“The blood be upon us, my lord, and on our children. Will you give the order?”
“Calcol!”
The centurion approached. An order was given him in an undertone, and as he turned to the guards, Pilate drew the staff of office across his knee, snapped it in two, tossed the pieces to the ground, and through the ranks of his servitors passed on into the great blue vestibule beyond.
CHAPTER X.
X.
In a sook near the Gannath Gate Mary stood. In the distance the palace of Herod defied the sun. Beyond the gate lay the Hennom Valley, the Geia Hennom, contracted by the people into Ge’ Hennom, or Gehenna, and converted by them into a sewer, a place where carrion was thrown, and the filth of a great city. In earlier days children had been immolated to Moloch there, human victims had been burned; it was a place accursed, and to purify the air, as a safeguard against pestilence, the offal was consumed by bonfires that were constantly renewed and never extinguished. At its extremity was an elevation, a hilly contour which to the popular fancy suggested a skull. To the west it fell steeply away. It was called Gülgolta.
The sook in which Mary stood was [pg 228]affected by shoemakers. Against the dwelling of one of them she leaned. The mantle was gone from her now, and the olive robe had a rent, but the splendor of her hair fell unconfined, the perils of her eyes had increased; yet in their depths where love had been was hate. One arm lay along the resisting stone, the other hung at her side; her face was turned to the palace, her thin nostrils quivering, her breath coming and going with that spasmodic irregularity which the consciousness of outrage brings. She laid it all to Judas; he must have returned to Kerioth, she thought. The sook itself was silent, stirred merely by some echo of the uproar in the palace beyond.