The Wrecks of Pillage
The very features of the popular physiognomy were changed. The natural vividness of the countenance was there, but hardened by habitual ferocity. I was surrounded by a multitude, in each of whom I was compelled to see the assassin. The keen eye scowled with cruelty; the cheek wore the alternate flush and paleness of desperate thoughts. The hurried gatherings, the quick quarrel, the loud blasphemy, told me the infuriate temper that had fallen, for the last curse, on Jerusalem. Scarcely a man passed me of whom I could not have said: “There goes one from a murder or to a murder.”
But even more open evidences startled me, accustomed as I was to scenes of military violence. I saw men stabbed in familiar greetings in the streets; mansions set on fire and burned in the face of day, with their inmates screaming for help, and yet unhelped; hundreds slain in rabble tumults, of which no one knew the origin. The streets were covered with the wrecks of pillage, sumptuous furniture plundered from the mansions of the great, and plundered for the mere love of ruin; mingled with the more hideous wrecks of man—unburied bodies, left to whiten in the blast or to be torn by the dogs.
Three factions divided Jerusalem, even while the Roman battering-rams were shaking her colossal towers; three armies fought night and day within the city. Streets undermined, houses battered down, granaries burned, wells poisoned, the perpetual shower of death upon each other from the roofs, made the external hostility trivial; and the Romans required only patience to have been bloodless masters of a city which yet they would have found only a tomb of its people.
“I had rescued Constantius.”
Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.
Salathiel Apostrophizes
I wandered day by day, an utter stranger, through Jerusalem. All the familiar faces were gone. At an early period of the war, many of the higher ranks, foreseeing the event, had left the city; at a later, my victory over Cestius, by driving back the enemy, had given a free passage to a crowd of others. It was at that time remarked that the crowd were chiefly Christians, and a singular prophecy of their Master was declared to be the warning of their escape. It is certain that of His followers, including many even of our priests and learned men, scarcely one remained.[44] They said that the evil day, menaced by the divine Wisdom, through Moses (may he rest in glory!) was come; that the death of their Master was the consummate crime; and that the Romans, the predicted nation of destroyers, the people “of a strange speech,” flying on “eagle wings from the ends of the earth,” were already commissioned against a land stained with the blood of the Messiah.