CHAPTER XLVII

_The Struggle for Supremacy_

[Sidenote: The Sickness of the Heart]

The seventeenth day of the month Tamuz, ever memorable in the sufferings of Israel, was the last of the Daily Sacrifice. Sorrow and fear were on the city, and the silence of the night was broken by the lamentations of the multitude. I returned to my chamber of affliction, and busied myself in preparing for the guard of the Temple, to withdraw my mind from the gloom that was beginning to master me. Yet when I looked round the room, and thought of what I had been, of the opulent enjoyments of my palace, and of the beloved faces which surrounded me there, I felt the sickness of the heart.

The chilling air that blew through the dilapidated walls, the cruse of water, the scanty bread, the glimmering lamp, the comfortless and squalid bed, on which lay in the last stages of weakness a patriot and a hero—a being full of fine affections and abilities, reduced to the helplessness of an infant, and whom in leaving for the night I might be leaving to perish by the poniard of the robber—unmanned me. I cast the simitar from my hand, and sat down with a sullen determination there to linger until death, or that darker vengeance which haunted me, should do its will.

The night was stormy, and the wind howled in long and bitter gusts through the deserted chambers of the huge mansion. But the mind is the true place of suffering, and I felt the season’s visitation in my locks drenched about my face, and my tattered robes swept by the freezing blasts, as only the natural course of things.

I was sitting by the bedside, moistening the fevered lips of Constantius with water, and pressing on him the last fragment of bread which I might ever have to give, when I, with sudden delight, heard him utter for the first time articulate sounds. I stooped to catch accents so dear and full of hope. But the words were a supplication—he prayed to the Christian’s God!

[Sidenote: The Prayer of Constantius]

I turned away from this resistless conviction of his belief. But this was no time for debate, and I was won to listen again. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, but his language was the aspiration of the heart. His eyes were closed, and, evidently unconscious of my presence, in his high communion with Heaven, he talked of things of which I had but imperfect knowledge or none; of blood shed for the sins of man; of a descended Spirit to guide the servants of Heaven; of the unspeakable love that gave the Son of God to mortal suffering for the atonement of that human guilt which nothing but such a sacrifice could atone. He finished by the names dear to us both; and praying “for their safety if they still were in life, or for their meeting beyond the grave, declared himself resigned to the will of his Lord.”

I waited in sacred awe until I saw, by the subsiding motion of the lips, that the prayer was done, and then, anxious to gain information of my family, questioned him. But with the prayer the interval of mental power had passed away. The veil was drawn over his senses once more, and his answers were unintelligible. Yet even the hope of his restoration lightened my gloom; my spirits, naturally elastic, shook off their leaden weight; I took up the simitar, and pressing the cold hand of my noble fellow victim, prepared to issue forth to the Temple. The storm was partially gone, and the moon, approaching to the full, was high in heaven, fighting her way through masses of rapid cloud. The wind still roared in long blasts, as the tempest retired, like an army repulsed, and indignant at being driven from the spoil. But the ground was deluged, and a bitter sleet shot on our half-naked bodies. I had far to pass through the streets of the upper city, and their aspect was deeply suited to the melancholy of the hour.

Vast walls and buttresses of the burned and overthrown mansions remained, that in the spectral light looked like gigantic specters. Ranges of inferior ruins stretched to the utmost glance; some yet sending up the smoke of recent conflagration, and others beaten down by the storms or left to decay. The immense buildings of the hierarchy, once the scene of all but kingly magnificence, stood roofless and windowless, with the light sadly gleaming through their fissures, and the wind singing a dirge of ruin through their halls. I scarcely met a human being, for the sword and famine had fearfully reduced the once countless population.

But I often startled a flight of vultures from their meal; or, in the sinking of the light, stumbled upon a heap that uttered a cry, and showed that life was there; or from his horrid morsel, a wretch glared upon me, as one wolf might glare upon another, that came to rob him of his prey; or the twinkling of a miserable lamp in the corner of a ruin glimmered over a knot of felony and murder, reckoning their hideous gains and carousing with the dagger drawn. Heaps of bones, whitening in the air, were the monuments of the wasted valor of my countrymen, and the oppressive atmosphere gave the sensation of walking in a sepulcher.

[Sidenote: The Avenues of Death]

I dragged my limbs with increased difficulty through those long avenues of death that, black, silent, and split into a thousand shapes of ruin, looked less like the streets of a city than the rocky defiles of a mountain shattered by lightnings and earthquakes. On the summit of the hill I found a crowd of unhappy beings, who came, like myself, actuated by zeal to defend the Temple from the insults to which its sanctity was now nightly exposed. Faction had long extinguished the native homage of the people. Battles had been fought within its walls, and many a corpse loaded the sacred floors, that once would have required solemn ceremonies to free them from the pollution of an unlicensed step.

And what a band was assembled there! Wretches mutilated by wounds, worn with sleeplessness, haggard with want of food; shivering together on the declivity, whose naked elevation exposed them to the whole inclemency of the night; flung like the dead, on the ground, or gathered in little knots among the ruined porticos, with death in every frame and despair in every heart.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Views the Pomp of War]

I was sheltering myself behind the broken columns of the Grand gate, from the bitter wind which searched every fiber, and was sinking into that chilling torpor which benumbs body and mind alike, when a clash of military music and the tramp of a multitude assailed my ear. I started up and found my miserable companions mustered, from the various hollows of the hill, to our post on the central ground of Mount Moriah, whence the view was boundless on every side. A growing blaze rose up from the valley and flashed upon the wall of circumvallation. The sounds of cymbal and trumpet swelled; the light advanced rapidly; and going the circuit of the wall, helmets and lances of the cavalry were seen glittering through the gloom; a crowd of archers preceded a dense body of the legionary horse, at whose head rode a group of officers. On this night the fatal wall had been completed, and Titus was going its round in triumph. Every horseman carried a torch, and strong divisions of infantry followed, bearing lamps and vessels of combustible matter on the points of their spears. As the whole moved, rolling and bending with the inequalities of the ground, I thought that I saw a mighty serpent, coiling his burning spires round the prey that was never to be rescued by the power of man.

But the pomp of war below and the wretchedness round me, raised reflections of such bitterness that when Titus and his splendid troop reached the mountain of the Temple, one outcry of sorrow and anticipated ruin burst from us all. The conqueror heard it, and, from the instant maneuvering of his troops, was evidently alarmed; he had known the courage of the Jews too long not to dread the effect of their despair. And despair it was, fierce and untamable!

I started forward, exclaiming: “If there is a man among you ready to stake his life for his country, let him follow me.”

To the last hour the Jew was a warrior! The crowd seized their spears, and we sprang down the cliffs. As we reached the outer wall of the city, I restrained their exhaustless spirit until I had singly ascertained the state of the enemy. Titus was passing the well-known ravine near the fountain-gate, where the ground was difficult for cavalry, from its being chiefly divided into gardens. I flung open the gate, and led the way to the circumvallation. The sentinels, occupied with looking on the pomp, suffered us to approach unperceived; we mounted the wall, overthrew everything before us, and plunged down upon the cavalry, entangled in the ravine. It was a complete surprise.

The bravery of the legions was not proof against the fury of our attack. Even our wild faces and half-naked forms, by the uncertain glare of the torches, looked scarcely human. Horse and man rolled down the declivity. The arrival of fresh troops only increased the confusion; their torches made them a mark for our pikes and arrows; every point told, and every Roman that fell, armed a Jew. The conflict now became murderous, and we stabbed at our ease the troopers of the Emperor’s guard, through their mail, while their long lances were useless.

The defile gave us incalculable advantages, for the garden walls were impassable by the cavalry, while we bounded over them like deer. All was uproar, terror, and rage. We actually waded through blood. At every step, I trod on horse or man; helmets and bucklers, lances and armor, lay in heaps, and the stream of the ravine soon ran purple with the proudest gore of the legions.

[Sidenote: The Roman Charge]

At length, while we were absolutely oppressed with the multitude of dead, a sudden blast of trumpets and the shouts of the enemy led me to prepare for a still fiercer effort. A tide of cavalry poured over the ground; Titus, a gallant figure, cheering them on, with his helmet in his hand, galloped in their front; I withdrew my wearied followers from the exposed situation into which their success had led them, and posting them behind a rampart of Roman dead, awaited the charge. It came with the force of thunder; the powerful horses of the imperial squadron broke over our rampart at the first shock and bore us down like stubble. Every man of us was under their feet in a moment; and yet the very number of our assailants saved us. The narrowness of the place gave no room for the management of the horse; the darkness assisted both our escape and assault; and even lying on the ground, we plunged our knives in horse and rider, with terrible retaliation.

The cavalry at length gave way, but the Roman general, a man of the heroic spirit that is only inflamed by repulse, rushed forward among the disheartened troops, and roused them by his cries and gestures to retrieve their honor. After a few bold words, he again charged at their head. I singled him out, as I saw his golden helmet gleam in the torch-light. To capture the son of Vespasian would have been a triumph worth a thousand lives. Titus[46] was celebrated for personal dexterity in the management of the horse and lance, and I could not withhold my admiration of the skill with which he penetrated the difficulties of the field, and the mastery with which he overthrew all that opposed him.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Attacks Titus]

Our motley ranks were already scattering, when I cried out my name and defied him to the combat. He stooped over his charger’s neck to discover his adversary, and seeing before him a being as blackened and beggared as the most dismantled figure of the crowd, gave a laugh of fierce derision, and was turning away, when our roar of scorn recalled him. He struck in the spur, and couching his lance, bounded toward me. To have waited his attack must have been destruction; I sprang aside, and with my full vigor flung my javelin; it went through his buckler. He reeled, and a groan rose from the legionaries who were rushing forward to his support. He stopped them with a fierce gesture, and casting off the entangled buckler, charged again. But the hope of the imperial diadem was not to be thus cheaply hazarded. The whole circle of cavalry rolled in upon us; I was dragged down by a hundred hands, and Titus was forced away, indignant at the zeal which had thwarted his fiery valor.

In the confusion I was forgotten, burst through the concourse, and rejoined my countrymen, who had given me over for lost, and now received me with shouts of victory. The universal cry was to advance, but I felt that the limit of triumph for that night was come; the engagement had become known to the whole range of the enemy’s camps, and troops without number were already pouring down. I ordered a retreat, but there was one remaining exploit to make the night’s service memorable.

Leaving a few hundred pikemen outside the circumvallation, to keep off any sudden attempt, I set every hand at work to gather the dry weeds, rushes, and fragments of trees from the low grounds into a pile. It was laid against the rampart. I flung the first torch, and pile and rampart were soon alike in a blaze. Volumes of flame, carried by the wind, rolled round its entire circuit. The Romans rushed down in multitudes to extinguish the fire. But this became continually more difficult. Jerusalem had been roused from its sleep, and the extravagant rumors that a great victory was obtained, Titus slain, and the enemy’s camp taken by storm, stimulated the natural spirit of the people to the most boundless confidence. Every Jew who could find a lance, an arrow, or a knife hurried to the gates, and the space between the walls and the circumvallation was crowded with an army which, in that crisis of superhuman exultation, perhaps no disciplined force on earth could have outfought.

Nothing could now save the rampart. Torches innumerable, piles of faggots, arms, even the dead, all things that could burn, were flung upon it. Thousands, who at other times might have shrunk, forgot the name of fear, leaped into the very midst of the flames, and tearing up the blazing timbers, dug to the heart of the rampart and filled the hollows with sulfur and bitumen; thousands struggled across the tumbling ruins, to throw themselves among the Roman spearsmen and see the blood of an enemy before they died.

[Sidenote: The Rampart’s Illumination]

War never had a bolder moment. Human nature, roused to the wildest height of enthusiasm, was lavishing life like dust. The ramparts spread a horrid light upon the havoc; every spot of the battle, every group of the furious living, and the trampled and deformed dead, was keenly visible. The ear was deafened by the incessant roar of flame, the falling of the huge heaps of the rampart, and the agonies and exultations of men, reveling in mutual slaughter.

[Sidenote: The Phenomenon in the Sky]

In that hour came one of those solemn signs that marked the downfall of Jerusalem. The tempest, that had blown at intervals with tremendous violence, died away at once; and a surge of light ascended from the horizon and rolled up rapidly to the zenith. The phenomenon instantly fixed every eye. There was an indefinable sense in the general mind that a sign of power and providence was about to be given. The battle ceased; the outcries were followed by utter silence; the armed ranks stood still, in the very act of rushing on each other; all faces were turned on the heavens.

The light rose pale and quivering like the meteors of a summer evening. But in the zenith, it spread and swelled into a splendor that distinguished it irresistibly from the wonders of earth or air. It swiftly eclipsed every star. The moon vanished before it; the canopy of the sky seemed to be dissolved, for a view into a bright and infinite region beyond, fit for the career of those mighty beings to whom man is but the dust on the gale.

As we gazed, this boundless field was transformed into a field of battle; multitudes seemed to crowd it in the fiercest combat; horsemen charged and died under their horses’ feet; armor and standards were trampled in blood; column and line burst through each other. At length the battle stooped toward the earth, and with hearts beating with indescribable feelings we recognized in the fight the banners of the tribes. It was Jew and Roman struggling for life; the very countenances of the combatants became visible, and each man below saw a representative of himself above. The fate of Jewish war was there written by the hand of Heaven; the fate of the individual was there predicted in the individual triumph or fall. What tongue of man can tell the intense interest with which we watched every blow, every movement, every wound, of those images of ourselves?

The light now illumined the whole horizon below. The legions were seen drawn out in front of the camps, ready for action—every helmet and spear-point glittering in the radiance; every face turned up, gazing in awe and terror on the sky. The tents spreading over the hills; the thousands and tens of thousands of auxiliaries and captives; the little groups of the peasantry, roused from sleep by the uproar of the night, and gathered upon the knolls and eminences of their fields—all were bathed in a flood of preternatural luster. But the wondrous battle approached its close. The visionary Romans seemed to shake, column and cohort gave way, and the banners of the tribes waved in victory over the celestial field. Then human voices dared to be heard. From the city and the plain burst forth one mighty shout of triumph!

[Sidenote: A Dreadful Sign]

But our presumption was soon to be checked. A peal of thunder that made the very ground tremble under our feet rolled from the four quarters of the heaven. The conquering host shook, broke, and fled in utter confusion over the sapphire field. It was pursued, but by no semblance of the Roman.

An awful enemy was on its steps. Flashes of forked fire, like myriads of lances, darted after it; cloud on cloud deepened down, as the smoke of a mighty furnace; globes of light shot blasting and burning along its track. Then amid the double roar of thunder rushed forth the chivalry of heaven. Shapes of transcendent beauty, yet with looks of wrath that withered the human eye—armed sons of immortality descending on the wing by millions—mingled with shapes and instruments of ruin, for which the mind has no conception. The circle of the heaven was filled with the chariots and horses of fire. Flight was in vain; the weapons were seen to drop from the Jewish host; their warriors sank upon the splendid field. Still the immortal armies poured on, trampling and blasting, until the last of the routed were consumed.

The angry pomp then paused. Countless wings were spread, and the angelic multitudes, having done the work of vengeance, rushed upward, with the sound of ocean in the storm. The roar of trumpets and thunders was heard, until the splendor was lost in the heights of the empyrean.

We felt the terrible warning. Our strength was dried up at the sight; despair seized upon our souls. We had seen the fate of Jerusalem. No victory over man could now save us from the coming of final ruin!

[Sidenote: Despair]

Thousands never left the ground on which they stood; they perished by their own hands, or lay down and died of broken hearts. The rest fled through the night, that again wrapped them in tenfold darkness. The whole multitude scattered with soundless steps, and in silence like an army of specters.