His pace was flying; many of his followers were running. It seemed that he was going against the Wall. Dozens anticipated that course and skirting through short ways clambered up on the fortifications and clung there though menaced by the sentries until Seraiah appeared.
At a narrow point in the street that ended against the wall, Seraiah met that Jew who had become a maniac on the day Jerusalem attacked Titus. Without warning the maniac leaped up into an intensely rigid posture; his legs spread, his lean arms upstretched at painful tension, his mouth wide, his eyes dilated immensely in their hollow depths.
Seraiah passed him as if no man stood in his way. Instantly the maniac wheeled, as a huge spread-eagle wind-vane on its staff, and stood at gaze, the broad uninterrupted light of the beacon shining down on him and the mysterious man. The street ended short of the wall. About the base of the fortification was an open space, in which was planted a scaling-ladder. Seraiah climbed this, an infinitesimal detail on the great blank of blackened stone.
Hundreds, rushing upon the wall, though a goodly distance from the point at which the strange man had mounted, climbed it and beat off the sentries.
And the foremost who reached the top saw the Roman Tower directly opposite Seraiah shudder suddenly and sink in a roaring cloud of dust upon itself to the earth.
Instantly the maniac below broke the tense silence with a scream that was heard in the paralyzed Roman camp:
"It is He, the Deliverer! Come!"
Of the thousands of Jews that heard the madman's cry, every heart credited it. Hundreds melted away suddenly, as if stricken with terror at what they might see; other hundreds scrambled down from their places to run purposelessly, crying aimless things to the night over the city; yet others covered their faces with their arms and fell in their places, expecting the end of the world; and of the rest, the less imaginative, the more composed and the more curious, remained on the walls to see enacted a further miracle. Uproar had broken out instantly among the four stolid legions of Titus on the Assyrian bivouac. Lights flashed out everywhere; great running to and fro could be distinguished; rapid trumpet-calls and the prolonged roll of drums from company quarters to quarters were echoed back from Antonia and from Hippicus. The startled shouts of commanders; the nervous dropping of arms; the sharp excited response to roll-call; the sound of sentries challenging, the curt response by countersign, showed everywhere irregularities and the symptoms of panic in the immovable ranks of Titus.
Seraiah meanwhile had disappeared from his place as mysteriously as he had come.
Many of the Jews who remained on the wall believed that he had passed into the Roman camp and was troubling it. The fall of the tower, and the confusion it had wrought in the Roman camp, never occurred to them to have been fortuitous incidents with which Seraiah had nothing to do. Of the thousands that witnessed that miracle, most of them were convinced that the hour had come.