XI
The old man had a coarse face, with high cheek-bones, bearded to the eyes. A patched piece of sacking served him as inner robe, and a hooded sheep's skin as cloak or chlamys. For twenty years, Pamva had never washed himself, considering cleanliness sinful, and believing that a special fiend presided over any acts of care for the body. He dwelt in a fearful desert, the Berean, round Chalybon, to the east of Antioch, where serpents and scorpions swarmed at the bottom of the arid water-courses. His lodging was the deep sandy hollow of a dried-up well, called coubba in Syriac, where he used to feed himself on five stalks a day of a sweet and flowery kind of reed. He had nearly died of starvation. His disciples descended to feed him by means of ropes. Then, during seven years, he lived on a half-measure of boiled lentils. His sight grew feeble; his skin became leprous and scurvy; he therefore added a little oil to his lentils, and accused himself of worship of the belly.
Pamva, learning from his disciples that the Emperor Julian, the fierce Anti-Christ, was persecuting the Christians, left his retreat and came to Antioch to strengthen weak-kneed believers—
"Listen! listen!... he's going to speak."
Pamva climbed the staircase of the baths and halted on a broad landing. His eyes glittered with condensed ire. He stretched out his arms, pointing out to the people palaces, pagan temples, baths, shops, courts of justice, all the monuments of Antioch.
"Not a stone of these shall remain! All shall crumble and disappear. The holy fire shall burn up the universe. The heavens, like a smouldering palace, shall sink away! That shall be the terrible judgment of Christ, the unimaginable spectacle. Whither shall I turn mine eyes, and what shall I wonder at, if it be not the groaning of kings, cast down into darkness? If it be not the terror of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, shivering in her nakedness before the Crucified? If it be not the flight of Jupiter, and all the Olympians, before the thunders of the Most High?... Triumph, ye martyrs, and rejoice, ye persecuted! See your judges, the Roman proconsuls, seized by more terrible flames than yours. Nor shall the syllogisms of Aristotle, nor the demonstrations of Plato save you, philosophers, hurled into hell! And, on that stage, their actors shall roar, as the heroes of Sophocles and Æschylus never roared before! And their rope-dancers, trust, me, shall dance a quicker step in that fire! And we, the poor and ignorant, shall rejoice and say to the strong, wise, and the haughty: Behold the Crucified, the son of the carpenter and the work-woman, the King of Judæa, crowned in purple and thorns! Behold the Sabbath-breaker, the Samaritan woman possessed of the devil! See Him, whom you led bound with cords into your prætorium, Him whose thirst you quenched with vinegar and hyssop! And we shall hear in answer weepings and gnashings of teeth. We shall laugh, our hearts overflowing with joy! Come, come, come, Lord Jesus!"
Gluturius, the cleanser of sewers, fell on his knees, and blinking his inflamed eyelids as if he saw Christ descending, stretched out his arms. The metal-founder clenched his fists, collected his forces like a bull ready to charge. And the livid-faced weaver, trembling in all his limbs, with an amazed smile was murmuring, "Lord, let me, too, suffer!"
The animal faces of beggars and sharpers expressed the mischievous triumph of the weak over the strong; of slaves over their masters. The She-wolf grinned in silence, and an insatiable thirst for vengeance twinkled in her drunken eyes.
Suddenly, the jingle of weapons and the heavy step of horses. The Roman legionaries of the night-watch wheeled round the corner of the road. At their head strode the prefect, Sallustius Secundus, a man with aquiline nose, open face, and a look of calmness and kindly intelligence. He wore the senatorial laticlave, and gave an impression of self-confidence and patrician nobleness. Above the distant Pantheon, erected by Antiochus Seleucus, slowly arose the great reddish moon, and its rays were glittering on shields and breastplates—