“Here,” said the Ethiopian, “it was the custom of the great king in his declining years, when his heart was broken by the loss of the most beloved of wives, and maddened by the conspiracies of the princes, his sons, to come and consult others than the God of Jerusalem. Here the Chaldee men of wisdom came to summon the spirits of the departed and show the fates of kingdoms. We are now in the bowels of the mountain.”
He loosed a chain, which disappeared into the ground with a hollow noise. A huge mass of rock slowly rolled back, and showed a depth of darkness through which our twinkling torches scarcely made way.
“Stop,” said the slave; “I should have first lighted the shrine.”
The Skeleton Warriors
He left us, and we shortly saw a blaze of many colors on a tripod in the center. As the blaze strengthened, a scene of wonder awoke before the eye. A host of armed statues grew upon the darkness. The immense vault was peopled with groups of warriors, all the great military leaders of the world in their native arms, and surrounded by a cluster of their captains; the disturbers of the earth, from Sesostris down to Cæsar and Antony, brandishing the lance or reining the charger, each in his known attitude of command. There rushed Cyrus in the scythed chariot, surrounded by his horsemen, barbed from head to foot. There was to be seen Alexander, with the banner of Macedon waving above his head, and armed as when he leaped into the Granicus; there Hannibal, upon the elephant that he rode at Cannæ; there Cæsar, with the head of Pompey at his feet. Those, and a long succession of the masters of victory, each in the moment of supreme fortune, made the vault a representative palace of human glory. But the view from the entrance told but half the tale. It was when I advanced and lifted the torch to the countenance of the first group that the moral was visible. All the visages were those of skeletons. The costly armor was hung upon bones. The spears and scepters were brandished by the thin fingers of the grave. The vault was the representative sepulcher of human vanity. This was one of the fantastic fits of a mind which felt too late the emptiness of earthly honors. Half pagan, the powerful intellect of the man gave way to the sullen superstitions of the murderer. Egypt was still the mystic tyrant of Palestine, and Herod, in his despair, sank into the slave of a credulity at once weak and terrible.
Herod’s Death
In the last hours of a long and deeply varied life, exhausted more by misery of soul than disease, when medicine was hopeless, and he had returned from trying the famous springs of Callirhoë in vain, the king ordered himself to be brought into this vault, and left alone. He remained in it during some hours. The attendants were at length roused by hideous wailings; they broke open the entrance, and found him in a paroxysm of terror. The vault was filled with the strong odors of some magical preparations, still burning on the tripod. The sound of departing feet was heard, but Herod sat alone. In accents of the wildest wo he declared that he had seen the statues filled with sudden life, and charging him with the death of his wife and children.
He left Masada instantly, pronouncing a curse upon the hour in which he first listened to the arts of Egypt. He was carried to Jericho, and there laid on a bed, from which he never rose. Alternate bursts of blasphemy and remorse made his parting moments frightful. But tyranny was in his last thought, and he died, holding in his hand an order for the massacre of every leading man in Judea.