The City of Delight

Over all this immense slope the eyes of Costobarus wandered. However

he had felt in the preceding days when he looked upon this ruin of the

land of milk and honey, he realized now suddenly and in all its

fearful actuality the predicament of Judea, its despair and the

gigantic travail before those who would save it from the united

sentence passed upon it by God and the powers. Immense dejection

seized him. He looked from the face of the country, upon which not a

single thing of profit showed, toward the bowed head and oppressed

figure of his young and inexperienced daughter who was to put her

tender self between Ruin and its victim. Chills, succeeded by flashes

of fever, swept over him. He raised himself as if to give command to

Aquila but settled back under the canopy, grown immeasurably older and

feebler in that moment of helpless surrender to conditions of which he

had been part an artificer. It was not as if he had made an incautious

move in a political game; it was, as it seemed to him undeniably then,

that he had advanced against the Lord God of Hosts, and there was no

turning back!

He settled slowly into a stunned anguish that seemed to rise

gradually, like a filling tide, shutting out the sunset and the

seaboard, the bald earth and the streaming wind, and engulfing him in

roaring darkness and intense cold.

They were in sight of a cluster of Syrian huts, the first inhabited

village they had come upon since leaving Ascalon, but he was not aware

of it. The sudden halting of his camel and a hoarse strained cry at

hand seemed to bear some relation to his condition, but he did not

care. He felt his howdah lurch to one side as some one leaped up

beside him; he felt remotely the great grasp of hands on him, which

must have been Momus'; the quick military voice of Aquila he heard and

then, keen and distinct as a call upon him, the sound of Laodice's

tones made sharp with terror.

He opened his eyes and saw her, holding him in her arms. Somewhere in

the background were the faces of Momus and Aquila. Between the pagan

and the old servant passed a look that the old man caught. Then he

heard Aquila say: "The village--his sole chance, if there is a physician there."

Laodice held him fast only for a moment, when it seemed that she was

wrenched away. The dying man was glad. If this were pestilence, she

should not come near. The hiss of the lash and the bound of the stung

camel disturbed him but he lapsed into the immense cold again as they

raced down the slight declivity toward the Syrian village. But

Pestilence was riding with them and the odds were with it.