The quenchless light

by Agnes C. Laut

Toward the tenth hour of the stone dial in front of the Imperial tent, a page lad walked out following King Agrippa. He wore a cloak and his turban cap came down over his ears to his very eyes.

All the terraced garden below the outer walls had been cut to the roots. Palm and cactus and hedge and olive trees had gone to build the huge hurdles on which the idle battering rams stood suspended in mid-air. Just once the page paused and swayed as he followed the king going up to Antonia Tower. ’Twas where the Romans had torn down the first and second walls of the Holy City. On the angle of a projecting bastion on the inner third wall, where those on the parapet above could see, swung the rotting skeletons of five hundred Jews crucified hanging by their spiked hands. Their loose garments blew to the wind and the ravens still circled above the featureless blackening skulls. Where the battering rams rested motionless above the parapets, bags filled with sand and dripping inky pitch showed how the besieged had fought back by firing the hurdles and engines of war. Rumor ran through the Roman camp how an old blind follower of Herod the Great, let down by ropes to work he could not see, had fired and burned the first hurdles. But for the creaking of the ravens perched on the turrets of the towers and fighting over the black skulls, the silence was of an awfulness that was stabbed by every footfall. Once or twice the page saw gaunt figures on the wall top appear like phantoms and toss naked dead over to the burning moats below; and down in the burning moats could be seen ghoulish figures of the Roman Army searching the dead for coin to buy slaves in victory. A quick catch of breath broke from the page. King Agrippa looked sharply back but did not pause. Javelins, darts, broken arrows, bent spears, crumpled shields littered the dust where gardens had once terraced the hills. The ground was hot beneath the page’s sandals as though seethed in flame. By the Tower of Antonio in front of the Temple, trickles of red clotted blood black with flies ran out under the demolished walls.

Then, they had vaulted the clutter of crumbled stones in the lowest story of Antonia’s Tower where its east wall joined the Temple. Where the broken wall was plugged by plank and bag, a cohort of Romans stood guard silent as stone. The King raised his right hand. The old Idumean came forward so swathed in sheet of mail and leggings of chain greaves he could scarce be recognized but for the stiffness of his aged legs. In his right hand, he carried a long sword, in his left the short circular dirk such as the Sicarii Sword Ruffians inside bore. Not a word was uttered. The old soldier, disguised as Zealot, moved forward and pulled some bagging from the hole in the wall. Head first, then right leg, he stepped through the hole. With frantic look of appeal as a dumb brute going to its doom might cast in affectionate farewell to a loved master, the page glanced back at the pale face of King Agrippa. Then, he followed the disguised soldier through the hole in the wall and the Romans stuffed the bagging and plank back in place.

They were inside the sanctuary of the Holy Place.

The silence was of a tomb. Gone was the golden Altar. Gone were golden cherubim and seraphim above the Altar of which the Psalmist sang. Gone were the golden candlesticks in mystic sevens. Gone were the great golden basins and the brass brazier in which the priests had burned sacrifices for the people’s sins from the days of Solomon. Gone were the cunningly wrought tapestries of Damascus and Babylon in woven gold and blue and purple and scarlet, which veiled the Holy of Holies in mystic purity from profane gaze. Ax and sword had hacked the sheathing of gold and silver from the pillars to each side supporting the cloisters and galleries. And where were the mystic treasure boxes between pillars, in which the Jews hoarded the offerings of the faithful through the fateful centuries? The Babylonians had rifled these treasures long centuries ago; but they had left the treasure chests. So had Antiochus of the North; but even he could not destroy these great iron boxes, though he had offered swine upon that vanished altar; and when Herod the Great had restored the Temple, these treasure chests had been left filled and untouched for a hundred years. Again the page swayed as faint; for sprawled on the pavement floor lay drunken Sicarii Ruffians in the dead sleep of swinish debauch, with sword in one hand, the golden flagons and cups of the altar service in the other, and they slept on a floor thickening with human blood. A slight tremor ran through the Temple, as of an earthquake from the Dead Sea; or was it that the senses of the page swam at what he saw? The Temple pavement seemed to heave and sink. The great Golden Gate to the east—ninety feet it was in height—swung open as of unseen hands, flooding the horror with a burst of sunlight. The page covered his face with his hand. Was this the crumbling kingdom of reality for which one grasped, rejecting that other shadow kingdom not made with hands, but made of rest and peace and light and love and eternity?

Julius, the old Idumean, with one eye gleaming through his vizor on the swinish forms asleep, and his long sword in his right hand, was prying with the dirk in his left to hoist the stone that gave secret drop to the dry Aqueduct below. The stone lifted as on hinges. The old Idumean laid down his right-hand long sword, grasped the page by the neck, signaled him to catch the edge of the black hole for the drop and was still holding the trapdoor up, when either the tremor of the earthquake, or the flood of sunburst from the Golden Gate, disturbed the sleepers.

“Down, you tricky she-vixen of hell,” the Idumean hissed, “and hang by your hands, which I’ve trapped, till Rome rots.”

But Bernice, the Princess, had thrust up one arm in a sudden revulsion at the drop in the under dark and caught the descending trap door with the palm while she hung suspended by her right hand from the edge. The noise had roused the sleepers. They were on him with a howl of tigerish fiends. She saw him snatch at his long sword, miss it, leap back, strike out with his short dirk sword. The iron-shod boot slipped on the bloody floor. He fell with a crash of armor on stone. They sprang on his outstretched arms, his mail-clad legs, his metal breastplate, hacking at the chain thighs with their swords. Her last glimpse of the old Idumean was of him shoving his chin down to meet the breastplate and save his neck from their spears. Then a great broadsword crashed down. His metal head piece went bounding over the floor with a gush of livid blood. Her hand hold gave from the edge of the trap door. The stone slipped back to its place in the floor, and she dropped to bottom in the dark of the Aqueduct.

It was black as night. She paused to think which way was west. Which way lay the Herod Palace? Had she turned as she swung on the edge of the trapdoor—and dropped? Then back in her dim memories of all the glories of the Herod line—was it memory or a throwback of the mad daring blood in her own daring veins?—came half consciousness of how Herod the Great in like case let down by baskets into robber caves of Galilee, black as the night of this Aqueduct, had plunged on fearless in the dark, and driven the cave robber bands over the precipice to a man. She boldly advanced through the dark. By the feel of her feet, the stone footing beneath was descending. That, she knew must be wrong; for the dry Aqueduct was used to flush water from the Altar out east from the pools at the Palace west. She turned. The Aqueduct ascended. That must be right; for waters do not flow up; and it was the Palace pools that flushed the Aqueduct to drain the Temple, and she fled through the dark like a night demon. Was this the price she must pay for a kingdom of which not one stone would be left upon another by sunrise if the Jews did not surrender that very day to Rome? Fool! Judea was lost. It was at Rome she aimed.