"He is alive, alive, alive! He was dead and behold he is alive!" Merira heard a loud voice behind him and, turning round, saw a thin ragged man, blackened by the sun and shaggy like a wild beast, walking towards him with a distorted face and fiercely burning eyes.
"I know what you have come for, murderer!" he cried, like one possessed. "You want to kill the dead, but behold he is alive and you are dead!"
At a sign from Horus the soldiers seized the man.
"Let him go," Merira commanded, and turning to the man asked him:
"Who are you?"
"Don't you recognise me? And yet we are old friends, berries from the same vine. We both are his murderers—only I have grown wiser and you are still foolish!"
Merira looked at him and recognized Issachar the Jew.
"Thus speaks the Lord God of Israel," Issachar cried again, lifting up his hands. "They shall look upon Him Whom they have pierced and they shall mourn for Him as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him as one is in bitterness for his firstborn!"
And as though in answer to the cry the shepherd's pipe wailed:
"Dead is the Lord, dead is Tammuz!
Dogs wander about in the ruined house,
Ravens flock to his funeral feast.
O heart of the Lord! O pierced side!"