"Now begone," said the King. "Let everything be ready for to-night. Clarissa, the Queen of the Grove, comes with a troop of her dancers."
With a wave of the royal hand the scribe vanished, and instead came the King's costumers and physician; for the body of the Glorious must be re-apparelled, and his stomach put in order for feasting.
II
THE CITY OF DESOLATION
The streets of Jerusalem in every age have been thronged with the same motley multitude: cool-looking, white-shirted market venders from the stalls; no shirted sweat-hot artisans from the cellar workshops; dyers, designated by their badges of bright-colored threads; tailors, in heraldry of ornamented needles; carpenters, wearing their symbol of square and compass—of which they were as proud as the scribe was of the pen stuck behind his ear; fishermen from Galilee and the coast jostling the fruiterers with great baskets on their heads; bare-legged, dirt-tanned laborers from the fields; half-naked children of either sex, playing with equal carelessness whether they knocked over the piles of fruit and black bread that stood upon the stone pavement, or were themselves knocked over by the sharp hoofs of asses or the spongy feet of camels. These exponents of common, toiling humanity made way for the gay tunic-clad aristocrats of the Upper City of Sion, white-robed priests from the Temple Mount, gray-sheeted women from the Cheesemakers Street, and ladies in black silken garments and caps of coins, who were borne in palanquins from the more fashionable Street of David.
But in the year 167 before our Era all these had disappeared,—as suddenly and completely as the sea-mullets and blackfish are driven out of the shallows in the bay of Joppa by an invasion of sharks.
The costumes and speech of the new crowd on the streets were foreign, chiefly those of Greek and Syrian soldiers, with broad-brimmed hats, loose-knit, iron-linked corsage, tight leather leggings, and short, stout cleaver-like swords hanging from their girdles. Here and there one stood stock still, sentinelling his corner of the street, with the point of his sarissa or long spear gleaming ten cubits above his head, while his broad circular shield held abreast made an eddy in the living current as it swept around him. These were the soldiers of Antiochus Epiphanes.
Mingled with them were many foreign civilians, as their dress indicated; merchants whose belts were well filled with gold to purchase what the soldiers might steal; colonists to resettle the lands from which the conquered people were expelled; and hordes of hucksters and harlots who followed the armies of the time as dust clouds come after chariots.