But the Princess answered never a word; for her heart was cold with fear of the sights she saw as in a shadow by the silver starlight. Where Herod’s Pleasure Gardens had lain at Jericho, was such a press of soldiers, they could not approach the city gates. The clank of the forges for the engines of war had become as the rumble of thunder or earthquake. Where she knew the Holy City must stand on Zion Hill, she could discern only the blaze of towers and uptossing in midsky of flaming javelin and torch to throw destruction inside the city walls; and as the caravan advanced through the press of legion and cohort in serried ranks of helmet and breastplate and spear, the narrow ascending mountain road lay thick in a screen of smoke with a sickening odor of burning she had not known could exist outside the purlieus of a nether world.
The old Idumean came back and wheeled his horse beside her.
“We cannot get through the press though I break the pate of every head under helmet,” he said. “We shall have to fork to the right for the Damascus Road past the General’s tent.”
“What is the smell of burning?” she asked, leaning forward from the muffle of her camel.
“The dead! They are burning the dead as they throw them out over the walls in Gehenna Valley,” answered the old soldier; “and this road is swimming in blood coming down the walls. The soldiers tell me it is swimming in blood to the horses’ bridles beneath Olivet.”
“Fear nought, Princess,” called the young presbyter, remounting his horse to guard the rear, “you are only escaping a world that plays all men false”, and they pressed on, taking the road that forked north of the city.
Daylight dim with fog and smoke and the dust of battle saw them on the crest of the highway that led north from the Holy City towards either Cæsarea on the Sea, or Damascus in the far snowy mountains.
They paused again to breathe their spent camels and horses.
Bernice signaled the young presbyter.
“I would have your Arab horse,” she said. “I cannot ride this beast. He is spent.”