But no one heard her, and the great chamber was dark, and not a sound came to her out of the stillness.
“Oh, by the Great Mother! By all the gods, great and small. Oh, Galilean!”
Now as she stood immobile and weightless in the blackness and silence, she began to sense a luminosity thinning the darkness below, and looking down she saw a great way off a point of light that spread and lifted and came up in ever widening circles to illuminate the heights about her. For she was standing on the summit of a great mountain, higher even than the sun-baked granite bluffs on which Machaerus sat above the Dead Sea, and far below she could discern the imprisoned, restless waters of a mountain-rimmed small lake.
Then, as she raised her eyes from the waters and looked across toward an opposite peak, she saw him. He stood, bent and shrunken and old with the weight of centuries, on a jagged thrust of rock that came out from the mountain to overhang the agitated surface of the lake. He was looking down at the waters; the light was reflected from a head completely bald, and it played on cheek bones guarding cheeks long sunken, so that his head even in life appeared to have dried away to a skull, and only long dewlaps hanging down showed signs of animation.
“No! No! It cannot be!”
But she knew it was, though Pontius Pilate had shriveled into a pitiful husk of the vain and pompous Procurator he had been.
In the same moment she heard voices, and looking around, she saw people on the slopes of the mountain, coming up, pushing outward, swelling, and growing until all the mountain was filled with people, and they were of all races and times and colors and tongues. But strangely enough, she could understand their words, Roman and Greek and Egyptian and the tongues of the yellow-haired sons of Germania and the dark-haired women of Gaul, and even the babblings of the barbarians in faraway Britannia, and the curious utterances of the many unborn strange peoples of places beyond the as yet uncharted seas. And each in his own way was saying what all the others were saying.
The man on the precipice appeared not to see or hear the people; he seemed preoccupied, fearful, oblivious of everything about him, and struggling with the burden of some monstrous inner distress. He raised his hands and held them before his face, and then it was that she saw they were red to the wrists with the color of blood freshly spilled; he rubbed them together, as though struggling fiercely to scrub the blood away; he lowered them as if to dip them in a basin, then lifted them again to study them, his bloodless face, in contrast to the hands, a shade of ashen horror.
But the frenzied washing had done no good; the hands shone fiery red. Despairing, Pilate dropped them to his sides and stepped to the very edge of the yawning gulf. “I didn’t know!” he cried. “By all the gods, I didn’t know.” He raised his cavernous face and with eyes wide looked into the void. “O God of the Jews”—his shrunken head swayed on the wrinkled neck—“had I but known. Had I but known....” His words whispered into silence, and he closed his eyes.
“Don’t! No! No!” she screamed. “No, don’t!”