entered, every portion of the walls was the scene of unexampled battle. Where the ground suffered the approach of troops, the enemy’s columns, headed by archers and slingers innumerable, rushed to the rampart, climbing up the breaches, with their shields covering their heads. Against the towers were wheeled towers filled with troops, who descended on the wall and fought us hand to hand. We felt the continued blows of the battering-rams, shaking the battlements under our feet. Where the ground repelled direct assault, there the military machines poured havoc, and those were the most dreaded of all.

The skill of man, exerted for ages on the arts of compendious slaughter, has scarcely produced the equals of those horrible engines. They threw masses of unextinguishable fire, of boiling water, of burning oil, of red-hot flints, of molten metal, from distances that precluded defense, and with a force that nothing could resist. The catapult shot stones of a hundred-weight from the distance of furlongs, with the straightness of an arrow, and with an impulse that ground everything in their way to powder. The fortitude that scorned the Roman spear, and exulted in the sight of the columns mounting the scaling-ladders, as mounting to sure destruction, quailed before the tremendous power of the catapult. The singular and ominous cry of the watchers, who gave notice of its discharge, “The son cometh,” was a sound that prostrated every man upon his face, until the crash of the walls told that the blow was given.

[Sidenote: “Wo to the City!”]

Every thought that I had now for earth was in the tower of Antonia! But there the legions rendered approach impossible, and I could only gaze from a distance and see, in the bitterness of my soul, the enemy gradually forcing their way from rampart to rampart. It was in vain that I strove to collect a few who would join me in a desperate attempt to succor its defenders. I was left alone, and sitting on the battlements, I took the chance of some friendly spear or stone.

Through all the roar I heard the voice of Sabat, the Ishmaelite: the eternal “Wo!—wo!—wo!” loud as ever, and in appalling unison with the hour. He now came rushing along the wall with the same rapid and vigorous stride as of old, but his betrothed no longer followed him. She was borne in his arms! The stones from the engines thundered against the wall; they tore up the strong buttresses like weeds; they struck away whole ranks of men, and whirled their remnants through the air. They leveled towers and swept battlements away with their defenders at a blow. But Sabat moved unshrinking on his wild mission. His cry now was terrible prophecy.

“A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegroom and the bride, a voice against this whole people.”

He stopped before me, and pointing to the face of his bride, said with a sudden faltering and tears: “She is gone; she is dead. She died last night. I promised to die too. She follows me no more. It is I that must follow her.”

Death was in his face, and my only wonder was that a form so utterly reduced could live and move. I offered him some provision from the basket of a dead soldier at my feet. For the first time he took it, thanked me, and ate. Not less to my surprise, he continued gazing round him on the movements of the enemy, on the temple, the tower of Antonia, and the hills. But his station was eminently perilous, and I pointed out one of the military engines taking its position to play upon the spot where we were. He refused to stir.

“The look may be long,” said he, “when a man looks his last.”

[Sidenote: The Conflict of Heaven and Earth]

I heard the roar of the engine, and leaped from the rampart to escape the discharge. Sabat stood, and again began his cry: “Wo to the city, and to the holy house, and to the people!” The discharge tore up a large portion of the battlement. Sabat never moved limb or feature. The wall was cut away on his right and left, as if it had been cut with an ax. He stood calmly on the projecting fragment with his lips to the lips of his bride. I saw the engine leveled again, and again called to him to escape. He gave me no answer but a melancholy smile; and crying out, with a voice that filled the air: “Wo to myself!” stood. I heard the rush of the stone. It smote Sabat and his bride into atoms![55]

The fall of our illustrious and unhappy city was supernatural. The destruction of the conquered was against the first principles of Roman polity, and to the last hour of our national existence, Rome held out offers of peace, and lamented our frantic determination to be undone. But the decree was gone forth from a mightier throne. During the latter days of the siege, a hostility to which that of man was as the grain of sand to the tempest that drives it on, overpowered our strength and senses.

Fearful shapes and voices in the air; visions startling us from our short and troubled sleep; lunacy in its most hideous forms; sudden death in the midst of vigor; the fury of the elements let loose upon our unsheltered heads; we had every terror and evil that could beset human nature, but pestilence; the most probable of all in a city crowded with the famishing, the diseased, the wounded, and the dead. Yet, tho the streets were covered with the unburied, tho every wall and trench was streaming with gore, tho six hundred thousand corpses lay flung over the rampart, naked to the sun—pestilence came not; for if it had come, the enemy would have been scared away. But the “abomination of desolation,” the pagan standard, was fixed, where it was to remain until the plow passed over the ruins of Jerusalem!

[Sidenote: The Last Sign]

On one night, that fatal night! no man laid his head upon his pillow. Heaven and earth were in conflict. Meteors burned above us; the ground shook under our feet; the volcano blazed; the wind burst forth in irresistible blasts, and swept the living and the dead in whirlwinds, far into the desert. We heard the bellowing of the distant Mediterranean, as if its waters were at our side, swelled by a new deluge. The lakes and rivers roared and inundated the land. The fiery sword shot out tenfold fire. Showers of blood fell. Thunder pealed from every quarter of the heaven. Lightning, in immense sheets, of an intensity and duration that turned the darkness into more than day, withering eye and soul, burned from the zenith to the ground, and marked its track by forests on flame, and the shattered summits of the hills.

Defense was not thought of, for the mortal hostility had passed from the mind. Our hearts quaked for fear, but it was to see the powers of heaven shaken. All cast away the shield and the spear, and crouched before the descending judgment. We were conscience-smitten. Our cries of remorse, anguish, and horror were heard through the uproar of the storm. We howled to the caverns to hide us; we plunged into the sepulchers to escape the wrath that consumed the living; we would have buried ourselves under the mountains! I knew the cause, the unspeakable cause, and knew that the last hour of crime was at hand. A few fugitives, astonished to see one man among them not sunk into the lowest feebleness of fear, came round me, and besought me to lead them to some place of safety, if such were now to be found on earth. I told them openly that they were to die, and counseled them to die in the hallowed ground of the Temple. They followed me through streets encumbered with every shape of human suffering, to the foot of Mount Moriah. But beyond that, we found advance impossible. Piles of cloud, whose darkness was palpable, even in the midnight in which we stood, covered the holy hill. Still, not to be daunted by anything that man could overcome, I cheered my disheartened band, and attempted to lead the way up the ascent. But I had scarcely entered the cloud when I was swept downward by a gust that tore the rocks in a flinty shower round me.

[Sidenote: “Let Us Go Hence”]

Now came the last and most wondrous sign that marked the fate of Israel. While I lay helpless, I heard the whirlwind roar through the cloudy hill, and the vapors began to revolve. A pale light, like that of the rising moon, quivered on their edges, and the clouds rose and rapidly shaped themselves into the forms of battlements and towers. The sound of voices was heard within, low and distant, yet strangely sweet. The luster brightened, and the airy building rose, tower on tower, and battlement on battlement. In awe that held us mute, we knelt and gazed upon this more than mortal architecture, which continued rising and spreading, and glowing with a serener light, still soft and silvery, yet to which the broadest moonbeam was dim. At last it stood forth to earth and heaven, the colossal image of the first Temple, the building raised by the wisest of men, and consecrated by the visible glory.

All Jerusalem saw the image, and the shout that, in the midst of their despair, ascended from its thousands and tens of thousands, told what proud remembrances were there. But a hymn was heard that might have hushed the world. Never fell on my ear, never on the human sense, a sound so majestic, yet so subduing; so full of melancholy, yet of grandeur. The cloudy portal opened, and from it marched a host such as man had never seen before, such as man shall never see but once again; the guardian angels of the city of David!—they came forth glorious, but with wo in all their steps; the stars upon their helmets dim; their robes stained; tears flowing down their celestial beauty.

“Let us go hence,” was their song of sorrow; “Let us go hence,” was answered by the sad echoes of the mountains. “Let us go hence,” swelled upon the night to the farthest limits of the land. The procession lingered long on the summit of the hill. Then, the thunder pealed; and they rose at the command, diffusing waves of light over the expanse of heaven. Their chorus was heard, still magnificent and melancholy, when their splendor was diminished to the brightness of a star. The thunder roared again; the cloudy temple was scattered on the winds; and darkness, the omen of her grave, settled upon Jerusalem!

I was roused from my consternation by the voice of a man.

[Sidenote: A Glance toward the Temple]

“What!” said he, “sitting here, when all the world is stirring? Poring over the faces of dead men, when you should be the foremost among the living? All Jerusalem in arms, and yet you scorn your time to gain laurels?”

The haughty and sarcastic tone was familiar to my recollection; but to see, as I did, a Roman soldier within a few feet of me was enough to make me spring up, and draw my simitar, careless of consequences.

“You ought to know me,” said he, without moving a muscle; “for tho it is some years since we met, we have not been often asunder. And so here you have been sitting these twelve hours among corpses, to no better purpose than losing your time and your memory together!”

I looked round; the sun was in his meridian. The little band that I had led to the foot of the mountain were lying dead, to a man.

“Are you not a Roman?” I exclaimed.

“No; but I conclude that nearly as much absurdity and mischief may be committed under these trappings as under any other, and therefore I wear them. But you may exchange with me if you like. This cuirass and falchion will help you to money, riot, violence, and vice—and what more do nine-tenths of mankind ask for in their souls? Take my offer and you will be on the winning side; another thing that men like. But be expeditious, for before this sun dips his forehead in the Asphaltites, the bloodshed and robbery will be over.”

His laugh, as he uttered the words, was bitterness itself, and I felt my flesh instinctively shudder. But a glance toward the Temple told me that the words were true. The legions had forced their way to the foot of the third and weakest rampart, which I now saw flying in pieces under the blows of the battering-rams. They must have marched by the very spot where I had sat since midnight, and I probably escaped only by being taken for one of the dead. I wrung my hands in agony. He burst into a wild roar of derision.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Beholds Epiphanes]

“What fools you lords of the creation are! What is the loss of life to the naked wretches that you see running about like frightened children on those battlements, or to the clothed wretches that you see ready to massacre them, for the honor and glory of a better-clothed wretch?—a dinner too much will revenge them on the Emperor of the earth. The spear or the arrow comes, and quick as thought their troubles are at an end. Man!—the true misery is to live, to be constrained to live, to feel the wants, wearinesses, and weaknesses of life, yet to drag on existence; to be—what I am.”

He tore the helmet from his forehead, and, with a groan of agony, flung it to a measureless distance in the air. In amaze and terror I beheld Epiphanes! The same Greek countenance, the same kingly presence, the same strength and heroic stature, and the same despair, were before me that, in the early years of my wo, I had seen on the shores of the Dead Sea.

“I told you,” said he, with a sudden return to calmness, “that this day would come; and to tell you so required no spirit of prophecy. There is a time for all things, long-suffering among the rest; and your countrymen had long ago come to that time. But one grand hope was still to be given; they cast it from them! Ages on ages shall pass before they learn the loftiness of that hope or fulfil the punishment of that rejection. Yet, in the fulness of time, shall the light break in upon their darkness. They shall ask, Why are we the despised, the branded, the trampled, the abjured, of all nations? Why are the barbarian and the civilized alike our oppressors? Why do contending faiths join in crushing us alone? Why do realms, distant as the ends of the earth, and diverse as day and night—alike those who have heard our history, and those who have never heard of us but as the sad sojourners of the earth—unite in one cry of scorn? And what is the universal voice of nature but the voice of the King of nature?”

I listened in reverence to language that pierced my heart with an intense power of truth, yet with a pang that made me writhe. I longed, yet dreaded, to hear again the searching and lofty accents of this being of unwilling wisdom.

“Man of terrible knowledge,” said I, “canst thou tell for what crime this judgment shall come?”

Awe was written upon his mighty brow, and his features quivered as he slowly spoke.

“Their crime? There is no name for it. The spirits of heaven weep when they think of it. The spirits of the abyss tremble. Man alone, the man of Judea alone, could commit that horror of horrors.”

He paused and prostrated himself at the words; then rising, rapidly uttered: “Judge of the crime by its punishment. From the beginning, Israel was stubborn, and his stubbornness brought him to sorrow. He rebelled, and he was warned by the captivity of a monarch or the slaughter of a tribe. He sinned more deeply, for he was the slave of impurity; then was his kingdom divided; yet a few years saw him powerful once more. He sinned more deeply still, for he sought the worship of idols. Then came his deeper punishment, in the fall of his throne and the long captivity of his people. But even Babylon sent back the forgiven.

“Happy, I say to you, happy will be the hour for Israel—for mankind, for creation—when he shall take into his hand the records of his fathers, and, in tears, ask, What is that greater crime than rebellion? than blasphemy? than impurity? than idolatry? which, not seventy years, nor a thousand years, of sorrow have seen forgiven; which has prolonged his wo into the old age of the world—which threatens him with a chain not to be broken but by the thunder-stroke that breaks up the universe!”

“And still,” said I, trembling before the living oracle,—“still is there hope?”

“Look to that mountain,” was the answer, as he pointed to Moriah. Its side, covered with the legions advancing to the assault, shone in the sun like a tide of burning brass. “It is now a sight of splendid evil!” exclaimed he. “But upon that mountain shall yet be enthroned a Sovereign before whom the sun shall hide his head, and at the lifting of whose scepter the heaven and the heaven of heavens shall bow down! To that mountain shall man, and more than man, crowd for wisdom and happiness. From that mountain shall light flow to the ends of the universe, and the government shall be the Everlasting!”

[Sidenote: The Roar of Assault]

The roar of the assault began, and my awful companion was recalled to the world.

[Sidenote: In Front of the Sanctuary]

“I must see the end of this battle,” said he, in his old mixture of sarcasm and melancholy; “man’s natural talent for making himself miserable may go far, but he is still the better for a teacher. On the top of that hill there are twenty thousand men panting for each other’s blood like tigers; and yet without me they would leave the grand business undone, after all.”

“But one word more,” I cried, giving my last look to the tower of Antonia, on which the eagles now glittered.

He anticipated me.

“All are safe—they are in the hands of Septimius, who will deal with them in honor. He solicited the command, that he might provide for their security. They comfort themselves with the hope that you will return. But return you never will. They will be happy in the hope—until sorrow is too long shut out to find room when it comes; they love you, and will love you long, but there is an end of all things. And now, farewell!”

“And now, onward,” said I. “But every spot is crowded with the Roman columns. How am I to pass those spears?”

He laughed wildly, flung his arm round me, as of old, and ran, with the speed of a stag, round the foot of the hill to an unobstructed side. The ascent was nearly perpendicular; but he bounded up the crags without drawing a breath, placed me on a battlement, and was gone!

[Sidenote: The Mark of Ruin]

Below me war raged in its boundless fury. The enemy had forced their way, and the exasperated Jews, contemptuous of life, fought them with the rage of wild beasts. When the lance was broken, the knife was the weapon; when the knife failed, they tore with their hands and teeth. Masses of stone, torches, even dead bodies, everything that could minister to destruction, were hurled from the roofs on the assailants, who were often repulsed with deadly havoc. But they still made way; the courts of the Gentiles, of the Israelites, and of the priests were successively stormed; and the legions at length established themselves in front of the Sanctuary. A howl of wrath, at the possible profanation of the Holy of Holies, rose from the multitude. I rushed from the battlement, and showing myself to the people, demanded “who would follow me?” The crowd exulted at the sight of their well-known chieftain; and in the impulse of the moment we poured on the enemy, and drove them from the court of the Sanctuary. Startled by the sudden reverse, the Roman generals renewed their proposal for a surrender, and Titus himself, at the most imminent hazard, forced his way to the portal, and besought me to surrender and save the Temple.

But Jerusalem was marked for ruin. While I was in the very act of checking the shower of spears, I heard the voice of one of those extraordinary beings who, by mad predictions of the certain succor of Heaven, kept up the resistance while there was a man to be slaughtered. He was standing on the roof of a vast cloister, surrounded by a crowd of unfortunate men, whom his false prophecies were infuriating against the offer of life. I recognized the impostor, or the demon, by whom the Roman mission had been destroyed. The legionaries pointed in vain to the flames already rising round the cloisters. The predictions grew bolder still, and the words of truth were answered by showers of missiles. The flames suddenly burst out through the roof, and the whole of its defenders, to the number of thousands, sank into the conflagration. When I looked round after the shock, this fearful being, without a touch of fire on his raiment, was haranguing in a distant quarter, and whether man or fiend, urging the multitude to their fate!

This was the day of days, the ninth day of the month Ab, the anniversary of the burning of the Temple by the king of Babylon. One thousand one hundred and thirty years, seven months, and fifteen days were past, from its foundation by our great King Solomon! My attack had repelled the legionaries, and Titus, exhausted and dispirited, began to withdraw the routed columns from the front of the Temple. It was the fifth hour; the sun was scorching up their strength, and I looked proudly forward to victory and the preservation of the Temple!

[Sidenote: The Enemy—Fire]

As I was standing on the portal of the court of the Sanctuary, and gazing at the rout of the troops toward the tower of Antonia, I heard a voice close to my ear: “I told you that this day would end in nothing without me.” I turned, but he was already far away among the crowd; and before I could even speak, I saw him, torch in hand, bound into the Golden window, beside the veil of the Holy Place. The inner Temple was instantly in a blaze. Our cries and the sight of the flames brought back the enemy at full speed. I saw that the fatal hour was come, and collecting a few brave men, took my post before the veil, to guard the entrance with my blood.

But the legions rushed onward, crying out that “they were led by the Fates,” and that “the God of the Jews had given His people and city into their hands.” The torrent was irresistible. Titus rushed in at its head, exclaiming, that “the Divinity alone could have given the stronghold into his power, for it was beyond the hope and strength of man.” My devoted companions were torn down in an instant. I was forced back to the veil of the Holy of Holies, fighting at random in the midst of the legionaries, who now saw no enemies but each other. In the fury of plunder they deluged the Portico and the Sanctuary with blood.

The golden table of Pompey, the golden vine, the trophies of Herod, were instantly torn away. Subordination was lost. The troops trampled upon their officers. Titus himself was saved only by cutting his way through those madmen. But I longed to die, and give my last breath and the last drop of my veins to the seat of Sanctity and Glory. I fought—I taunted—I heaped loud scorn on the profaners—I was covered from head to foot with gore; but it was from the hearts of Romans—I toiled for death; but I remained without a wound. Yet, wo to the life that came within the sweep of my simitar. The last blow that I struck was at an impious hand, put forth to grasp the veil that shut the Holy of Holies from the human gaze. The hand flew from the body, and the spoiler fell groaning at my feet. He sent up an expiring look, and I knew the countenance of my persecutor, Cestius!

[Sidenote: The Ruin of the Temple]

But a new enemy had come, conqueror alike of the victor and the vanquished—fire.[56] I heard its roar round the sanctuary. The Romans, appalled, fled to the portal; but they were doomed. A wall of fire stood before them. They rushed back, tore down the veil, and the Holy of Holies stood open. The blaze melted the plates of the roof in a golden shower above me. It calcined the marble floor; it dissipated in vapor the inestimable gems that studded the walls. All who entered lay turned to ashes. So perish the profaners! But on the sacred Ark the flame had no power. It whirled and swept in a red orb round the untouched symbol of the throne of thrones. Still I lived, but I felt my strength giving way: the heat withered my sinews—the flame extinguished my sight.

Bleeding, blind, frantic, I still fought until I sank under a heap of dead. In defiance of all prediction, I now believed my death inevitable. At once I heard the shouts of the conquerors and the fall of the pillars of the Temple. I welcomed the living grave! In all the wildness of the uproar I heard the voice: “TARRY THOU TILL I COME!” The world disappeared from before me!

* * * * *

Here I pause. I had undergone that portion of my unhappy career which was to be passed among my people. My life as father, husband, and citizen was at an end. Thenceforth I was to be a solitary being.

My fate had yet scarcely fallen upon me, but I was now to feel it in the disruption of every gentler tie that held me to life. I was to make my couch with the savage, the outcast, and the slave. I was to see the ruin of the mighty and the overthrow of empires. Yet in the tumult that changed the face of the world, I was still to live and be unchanged. Every sterner passion that disturbs our nature was to reign in successive tyranny over my soul. And fearfully was the decree fulfilled.

[_see page 532._

Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]

[Sidenote: Salathiel the Eternal Wanderer]

In revenge for the fall of Jerusalem, I traversed the globe to seek out an enemy of Rome. I found in the northern snows a man of blood; I stirred up the soul of Alaric and led him to the rock of Rome. In revenge for the insults heaped on the Jew by the dotards and dastards of the city of Constantine, I sought out an instrument of compendious ruin: I found him in the Arabian sands, and poured ambition into the soul of the enthusiast of Mecca. In revenge for the pollution of the ruins of the Temple, I roused the iron tribes of the West, and at the head of the crusaders expelled the Saracens. I fed full on the revenge, and I felt the misery of revenge!

A passion for the mysteries of nature seized me. I toiled with the alchemist; I wore away years in perplexities of the schoolmen; and I felt the guilt and emptiness of unlawful knowledge.

A passion for human fame seized me. I drew my sword in the Italian wars—triumphed—was a monarch—and learned to curse the hour when I first dreamed of fame!

A passion for gold seized me. I felt the gnawing of avarice—the last infirmity of the fallen mind. Wealth came, to my wish and to my torment. In the midst of royal treasures I was poorer than the poorest. Days and nights of misery were the gift of avarice. I felt within me the undying worm. In my passion I longed for regions where the hand of man had never rifled the mine. I found a bold Genoese, and led him to the discovery of a new world. With its metals I inundated the old, and to my own misery added the misery of two hemispheres!

But the circle of the passions, a circle of fire, was not to surround my fated steps forever. Calmer and nobler aspirations were to rise in my melancholy heart. I saw the birth of true science, true liberty, and true wisdom. I lived with Petrarch, among his glorious relics of the genius of Greece and Rome. I stood enraptured beside the easel of Angelo and Raphael. I conversed with the merchant kings of the Mediterranean. I stood at Mentz beside the wonder-working machine that makes knowledge imperishable and sends it with winged speed through the earth. At the pulpit of the mighty man of Wittenberg I knelt; Israelite as I was, and am, I did voluntary homage to the mind of Luther!

[Sidenote: The Future]

But I must close these thoughts, as wandering as the steps of my pilgrimage. I have more to tell—strange, magnificent, and sad.

But I must wait the impulse of my heart. Or, can the happy and the high-born, treading upon roses, have an ear for the story of the Exile, whose path has for a thousand years been in the brier and the thorn!

FINIS