The dreadful uproar sank as suddenly as it had risen. The Roman troop lay a heap of dead. I turned away from the sight, but at the instant of turning I saw the prophet of evil, whether impostor or magician, whether man or demon, spring into their midst with a roar of laughter. I shrank away. But I heard that terrible laugh ringing through all the streets of Jerusalem!
CHAPTER LIII
A Fatal Sign
It was night, and the greater portion of the city lay between me and home. To traverse it was still a matter of danger. Furious festivity had succeeded to furious conflict; the roving mountaineers made little difference between a stranger and an enemy, and whether inflamed with wine or triumph, the carousers on that night were the masters of Jerusalem.
I kept my course through the less frequented ways, and leaving on either side the great avenues, crowded with tents and glittering with illumination, committed myself to the quiet light of the moon.
But in choosing the more solitary streets, I was, without recollecting it, led into the open place where the late disturbance had begun, and I felt some vague dread of passing a spot on which had appeared a being so singular as the leader of the tumult.
A Wounded Soldier
By a compromise with my prudence, I kept as far from the hillock as possible, and was moving rapidly by the wall of one of the huge buildings of Herod, when I heard a groan. In the nervousness of the time, and doubtful from what region of earth or air my antagonist, in that place of spells, might come, I drew my dagger with a sensation that I had never felt in the field, and setting my back against the wall, stood on my defense. But a wounded man, the utterer of the groan, now tottered into the light and fell before me. I recognized the commander of the escort. The dying struggles of his charger had crushed him, and the multitude had abandoned him to his fate.
To leave him where he was, was to leave him to perish. I owed something to the survivor of the unfortunate mission, and my short consultation closed by carrying him on my shoulders to the door of my comfortless dwelling.