When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts. But he could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him.
"What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him. The man shook his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe.
Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back. In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the center. A young man stood there. About his forehead was bound the phylactery of a Pharisee. At his feet was a tumbled heap of white outer garments. Then the breach closed up.
"A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself. But such a deduction would not answer for the behavior of the crowd. Its temper was ferocious. They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the rearmost which was perfectly in the dark.
It was typically the voice of the Beast in man. Some circumstance, unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint. Therefore the wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!"
Each felt the support of numbers, the momentum of unanimity, the incentive of relaxed order, and the original cause, however heinous, was forgotten in the joy of the reversion to primordial savagery. Their quiet fellow stood on the outskirts and listened to the yelp of the jackal in man. Before him was a wall of variously clad backs and upstretched heads, beside him rows of raving men in profile, with strained eyes, open mouths and working beards; and one of them was the man who had shown, when asked, that he did not understand this demonstration.
The man in scarlet finally shrugged his shoulders. He had suddenly evolved an explanation—the blood of a fellow man. He turned away, not because he had revolted—he had seen too many spectacles in the Circus in Rome—but because he was disinclined to stand till he had learned the particulars of the uproar. A gnarly hummock, white, harsh and dry, as if it were a heap of disintegrated ashes, rose several rods away on the brink of Kedron. He mounted it and sat. Yes; he would wait, also, till he saw the Essene again, who, he was sure, had been buried in the ring. It would be unkind to himself to permit a chance for a loan to pass untried.
The tumult continued many minutes before he noticed abatement in the forward ranks. Movement which had been general throughout the interval increased at times, but the mob showed no signs of dispersing.
The western slope of Olivet was now in its own shadow, its ravines already purpling with night. Only the glory on the summit of Moriah blazed with undiminished fire, as the gold of the gates gave back the gold of the sunset.
Presently a number of men, dressed alike in priestly robes, hurried back through Hanaleel into the city. Hardly had they disappeared before the gate gave up a number of radiant shapes in a column, which broke suddenly and flung itself upon the great raving circle. The flash of armor and the glitter of swords were suddenly interjected into a demoralized eddy of stampeded hundreds. Another sort of clamor arose, no less voluminous, no less fervid, but it was a howl of panic and protest against the methods of Vitellius' legionaries sent to disperse a crowd.