“The look may be long,” said he, “when a man looks his last.”
The Conflict of Heaven and Earth
I heard the roar of the engine, and leaped from the rampart to escape the discharge. Sabat stood, and again began his cry: “Wo to the city, and to the holy house, and to the people!” The discharge tore up a large portion of the battlement. Sabat never moved limb or feature. The wall was cut away on his right and left, as if it had been cut with an ax. He stood calmly on the projecting fragment with his lips to the lips of his bride. I saw the engine leveled again, and again called to him to escape. He gave me no answer but a melancholy smile; and crying out, with a voice that filled the air: “Wo to myself!” stood. I heard the rush of the stone. It smote Sabat and his bride into atoms![55]
The fall of our illustrious and unhappy city was supernatural. The destruction of the conquered was against the first principles of Roman polity, and to the last hour of our national existence, Rome held out offers of peace, and lamented our frantic determination to be undone. But the decree was gone forth from a mightier throne. During the latter days of the siege, a hostility to which that of man was as the grain of sand to the tempest that drives it on, overpowered our strength and senses.
Fearful shapes and voices in the air; visions startling us from our short and troubled sleep; lunacy in its most hideous forms; sudden death in the midst of vigor; the fury of the elements let loose upon our unsheltered heads; we had every terror and evil that could beset human nature, but pestilence; the most probable of all in a city crowded with the famishing, the diseased, the wounded, and the dead. Yet, tho the streets were covered with the unburied, tho every wall and trench was streaming with gore, tho six hundred thousand corpses lay flung over the rampart, naked to the sun—pestilence came not; for if it had come, the enemy would have been scared away. But the “abomination of desolation,” the pagan standard, was fixed, where it was to remain until the plow passed over the ruins of Jerusalem!
The Last Sign
On one night, that fatal night! no man laid his head upon his pillow. Heaven and earth were in conflict. Meteors burned above us; the ground shook under our feet; the volcano blazed; the wind burst forth in irresistible blasts, and swept the living and the dead in whirlwinds, far into the desert. We heard the bellowing of the distant Mediterranean, as if its waters were at our side, swelled by a new deluge. The lakes and rivers roared and inundated the land. The fiery sword shot out tenfold fire. Showers of blood fell. Thunder pealed from every quarter of the heaven. Lightning, in immense sheets, of an intensity and duration that turned the darkness into more than day, withering eye and soul, burned from the zenith to the ground, and marked its track by forests on flame, and the shattered summits of the hills.
Defense was not thought of, for the mortal hostility had passed from the mind. Our hearts quaked for fear, but it was to see the powers of heaven shaken. All cast away the shield and the spear, and crouched before the descending judgment. We were conscience-smitten. Our cries of remorse, anguish, and horror were heard through the uproar of the storm. We howled to the caverns to hide us; we plunged into the sepulchers to escape the wrath that consumed the living; we would have buried ourselves under the mountains! I knew the cause, the unspeakable cause, and knew that the last hour of crime was at hand. A few fugitives, astonished to see one man among them not sunk into the lowest feebleness of fear, came round me, and besought me to lead them to some place of safety, if such were now to be found on earth. I told them openly that they were to die, and counseled them to die in the hallowed ground of the Temple. They followed me through streets encumbered with every shape of human suffering, to the foot of Mount Moriah. But beyond that, we found advance impossible. Piles of cloud, whose darkness was palpable, even in the midnight in which we stood, covered the holy hill. Still, not to be daunted by anything that man could overcome, I cheered my disheartened band, and attempted to lead the way up the ascent. But I had scarcely entered the cloud when I was swept downward by a gust that tore the rocks in a flinty shower round me.
“Let Us Go Hence”
Now came the last and most wondrous sign that marked the fate of Israel. While I lay helpless, I heard the whirlwind roar through the cloudy hill, and the vapors began to revolve. A pale light, like that of the rising moon, quivered on their edges, and the clouds rose and rapidly shaped themselves into the forms of battlements and towers. The sound of voices was heard within, low and distant, yet strangely sweet. The luster brightened, and the airy building rose, tower on tower, and battlement on battlement. In awe that held us mute, we knelt and gazed upon this more than mortal architecture, which continued rising and spreading, and glowing with a serener light, still soft and silvery, yet to which the broadest moonbeam was dim. At last it stood forth to earth and heaven, the colossal image of the first Temple, the building raised by the wisest of men, and consecrated by the visible glory.