For once he blessed a Nazarene night-gathering, when he saw family after family emerge from the tunnel-like doors of the temple-house and proceed silently toward the meeting of their brethren in the street below.
A long time after the last emerged and disappeared into the dark, Marsyas crossed to the doors and knocked. For a moment after his first trial, he listened lest there be an answer. He knocked more loudly a second time, and, after the third, he opened the unlocked doors, and, putting in his head, called. The heated interior was totally dark and silent.
He stepped in and closed the doors behind him. When at last his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that he was in a single immense chamber; the entire interior of the old temple was unbroken by partition of any kind. Above him, he saw the crossing of great palm-trunks, bracing the walls, and over them the blue arch of the night. At the rear, the starlight showed him the wall abutting the street of the sentries. It was absolutely blank and fully thirty feet in height.
Marsyas sighed and shook his head. Though he made the leap in safety, he could not alight without noise enough to attract the whole garrison to the spot. But, determined to make his investigation thorough before he surrendered the scheme as hopeless, he felt about the great chamber and stumbled on a rude ladder leaning against a side-wall. He climbed it, to find that it reached to a ledge, where the deeper lower half of the wall was surmounted by a clerestory just half its thickness. He found here rows of straw pallets where the overflow of Nazarenes took refuge by night. He pulled up his ladder, set it on the ledge and climbed again, finding himself at the uppermost rung within reach of one of the palm-trunks. He seized it, tried it for solidity and drew himself up on the top of the wall.
Fearing detection by the sentries more than the return of the householders, he crept with caution to the angle at the rear, and looked down into the street.
He located two sentries, but no nearer the back of the temple than the two streets opening into the other several yards away to the north and south. He lay still to note the direction of their post and found that, in truth, they turned just under him. At a point half-way between either end of their walk, they were more than two hundred paces apart. But Marsyas looked down the sheer wall. He could not possibly accomplish it without injury or discovery or both.
With a heavy heart he retraced his steps, descended into the old temple and made his way toward the doors. Before he reached them, he frightened himself by stumbling upon a huge light object that rolled away toward the entrance. He followed cautiously, and touched it again while fumbling for the latch. He felt of it, and finally, swinging the door open, saw by the starlight that it was a huge hamper of twisted palm-fiber, tall enough to contain a man and wide enough for two. He set the thing aside and went out into the night.
To-morrow was the last day of his confinement, but he did not expect liberty. He did not doubt that the city meditated the destruction of the Nazarenes, nor that Flaccus would permit him to be overlooked in the general slaughter. Not the least of his fears was that Lydia might be thrust among them at any moment, to share the fate he had striven so hard to avert from her.
He returned to his cave in the ruined wall, and lay down on his matting, not to sleep, nor even to plan intelligently, but to submit to his distress.
At high noon the third day, on the summit of the Serapeum in Egyptian Rhacotis, there appeared a slender figure in the burnoose of an Arab.