But after he had met the girl in
the hills, his sensations of reluctance became emphatic, became an
actual dread, so that he thrust away all thought of the domestic side
of the life that confronted him, and bitterly resigned all hope in the
tender things that were the portion of all men. The villainy of Julian
of Ephesus engaged him chiefly, and his punishment. After that, then
the establishment of his kingdom, politics, conquest and power--but
not love!
Late that afternoon, he stepped out of a wady west of Jerusalem and
halted.
Ahead of him ran a road depressed between worn, hard, bare banks of
earth, past a deserted pool, marged with stone, up shining surfaces of
outcropping rock, through avenues of clustered tombs, pillars, pagan
monuments which were tracks of the Herods, dead and abandoned,
splendid pleasure gardens, suburban palaces lifeless and still, toward
the looming Tower of Hippicus, brooding over a fast-closed gate.
The Maccabee nodded. It was as he had expected. The city was besieged.
It was afternoon, a week-day at the busiest portal of Jerusalem; but
save for the fixed and pygmy sentry upon the tower, there was no
living thing to be seen, no single sound to be heard.
Beyond the mounting hills of the City of David stood up, shouldering
like mantles of snow their burden of sun-whitened houses. Above it
all, supreme over the blackened masonry of Roman Antonia, stood a
glittering vision in marble and gold--the Temple.
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