The City of Delight: A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem

Although it was a late winter day the old man was clad in the free white garments of a midsummer afternoon, for to the sorrow of Philistia the cold season of the year sixty-nine...

Momus drew up his camel. The woman who had followed halted. Except for the hurried breathing of their beasts, a critical silence brooded over the moon-silvered wilderness. The m...

News of the appearance of the plague in the house of Costobarus traveled fast after the death of the gardener, who had fallen in the open and in sight of the watchful inhabitant...

It was a night that the Maccabee did not readily forget. Since the girl had moved on to avoid him, he had become alive to a delinquency that was more of a sensation than an admi...

The Maccabee rode on, unconscious of Julian's critical gaze. The smile on his lips flickered now brightly, now very faint. The incident in the hills had not made him entirely ha...

Since the hour in which the Roman eagles had appeared above the horizon to the west in their circling over the rebellious province of Judea there had not been one day of peace....

Meanwhile Jerusalem was in the fury of barbarous warfare. At this ravine and that debouching upon Golgotha, the Vale of Hinnom and the Valley of Tophet, whole legions of besiege...

The Maccabee resolved that in spite of his heart-hunger, he must not be a frequent visitor to the house of Amaryllis because of the imminent risk of confronting the impostor Jul...

Joseph, the shepherd, son of Thomas of Pella, moved out of the green marsh before sunset, as he had planned to do, but not for the original motive. The sheep, indeed, would not...

Without stood a ten year old girl, of the most bewitching beauty, as barely clad as ever the children of her blood went over the green meadows of Achaia. Her golden hair was kno...

When the Maccabee had returned to the spot in the sedgy valley where he and Julian had halted, he found the Ephesian white to the lips and with ignited eyes awaiting him.

On his way to the oaken door that was for ever double-barred, in that small hall which led to the apartments of Amaryllis' corps of artists, Philadelphus met Salome, the actress...

Julian of Ephesus, now the presumptive Philadelphus Maccabaeus, rode up the broad brown bosom of a hill that had confronted him for miles to the south, and the sun had sloped un...

The madness on Jerusalem poured like an overwhelming flood into the cavern under the ruin of the Herodian palaces. There was Hesper, with most of his Gibborim gathered, preparin...

It was a different Amaryllis that the pretended Philadelphus faced now, from the one who had welcomed him on his arrival in Jerusalem months ago. Then she had been so cold and s...

As they reached the crest of a series of ridges there lay before them a long gentle slope smooth and dun-colored as some soft pelt, dropping down into a tender vale with levels...

The twilight of the cavern rarely revealed enough of the features of her fellows to Laodice for her to identify them or for them to identify her. She lived among them a dusky sh...

The night following the wounding of Nicanor, John spent on his fortifications expecting an attack. It was one of the few nights when the Gischalan kept vigil, for he refused to...

Beginning with the moment that the Maccabee first entered her hall, Amaryllis struggled with a perplexity. Certain discrepancies in the hastily concocted story which that stern...

He turned to look toward the corner of the Old Wall in time to behold Jews in armor and Romans in blazing brass rush together in a great cloud of dust as the Old Wall went in an...

The tremulous old man, weakened from his long and superhuman struggle to enter the doomed city, held Laodice to his breast while she stroked his rough cheeks and murmured things...

Within the Roman lines was a bent and deformed figure of an old waif that the soldiers had picked up attempting to run the lines into Jerusalem the second day after the siege ha...

A sudden wave of delight, a sudden rush of blood through his veins, swept before it and away for that time all memory of his struggle and his resolution to renounce her. All tha...

It was night when the first new air from the outside world reached him. So he rushed into great open darkness, lighted with stars, before he knew that he had emerged from the un...