Items: One wife, Two hundred talents.
JOHN, KING OF JERUSALEM.
He went back to the andronitis of Amaryllis.
"I have lost interest in the treasure," he said whimsically. "But I'll
go out and look for the girl. I--I should like to discover of a truth
if the passage leads out of Jerusalem."
Amaryllis closed her lips firmly. Philadelphus read in the look that
he could not escape without Laodice.
Without further speech, he went to the vestibule, took his cloak and
kerchief from the porter and went out into the city.
It was nearly midnight when he passed into the streets. The tumult of
assault on the walls had ceased. The long lines of beacon-fires on the
walls showed only a few men in arms posted there. Without there came
no sound of activity in the camp of the Roman. The streets below,
lighted up by the ever-burning beacons, showed its usual restless
tramping of houseless, hungry ones. But there was no talk; each one
who walked the passages went wrapped in his own dismal thoughts; the
thousands took no notice of one another. Jerusalem was as silent as a
city stricken with plague.
From the summit of Zion, which Philadelphus mounted, he could see
three Roman war-towers, planted along the outer works, dimly lighted,
and manned by a vigilant garrison of legionaries. These had been a
dread and a destruction which the Jews had been unable to overthrow;
coigns of vantage from which the enemy had been able to deal the
sturdiest blows of the campaign.
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