The net was cast and a great burden of fish towed to the shore, which was washed clean of footmarks and strewn with fresh pebbles. With the vigor of new-born joy, Jael worked with the other fishers. But when he would have come in contact again with his hope, he found Jesus had gone, no man knew whither.
PART TWO
A. D. 33
CHAPTER XIX
CATACOMBS COMRADES
With its hyena head pointed toward the Imperial Capitol, the brazen She-Wolf of the Roman Empire stood, its bristled hair and exposed fangs symbolic of the beast-nature that was its Babylonian inheritance. Enthroned on her Seven Hills, Rome had subjugated and pillaged the nations of the earth until she had grown drunk with power, and although life on the Palatine and the Quirinal was one outflowing exercise of brute force and one long feast and revel on the spoils thereof, yet was the Empire rushing as headlong to the destruction predestined at the hand of her own corruption, as was Tiberius Caesar rushing to his earthly end by debauchery unbridled. And although neither the Latin world nor its vassals had will or vision to foresee it, Time, in its inscrutable womb was fashioning that which was to bring about conflict ages-long, between Pagan autocracy and the spiritual essence of Liberty for all humankind.
On an evening when the purple and blue, the glistening white and golden glow and shining green of an Italian spring, speaking through sea and sky, through billowing clouds and the verdure of the earth, was rivaled by the purple and gold of Rome's pageantry and the gleaming whiteness of her pillared palaces, a sojourner in the Imperial City, who had but that day sailed up the River Tiber, stood waiting beneath the shadow of the She-Wolf. The stranger, a Phoenician who had at one time done stone cutting at Tyre and Sidon, had not long to wait. The man who met him wore the dull brown tunic of the working man. A scarlet cord bound his waist and he carried a covered bundle. Speaking in Latin, he addressed a few words to the Phoenician and then said, "Follow me."
For a time the working man, whose present occupation was that of torch-lighter, led the visitor through the streets of the city, the surrounding scenes changing until from the marble palaces of the Palatine their way led them past the slave pens at the lower end of Via Sacra, and shortly after they found themselves traveling a roadway on the Campagna. Here they often found it necessary to step aside to make passageway for carts loaded with Pozzolana sand. It was toward the pits from which this sand came the two were making their way and it was not until they had turned into deserted pitroad that they entered into free conversation.
"Shortly," said the guide, "we will enter into the way which leadeth to the burial place of slaves, some of which are thrown in dead, and some not yet dead but only worthless. From its corruption ariseth a stench that ceaseth not day nor night."
"Do we go that way?"