The whole jungle was instantly alive; the shade which I had fixed on for the seat of unearthly tranquillity had been an old haunt of lions, and the mighty herd were now roused from their noonday slumbers. Nothing could be grander or more terrible than this disturbed majesty of the forest kings. In every variety of savage passion, from terror to fury, they plunged, tore, and yelled; dashed through the lake, burst through the thicket, rushed up the hills, or stood baying and roaring in defiance, as if against a coming invader; their numbers were immense, for the rareness of shade and water had gathered them from every quarter of the desert.

While I stood clinging to my perilous hold, and fearful of attracting their gaze by the slightest movement, the source of the commotion appeared, in the shape of a Roman soldier issuing, spear in hand, through a ravine at the farther side of the valley. He was palpably unconscious of the formidable place into which he was entering, and the gallant clamor of voices through the hills showed that he was followed by others as bold and as unconscious of their danger as himself. But his career was soon closed; his horse’s feet had scarcely touched the turf, when a lion was fixed with fang and claw on the creature’s loins. The rider uttered a cry of horror, and for an instant sat helplessly gazing at the open jaws behind him. I saw the lion gathering up his flanks for a second bound, but the soldier, a figure of gigantic strength, grasping the nostrils of the monster with one hand, and with the other shortening his spear, drove the steel at one resistless thrust into the lion’s forehead. Horse, lion, and rider fell, and continued struggling together.

In the next moment a mass of cavalry came thundering down the ravine. They had broken off from their march, through the accident of rousing a straggling lion, and followed him in the giddy ardor of the chase. But the sight now before them was enough to appal the boldest intrepidity. The valley was filled with the vast herd; retreat was impossible, for the troopers came still pouring in by the only pass, and from the sudden descent of the glen, horse and man were rolled head foremost among the lions; neither man nor monster could retreat.

The conflict was horrible; the heavy spears of the legionaries plunged through bone and brain; the lions, made more furious by wounds, sprang upon the powerful horses and tore them to the ground, or flew at the troopers’ throats, and crushed and dragged away cuirass and buckler. The valley was a struggling heap of human and savage battle; man, lion, and charger writhing and rolling in agonies until their forms were undistinguishable. The groans and cries of the legionaries, the screams of the mangled horses, and the roars and howlings of the lions, bleeding with sword and spear, tearing the dead, darting up the sides of the hills in terror, and rushing down again with the fresh thirst of gore, baffled all conception of fury and horror. But man was the conqueror at last; the savages, scared by the spear, and thinned in their numbers, made a rush in one body toward the ravine, overthrew everything in their way, and burst from the valley, awaking the desert for many a league with their roar.

The troopers, bitterly repenting their rash exploit, gathered up the remnants of their dead on litters of boughs, and leaving many a gallant steed to feast the vultures, slowly retired from the place of carnage.

The spot to which I clung made ascent or descent equally difficult, and during their extraordinary contest I continued embedded in the foliage, and glad to escape the eye of man and brute alike. But the troop were now gone; beneath me lay nothing but a scene of blood, and I began to wind my way to the summit. A menace from below stopped me. A solitary horseman had galloped back to give a last look to this valley of death; he saw me climbing the hill, saw that I was not a Roman, and in the irritation of the hour, made no scruple of sacrificing a native to the manes of his comrades. The spear followed his words and plowed the ground at my side. His outcry brought back a dozen of his squadron; I found myself about to be assailed by a general discharge. Escape on foot was impossible, and I had no resource but to be speared, or to descend and give myself up to the soldiery.

It was to warn me of this hazard that the signals of my strange companion were made. He saw the advance of the Roman column along the plain. My suspicions of his honesty drove me directly into their road, and the chance of turning down the valley scarcely retarded the capture. On my first emerging from the hills, I must have been taken. However, my captors were in unusual ill-temper. As an Arab, too poor to be worth plundering or being made prisoner, I should have met only a sneer or an execration and been turned loose; but the late disaster made the turban and haik odious, and I was treated with the wrath due to a fellow conspirator of the lions. To my request that I should be suffered to depart in peace on my business, the most prompt denial was given; the story that I told to account for my travel in the track of the column was treated with the simplest scorn; I was pronounced a spy, and fairly told that my head was my own only till I gave the procurator whatever information it contained.

Yet I found one friend, in this evil state of my expedition. My barb, which I had given up for lost in the desert, or torn by the wild beasts, appeared on the heights overhanging our march, and by snuffing the wind, and bounding backward and forward through the thickets, attracted general attention. I claimed her, and the idea that the way-sore and rough-clothed prisoner could be the master of so noble an animal, raised scorn to its most peremptory pitch. In turn I demanded permission to prove my right, and called the barb. The creature heard the voice with the most obvious delight, bounded toward me, rubbed her head against me, and by every movement of dumb joy showed that she had found her master.

Still my requests for dismissal were idle; I talked to the winds; the rear squadrons of the column were in sight; there was no time to be lost. I was suffered to mount the barb, but her bridle was thrown across the neck of one of the troopers’ horses, and I was marched along to death, or a tedious captivity. My blood boiled when I thought of what was to be done before the dawn. How miserable a proof had I given of the vigilance and vigor that were to claim the command of armies! I writhed in every nerve. My agitation at length caught the eye of a corpulent old captain, whose good-humored visage was colored by the deepest infusion of the grape. His strong Thracian charger was a movable magazine of the choicest Falernian; out of every crevice of his pack-saddle and accouterments peeped the head of a flask; and to judge by his frequent recourse to his stores, no man was less inclined to carry his baggage for nothing. Popularity, too, attended upon the captain, and a group of young patricians attached to the procurator’s court were content to abate of their rank, and ride along with the old soldier, in consideration of his better knowledge of the grand military science, providing for the road.

In the midst of some camp story, which the majority received with peals of applause, the captain glanced upon me, and asking “whether I was not ill,” held out his flask. I took it, and never did I taste draught so delicious. Thirst and hunger are the true secrets of luxury. I absolutely felt new life rushing into me with the wine.

“There,” said the old man, “see how the fellow’s eye sparkles. Falernian is the doctor, after all. I have had no other those forty years. For hard knocks, hard watches, and hard weather, there is nothing like the true juice of the vine. Try it again, Arab.”

I declined the offer in civil terms.

“There,” said he, “it has made the man eloquent. By Hercules, it would make his mare speak. And now that I look at her, she is as prettily made a creature as I have seen in Syria; her nose would fit in a drinking-cup. What is her price, at a word?”

I answered that “she was not to be sold.”

“Well, well, say no more about it,” replied the jovial old man; “I know you Arabs make as much of a mare as of a child, and I never meddle in family affairs.”

A haughty-looking tribune, covered with embroidery and the other coxcombry of the court soldier, spurred his charger between us and uttered with a sneer:

“What, captain, by Venus and all the Graces! giving this beggar a lecture in philosophy or a lesson in politeness? If you will not have the mare, I will. Dismount, slave!”

The officers gathered to the front, to see the progress of the affair. I sat silent.

“Slave! do you hear? Dismount! You will lose nothing, for you will steal another in the first field you come to.”

“I know but one race of robbers in Judea,” replied I.

The old captain reined up beside me, and said in a whisper: “Friend, let him have the mare. He will pay you handsomely, and besides, he is the nephew of the procurator. It will not be wise in you to put him in a passion.”

“That fellow never shall have her, tho he were to coin these sands into gold,” replied I.

“Do you mean to call us robbers?” said the tribune, with a lowering eye.

“Do you mean to stop me on the high-road and take my property from me, yet expect that I shall call you anything else?” was the answer.

“Sententious rogues, those Arabs! Every soul of them has a point, or a proverb, on his tongue,” murmured the captain to the group of young men, who were evidently amused at seeing their unpopular companion entangled with me.

“Slave!” said the tribune fiercely, “we must have no more of this. You have been found lurking about the camp. Will you be hanged for a spy?”

“A spy!” said I—and the insult probably colored my cheek; “a spy has no business among the Romans.”

“So,” observed the captain, “the Arab seems to think that our proceedings are in general pretty palpable: slay, strip, and burn.” He turned to the patrician tribune. “The fellow is not worth our trouble. Shall I let him go about his business?”

“Sir,” said the tribune angrily, “it is your business to command your troop and be silent.”

The old man bit his lip, and fell back to the line of his men. My taunter reined up beside me again.

“Do you know, robber, that I can order you to be speared on the spot for your lies?”

“No, for I have told you nothing but the truth of both of us. Such an order, too, would only prove that men will often bid others do what they dare not touch with a finger of their own.”

The officers, offended at the treatment of their old favorite, burst into a laugh. The coxcomb grew doubly indignant.

“Strip the hound!” exclaimed he to the soldiers; “it is money that makes him insolent.”

“Nature has done it, at least for one of us, without the expense of a mite,” replied I calmly.

“Off with his turban! Those fellows carry coin in every fold of it.”

The officers looked at each other in surprise; the captain hardly suppressed a contemptuous execration between his lips. The very troopers hesitated.

“Soldiers!” said I, in the same unaltered tone, “I have no gold in my turban. An Arab is seldom one of those—the outside of whose head is better worth than the inside.”

The perfumed and curled locks of the tribune, surmounted by a helmet, sculptured and plumed in the most extravagant style, caught every eye; and the shaft, slight as it was, went home.

“I’ll pluck the robber off his horse by the beard!” exclaimed the tribune, spurring his horse upon me and advancing his hand.

I threw open my robe, grasped my dagger, and sternly pronounced: “There is an oath in our line that the man who touches the beard of an Arab dies.”

He was not prepared for the action, hesitated, and finally wheeled from me. The old captain burst out into an involuntary huzza.

“Take the beggar to the camp,” said the tribune, as he rode away, “I hate all scoundrels”; and he glanced round the spectators.

“Then,” exclaimed I, after him, as a parting blow, “you have at least one virtue, for you can never be charged with self-love.”

This woman-war made me popular on the spot. The tribune had no sooner turned his horse’s head than the officers clustered together in laughter. Even the iron visages of the troopers relaxed into grim smiles. The old jocular captain was the only one still grave.

“There rides not this day under the canopy of heaven,” murmured he, “a greater puppy than Caius Sempronius Catulus, tribune of the thirteenth legion by his mother’s morals and the Emperor’s taste. Why did not the coxcomb stay at home, and show off his trappings among the supper-eaters of the Palatine? He might have powdered his ringlets with gold-dust, washed his hands in rose-water, and perfumed his handkerchief with myrrh as well there as here, for he does nothing else—except,” and he clenched the heavy hilt of his falchion, “insult men who have seen more battles than he has seen years, who knew better service than bowing in courts, and the least drop of whose blood is worth all that will ever run in his veins. But I have not done with him yet. As for you, friend,” said he, “I am sorry to stop you on your way; but as this affair will be magnified by that fool’s tongue, you must be brought to the procurator. However, the camp is only a few miles off; you will be asked a few questions, and then left to follow your will.”

He little dreamed how I recoiled from that interview.

To shorten the time of my delay, the good-natured old man ordered the squadron to mend their pace, and in half an hour we saw the noon encampment of my sworn enemy, lifting its white tops and scarlet flags among the umbrage of a forest, deep in the valley at our feet.

CHAPTER XXVII
The Escape of Salathiel, the Magician

The squadron drew up at the entrance of the procurator’s tent, and with a crowd of alarmed peasants captured in the course of the day, I was delivered over to be questioned by this man of terror. The few minutes which passed before I was called to take my turn were singularly painful. This was not fear, for the instant sentence of the ax would have been almost a relief from the hopeless and fretful thwartings sown so thickly in my path. But to have embarked in a noble enterprise, and to perish without use; to have arrived almost within sight of the point of my desires, and then, without striking a blow, to be given up to shame, stung me like a serpent.

My heart sprang to my lips when I heard myself called into the presence of Florus. He was lying upon a couch, with his never-failing cup before him, and turning over some papers with a shaking hand. Care or conscience had made ravages even in him since I saw him last. He was still the same figure of excess, but his cheek was hollow; the few locks on his head had grown a more snowy white, and the little pampered hand was as thin and yellow as the claw of the vulture that he so much resembled in his soul.

With his head scarcely lifted from the table, and with eyes that seemed half shut, he asked whence I had come and whither I was going. My voice, notwithstanding my attempt to disguise it, struck his acute ear. His native keenness was awake at once. He darted a fiery glance at me, and, striking his hand on the table, exclaimed: “By Hercules, it is the Jew!” My altered costume again perplexed him.

“Yet,” said he in soliloquy, “that fellow went to Nero, and must have been executed. Ho! send in the tribune who took him.”

Catulus entered, and his account of me was, luckily, contemptuous in the extreme. I was “a notorious robber, who had stolen a handsome horse, perfectly worthy of the stud of the procurator.”

I panted with the hope of escape, and was gradually moving to the door.

“Stand, slave!” cried Florus, “I have my doubts of you still, and as the public safety admits of no mistake I have no alternative. Tribune, order in the lictors. He must be scourged into confession.”

The lictors were summoned, and I was to be torn by Roman torturers.

A tumult now arose outside, and a man rushed in with the lictors, exclaiming: “Justice, most mighty Florus! By the majesty of Rome, and the magnanimity of the most illustrious of governors, I call for justice against my plunderer, my undoer, the robber of the son of El Hakim, of his most precious treasure.”

Florus recognized the clamorer as an old acquaintance, and desired him to state his complaint, and with as much brevity as possible.

“Last night,” said the man, “I was the happy possessor of a mare, fleet as the ostrich and shapely as the face of beauty. I had intended her as a present for the most illustrious of procurators, the great Florus, whom the gods long preserve! In the hour of my rest, the spoiler came, noiseless as the fall of the turtle’s feather, cruel as the viper’s tooth. When I arose the mare was gone. I was in distraction. I tore my beard; I beat my head upon the ground; I cursed the robber wherever he went, to the sun-rising or the sun-setting, to the mountains or the valleys. But fortune sits on the banner of my lord the procurator, and I came for hope of his conquering feet. In passing through the camp, what did I see but my treasure, the delight of my eyes, the drier up of my tears! I have come to claim justice and the restoration of my mare, that I may have the happiness to present her to the most renowned of mankind.”

I had been occupied with the thought whether I should burst through the lictors or rush on the procurator. But the length and loudness of this outcry engrossed every one. The orator was my friend the beggar! He pointed fiercely to me. If looks could kill, he would not have survived the look that I gave the traitor in return.

“There,” said Florus, “is your plunderer. Sabat, have you ever seen him before?”

The beggar strode insolently toward me.

“Seen him before! aye, a hundred times. What! Ben Ammon, the most notorious thief from the Nile to the Jordan! My lord, every child knows him. Ha, by the gods of my fathers, by my mother’s bosom, by shaft and by shield, he has stolen more horses within the last twenty years than would remount all the cavalry from Beersheba to Damascus! It was but last night that, as I was leading my mare, the gem of my eyes, my pearl——”

I now began to perceive the value of my eloquent friend’s interposition.

“An Arab horse-thief! That alters the case,” said the procurator. “Ho! did you not say that the mare was intended for me? Lictor, go and bring this wonder to the door.”

The voluble son of El Hakim followed the lictor, and returned, crying out more furiously than before against me. His “pearl, the delight of his eyes, was spoiled—was utterly unmanagable. I had put some of my villainous enchantments upon her, for which I was notorious.”

The procurator’s curiosity was excited; he rose and went to take a view of the enchanted animal. I followed, and certainly nothing could be more singular than the restiveness which the son of El Hakim contrived to make her exhibit. She plunged, she bounded, bit, reared, and flung out her heels in all directions. Every attempt to lead or mount her was foiled in the most complete yet most ludicrous manner. The young cavalry officers came from all sides, and could not be restrained from boisterous laughter, even by the presence of the procurator. Florus himself at last became among the loudest. Even I, accustomed as I was to daring horsemanship, was surprised at the eccentric agility of this unlucky rider. He was alternately on the animal’s back and under her feet; he sprang upon her from behind, he sprang over her head, he stood upon the saddle, but all in vain; he had scarcely touched her when she threw him up in the air again, amid the perpetual roar of the soldiery.

At length, with a look of dire disappointment, he gave up the task, and, as scarcely able to drag his limbs along, prostrated himself before Florus, praying that he would order the Arab thief to unsay the spells that had turned “the gentlest mare in the world into a wild beast.” The consent was given with a haughty nod, and I advanced to play my part in a performance, the object of which I had no conception. The orator delivered the barb to me with a look so expressive of cunning, sport, and triumph, that perplexed as I was, I could not avoid a smile.

My experiment was rapidly made. The mare knew me, and was tractable at once. This only confirmed the charge of my necromancy. But the son of El Hakim professed himself altogether dissatisfied with so expeditious a process, and demanded that I should go through the regular steps of the art. In the midst of the fiercest reprobation of my unhallowed dealings, a whisper from him put me in possession of his mind.

I now went through the process used by the traveling jugglers, and if the deepest attention of an audience could reward my talents, mine received unexampled reward. My gazings on the sky, whisperings in the barb’s ear, grotesque figures traced on the sand, wild gestures and mysterious jargon, thoroughly absorbed the intellects of the honest legionaries. If I had been content with fame, I might have spread my reputation through the Roman camps as a conjurer of the first magnitude. I was, however, beginning to be weary of my exhibition, and longed for the signal, when Sabat approached, and loudly testifying that I had clearly performed my task, threw the bridle over the animal’s head and whispered, “Now!”

My heart panted; my hand was on the mane; I glanced round to see that all was safe, before I gave the spring, when Florus screamed out:

“The Jew! by Tartarus, it is the Jew himself. Drag down the circumcised dog.”

With cavalry on every side of me, forcible escape was out of the question.

“Undone, undone!” were the words of my wild friend, as he passed me. And when I saw him once more in the most earnest conversation with Florus, I concluded that the discovery was complete. I was in utter despair. I stood sullenly waiting the worst, and gave an internal curse to the more than malevolence of fortune.

The conversation continued so long that the impatience of those around me began to break out.

“On what possible subject can the procurator suffer that mad fellow to have so long an audience?” said a young patrician.

“On every possible subject, I should conceive, from the length of the conference,” was the reply.

“Florus knows his man,” said a third; “that mad fellow is a regular spy, and receives more of the Emperor’s coin in a month than we do in a year.”

The tribune now broke into the circle, and with a look of supreme scorn, affectedly exclaimed: “Come, knight of the desert, sovereign of the sands, let us have a specimen of your calling. Stand back, officers; this egg of Ishmael is to quit plunder so soon that he would probably like to die as he lived—in the exercise of his trade. Here, slave, show us the most approved method of getting possession of another man’s horse.”

I stood in indignant silence. The tribune threatened. A thought struck me; I bowed to the command, let the barb loose, and proceeded according to the theory of horse-stealing. I approached noiselessly, gesticulated, made mystic movements, and gibbered witchcraft as before. The animal, with natural docility, suffered my experiments. I continued urging her toward the thinner side of the circle.

“Now, noble Romans,” said I, “look carefully to the next spell, for it is the triumph of the art.”

Curiosity was in every countenance. I made a genuflexion to the four points of the compass, devoted a gesture of peculiar solemnity to the procurator’s tent, and while all eyes were drawn in that direction, sprang on the barb’s back and was gone like an arrow.

I heard a clamor of surprise, mingled with outrageous laughter, and looking round, saw the whole crowd of the loose riders of the encampment in full pursuit up the hill. Florus was at his tent door, pointing toward me with furious gestures. The trumpets were calling, the cavalry mounting; I had roused the whole activity of the little army.

The slope of the valley was long and steep, and the heavy horsemanship of the legionaries, who were perhaps not very anxious for my capture, soon threw them out. A little knot of the more zealous alone kept up a pursuit, from which I had no fears. An abrupt rock in the middle of the ascent at length hid them from me. To gain a last view of the camp, I doubled round the rock and saw, a few yards below me, the tribune, with his horse completely blown. I owed him a debt, which I had determined to discharge at the earliest possible time, partly on my own account, and partly on that of the old captain. I darted upon him. He was all astonishment; a single buffet from my naked hand knocked the helpless taunter off his charger.

“Tribune,” cried I, as he lay upon the ground, “you have had one specimen of my art to-day, now you shall have another. Learn in future to respect an Arab.”

I caught his horse’s bridle, gave the animal a lash, and we bounded away together. The scene was visible to the whole camp; the troopers, who had reined up on the declivity, gave a roar of merriment, and I heard the old corpulent captain’s laugh above it all.

CHAPTER XXVIII
The Power of a Beggar

I had escaped, but the delay was ruinous. The sun sank when I reached the brow of the mountain, and Masada lay many a weary mile forward. I cast off the tribune’s horse, thus giving his insolent master evidence that I did not understand the main point of my trade, and stood pondering to what point of the mighty ridge that rose blue along the horizon I should turn, when, in the plunge of the horse as he felt himself at liberty, his saddle came to the ground. The possibility of its containing reports of the state of the enemy led me to examine its pockets; they were stuffed with letters worthy of the highest circles of Italian high life; the ill-spelled registers of an existence at a loss how to lose its time; of libertinism sick of indulgence, and of pecuniary embarrassment driven to the most hopeless and whimsical resources.

A glance at a few of those epistles was enough, and I scattered into the air the reputations of half the high-born maids and matrons of Rome; but as I was turning away with an instinctive exclamation of scorn at this compendium of patrician life, my eye was caught by a letter addressed to the governor of Masada. In opening it, I committed no violation of diplomacy, for it held no secret other than an angry remission of his allegiance by some wearied fair one, who announced her intended marriage with the tribune.

My revenge was thus to go further than my intent, for I deprived him of the personal triumph of delivering this calamitous despatch to his rival. Yet, on second thought, conceiving that some cipher might lurk under its absurdity, I secured the paper, and giving the rein, left the whole secret correspondence of debt, libel, and love to the delight of mankind. I flew along; my indefatigable barb, as if she felt her master’s anxieties, put forth double speed. But I had yet a fearful distance to traverse. The night came, but I had no time to think of rest or shelter. I pushed on. The wind rose and wrapt me in whirls of sand. I heard the roar of waters. The ground became fractured, and full of the loose fragments that fall from rocky hills. I found that I was at the foot of the ridge and had lost my way. In this embarrassment I trusted to the sagacity of my steed. But thirst led her directly to one of the mountain torrents, and the phosphoric gleam of the waters alone saved us both from a plunge over a precipice, deep enough to extinguish every appetite and ambition in the round of this bustling world.

To find a passage or an escape, I alighted. The torrent bellowed before me. A wall of rock rose on the opposite side. After long climbings and descents, I found that I had descended too deep to return. Oh, how I longed for the trace of man, for the feeblest light that ever twinkled from the cottage window! I felt the plague of helplessness. To attempt the torrent was impossible. To linger where I stood till dawn was misery.

What would be going on meanwhile? Perhaps, at the very time while I was standing in wretched doubt, imprisoned among those pestilent cliffs, the deed was doing. Constantius was, with ineffectual gallantry, assaulting the fortress; my brave kinsmen were sacrificing their lives under the Roman spears, and I was not there!

A fitful sound came mingling with the roar of the cataract; it swelled, and vanished like the rushings of the gale. A trumpet sounded, but so feebly that nothing but the keenness of an ear straining to catch the slightest sound could have distinguished it. I heard remote shouts; they deepened; the echo of trumpets followed.

“The assault has begun!” I thought. “The work of glory and of death was doing. Every instant cost a life. The hailstones that bruised me were not thicker than the arrows that were then smiting down my people. Yet there was I, like a wolf in the pitfall!”

Even where the combat was being fought, baffled my conception. It might be in the clouds or underground, on the opposite side of the black ridge before me, or many a league beyond the reach of my exhausted limbs and drooping steed; all was darkness to the eye and to the mind.

A light flashed down a ravine leading into the heart of the mountains; another and another blazed. Masada stood upon the mountain’s brow.

I instantly plunged into the torrent—was beaten down by the billows—was swept along through narrow channels of rock, until, half-suffocated, I was hurled up against the opposite cliff. Wet and weary, I less climbed than tore my way upward. But the torrent had borne me far below the ravine. Before me was a gigantic rampart of rock. But the time was flying. I dragged myself up to the face of the precipice by the chance brushwood. I swung from point to point by a few projecting branches that broke away almost in my grasp, until, with my hands excoriated, my limbs stiff and bleeding, and my head reeling, I reached the pinnacle.

Was I under the dominion of a spell? Was the power of some fiend raised to mock me? All was darkness as far as the eye could pierce; the heaviest veil of midnight hung upon the earth. There was utter silence. Not the slightest sound reached the ear.

For a while, the thought of some strange illusion was paramount; then came the frightful idea that the illusion was in myself; that in the effort to gain the ascent, I had strained eye and ear until I could neither hear nor see; that I was still within sight and sound of battle, but insensible to the impressions of the external world forever. Immortality under this exclusion! A deathlessness of the deaf and blind! The thought struck me with a force inconceivable by all minds but one sentenced like mine.

In my despair I cried aloud. A flood of joy rushed into my heart when I heard my voice answered, tho it was but by the neigh of my barb below, which probably felt itself as ill-placed as its master. I now used my ear as the guide, and cautiously descending the farther side of the ridge was soon on comparatively level ground, the remnant of a forest. My foot struck against a human body; I spoke; the answer was a groan, and an entreaty that I should bear a small packet, which was put into my hands, “to the prince of Naphtali!” In alarm and astonishment, I raised the sufferer, gave him some water from my flask, and after many an effort, in which I thought that life would depart every moment, he told me that “he was the unfortunate leader of the assault of Masada.” Constantius lay in my arms!

“Where I am,” said he, as he slowly recovered his senses, “how I came here, or anything but that we are undone, I can not conceive. My last recollection was of fixing a ladder to the inner rampart. We had made our way good so far without loss. The garrison was weakened by detachments sent out to plunder. I attacked at midnight. To surprise a Roman fortress was, I well knew, next to impossible; and no man ever found a Roman garrison without bravery. But our bold fellows did wonders. Everything was driven from the first rampart; we made more prisoners than we knew what to do with, and in the midst of all kinds of resistance, we laid our ladders to the second wall. But the garrison were still too strong for us. Our easy conquest of the first line might have been a snare, for the battlements before us exhibited an overwhelming force. We fought on, but the ladders were broken with showers of stones from the engines. The business looked desperate, but I had made up my mind not to go back, after having once got in; and rallying the men, I carried a ladder through a storm of lances and arrows, to the foot of the main tower. I was bravely followed, and we were within grasp of the battlement when I saw a cohort rush out from a sally-port below. This was fatal; the foot of the rampart was cleared at once; the ladders were flung down; and I suppose it is owing to the ill-judged fidelity of some of my followers that I am unfortunate enough to find myself here and alive.”

During the endless hours of this miserable night, I labored with scarcely a hope to keep life in my heroic son. My coming had saved him. The exposure and his wounds must have destroyed him before morning. We consulted as to our next course. I suggested the possibility of gaining the fortress by a renewal of the attack, while the garrison was unprepared, or perhaps indulging in carousal after success. The necessity of some attempt was strongly in my mind, and I expressed my determination to run the hazard, if I could find where the remnant of our troop had taken refuge. But this was the difficulty. Signals of any kind must rouse the vigilance of the Romans. The fortress was above our heads, and to collect the men during the night was impossible.

While I watched the restless tossings of Constantius, a light stole along the ground at a distance. My first idea was that a Roman patrol was coming to extinguish our last remains of hope. But the light was soon perceived to be in the hand of some one cautious of discovery. To keep its bearer at a distance, I followed the track and grasped him.

“I surrender,” said the captive, perfectly at his ease; “long life to the Emperor!” He lifted the lamp to my face and burst into laughter. “May I have a Roman falchion through me,” said he, “but I think we were born under the same planet. By all the food that has entered my lips this day, I took your highness for a thief, and, pardon the word, for a Roman one. I have been running after you the whole day and night.”

He confined to talk and writhe, with a kind of mad merriment. I could not obtain an answer to my questions, of what led him there, how he could guide us out of the forest, or what news he brought from the procurator. He less walked than danced before me through the thickets, as our scene with Florus recurred to his fantastic mind.

“Never was trick so capital as your escape,” he exclaimed. “I would have given an eye or an arm, things rather an impediment to a beggar, I allow; but it would have been worth a kingdom to see, as I saw, the faces of the whole camp, procurator, officers, troopers, and all, down to the horse-boys, on your slipping through their fingers in such first-rate style. I have done clever things in my time, but never, no never, shall I equal that way of making five thousand men at once look like five thousand fools. I own I thought that you would do something brilliant, and it was for that purpose that I tried to draw off the eye of that scoundrel Florus, for, sot as he is, there are not ten in Palestine keener in all points where roguery is concerned. I caught hold of his robe, told him a ready lie of the largest size about a discovery of coin in Jerusalem, and while he was nibbling at the bait I heard the uproar. You were off; I could not help laughing in his illustrious face. He kicked me from him, and foaming with rage, ordered every man and horse out after your highness. But I saw at a glance that you had the game in your own hands. You skimmed away like a bird; an eagle could not have got up that long hill in finer condition. Away you went, bounding from steep to steep, like a stone from a sling; you cut the air like a shaft. I have seen many a mare in my time, but as for the equal of yours—why a pair of wings would be of no use to her. She is a paragon, a bird of paradise, an ostrich on four legs, a——”

I checked his volubility and led him to the rough bedside of Constantius. I could not have found a better auxiliary. He knew every application used in the medicine of the time, and, to give him credit on his own showing, all diseases found in him an enemy worth all the doctors of Asia.

“He had traveled for his knowledge; he had fought with death from the Nile to the Ganges, and could swear that the sharks and crocodiles owed him a grudge throughout the world. He had cured rajahs and satraps till he made himself unpopular in every court where men looked for vacancies; had kept rich old men out of their graves until there was a general conspiracy of heirs to drive him out of the country; and had poured life into so many dying husbands that the women made a universal combination against his own.”

This flow of panegyric, however, did not impede his present services. He applied his herbs and bandages with professional dexterity, and kindling a fire, prepared some food, which went further to cheer the patient than even his medicine. He still talked away like one to whom words were a necessary escape for his surcharge of animal spirits.

“He knew everything in physic. He had studied in Egypt, and could compound the true essential extract of mummy with any man that wore a beard, from the Cataracts to the bottom of the Delta. He once walked to the Mountains of the Moon to learn the secret of powdered chrysolite. On the Himalaya he picked up his knowledge of the bezoar, and a year’s march through sands and snows rewarded him at once with a bag of the ginseng, most marvelous of roots, and the sight of the wall of China, most endless of walls.”

How he stooped to veil this accumulation of knowledge in rags, he did not condescend to explain. But his skill, so far, was certainly admirable, and my brave Constantius recovered with a suddenness that surprised me. With his strength his hopes returned.

“Oh,” exclaimed he, waking from a refreshing sleep, “that I were once again at the foot of the rampart with the ladder in my hand!”

“By my father’s beard,” replied the leech, “you are much better where you are; for observe, tho I can go further than any doctor between the four rivers, yet I never professed to cure the dead. Take Masada by scale! Ha! ha! take the clouds by scale! You would have found three walls within the one to which they decoyed you. Herod was the prince of builders, and could have so built as to have kept out everything, except the champion that carries no arms but a scythe.”

“Then you know Masada?” interrupted I eagerly.

“Know it, yes; every loophole, window, door—aye, and dungeon—from one end of it to the other.”

Still, my escape from the camp was so congenial to his ideas of pleasantry that it mingled with all his topics. War and politics went for nothing compared with the adroitness of eluding Roman insolence.

“By Jove!” said he, “when I played my tricks with that pearl of pearls, that supreme of horseflesh, your barb, I was clumsy; I played the clown; you beat me hollow; it was matchless; it was my purse in prospect of your generosity to its emptiness this night”—he made a profound obeisance; “to see those fellows panting up the hill after you, nearly killed me.”

“But the fortress?”

“Oh! as to the fortress, the notion of attacking it was madness. I had my doubts of your intention, and broke loose from the camp to give you the benefit of my advice. But the tribune; ha, ha! never was coxcomb so rightly served. You won the heart of the whole legion by the single blow that spared him the trouble of sitting his horse. The troopers could not keep their saddles for laughing; and as for the fat old captain, I was only afraid that he would roar himself out of the world. I owed my escape partly to him, and his last words were: ‘Rascal, if you ever fall in with the Arab, whom I suspect to be as pleasant a rogue as yourself, tell him that I wish I had a dozen such in my squadron.’”

“But is there any possibility of knowing the present state of the garrison?”

“Aye, there is the misfortune. Yesterday I could have got in, and got out again, like a wild-cat. But, after this night’s visit, it is not too much to suppose that they may be a little more select in their hospitality. The governor has a slight correspondence of his own to carry on; a trifle in the way of trade; I had the honor to be smuggler extraordinary to his Mightiness, and, as in state secrets everything ought to be kept from the vulgar, my path in and out was by a portcullis, far enough from gates and sentinels, through which portcullis I should have shown you the way, if the attack had waited for me a few hours longer. That chance is of course cut off now. But see, yonder comes the morning.”

“Then we must move, or have the garrison on us.”

“I forbid that maneuver,” interrupted the fellow, with easy audacity.

Constantius and I, in equal surprise, bade him be silent. Yet the quietness with which he took the rebuke propitiated me, and I asked his reason.