The trampling of horses roused me from this unwarlike reverie. Constantius came up, glowing to communicate the intelligence that the last of the enemy had been driven in, and that his troops only awaited my orders to force the passes. I mounted, heard their shouts, and was again the soldier.
But the iron front of the enemy resisted our boldest attempts to force the ravines,—the hills were not to be turned, and we were compelled, after innumerable efforts, to wait for the movement of the Romans from a spot which thirst and hunger must soon make untenable. This day had stripped them of their baggage, their beasts of burden, and their military engines.
At dawn the pursuit began again. We still found the enemy struggling to escape out of those fatal defiles. The day was worn away in perpetual attempts to break the ranks of the legionaries. The Jew, light, agile, and with nothing to carry but his spear, was a tremendous antagonist to the Roman, perplexed among rocks and torrents, famishing, and encumbered with an oppressive weight of armor. The losses of this day were dreadful. Our darts commanded their march from the heights; every stone did execution among ranks whose armor was now scattered by the perpetual discharge. Still they toiled on, unbroken. We saw their long line laboring with patient discipline through the rugged depth below, and in the face of our attacks they made way till night again covered them.
I spent that night on horseback. Fatigue I never felt in the strong excitement of the time. I saw multitudes sink at my horse’s feet, in sleep as insensible as the rock on which they lay. Sleep never touched my eyelids. I galloped from post to post, brought reenforcements to my wearied ranks, and longed for morn.
It came at last. The enemy had reached the head of the defile, but there a force was poured upon them that nothing could resist. Their remaining cavalry were driven into the torrent; the few light troops that scaled the higher grounds were swept down. I looked upon their whole army as in my hands, and was riding forward with Constantius and my chief officers to receive their surrender, when they were saved by one of those instances of devotedness that distinguished the Roman character.
Wearied of pursuit and evasion, I had rejoiced to see at last symptoms of a determination to wait for us and try the chance of battle. An abrupt ridge of rock, surmounted by a lofty cone, was the enemy’s position, long after famous in Jewish annals. A line of spearmen was drawn up on the ridge, and the broken summit of the cone, a space of a few hundred yards, was occupied by a cohort. Italian dexterity was employed to give the idea that Cestius had taken his stand upon this central spot; an eagle and a concourse of officers were exhibited, and upon this spot I directed the principal attack to be made.
But the cool bravery of its defenders was not to be shaken. After a long waste of time in efforts to scale the rock, indignant at seeing victory retarded by such an obstacle, I left the business to the slingers and archers, and ordered a steady discharge to be kept up on the cohort. This was decisive. Every stone and arrow told upon the little force crowded together on the naked height. Shield and helmet sank one by one under the mere weight of missiles. Their circle rapidly diminished, and, refusing to surrender, they perished to a man.
When we took possession the army was gone. The resistance of the cohort had given the Romans time to escape, and Cestius sheltered his degraded laurels behind the ramparts of Bethhoron, by the sacrifice of four hundred heroes.
This battle, which commenced on the eighth day of the month Marchesvan, had no equal in the war. The loss to the Romans was unparalleled since the defeat of Crassus. Two legions were destroyed; six thousand bodies were left on the field. The whole preparation for the siege of Jerusalem fell into our hands. Then was the hour to have struck the final blow for freedom; then was given that chance of restoration which Providence gives to every nation and every man. But our crimes, our wild feuds, the bigoted fury and polluted license of our factions, rose up as a cloud between us and the light; we were made to be ruined.
Such were not my reflections when I saw the gates of Bethhoron closing on the fugitives; I vowed never to rest until I brought prisoners to Jerusalem the last of the sacrilegious host that had dared to assault the Temple.
The walls of Bethhoron, manned only with the wreck of the troops that we had routed from all their positions, could offer no impediment to hands and hearts like ours. I ordered an immediate assault. The resistance was desperate, for beyond this city there was no place of refuge nearer than Antipatris. We were twice repulsed, and I headed the third attack myself. The dead filled up the ditch, and I had already arrived at the foot of the rampart, with the scaling-ladder in my hand, when I heard Jubal’s voice behind me. He was leaping and dancing in the attitudes of utter madness. But there was no time to be lost. I sprang upon the battlements, tore a standard from its bearer, and waved it over my head with a shout of victory. The plain, the hills, the valleys, covered with the host rushing to the assault, echoed the cry; I was at the summit of fortune!
In the next moment I felt a sudden shock. Darkness covered my eyes, and I plunged headlong.
I awoke in a dungeon.
In that dungeon I lay for two years![37] How I lived, or how I bore existence, I can now have no conception. I was not mad, nor altogether insensible to things about me, nor even without occasional inclination for the common objects of our being. I used to look for the glimmer of daylight that was suffered to enter my cell. The reflection of the moon in a pool, of which, by climbing to the loophole, I could gain a glimpse, was waited for with some feeble feeling of pleasure, but my animal appetites were more fully alive than ever. An hour’s delay of the miserable provision that was thrown through my bars made me wretched. I devoured it like a wild beast, and then longed through the dreary hours for its coming again!
I made no attempt to escape. I dragged myself once to the entrance of the dungeon, found it secured by an iron door, and never tried it again. If every bar had been broken, I scarcely know whether I should have attempted to pass it. Even in my more reasoning hours, I felt no desire to move. Destiny was upon me. My doom was marked in characters which nothing but blindness could fail to read; and to struggle with fate, what was it but to prepare for new misfortune?
The memory of my wife and children sometimes broke through the icy apathy with which I labored to encrust my mind. Tears flowed; nature stung my heart; I groaned, and made the vault ring with the cries of the exile from earth and heaven. But this passed away, and I was again the self-divorced man, without a tie to bind him to transitory things. I heard the thunder and the winds; the lightnings sometimes startled me from my savage sleep. But what were they to me! I was dreadfully secure from the fiercest rage of nature. There were nights when I conceived that I could distinguish the roarings of the ocean, and, shuddering, seemed to hear the cries of drowning men. But those, too, passed away. I swept remembrance from my mind, and felt a sort of vague enjoyment in the effort to defy the last power of evil. Cold, heat, hunger, waking, sleep, were the calendar of my year, the only points in which I was sensible of existence; I felt like some of those torpid animals which, buried in stones from the creation, live on until the creation shall be no more.
But this sullenness was only for the waking hour; night had its old, implacable dominion over me; full of vivid misery, crowded with the bitter-sweet of memory, I wandered free among those forms in which my spirit had found matchless loveliness. Then the cruel caprice of fancy would sting me; in the very concord of enchanting sounds there would come a funereal voice; in the circle of the happy, I was appalled by some hideous visage uttering words of mystery. A spectral form would hang upon my steps and tell me that I was undone.
From one of those miserable slumbers I was roused by a voice pronouncing my name. I at first confounded it with the wanderings of sleep. But a chilling touch upon my forehead completely aroused me. It was night, yet my eyes, accustomed to darkness, gradually discovered the first intruder who ever stood within my living grave; nothing human could look more like the dead. A breathing skeleton stood before me. The skin clung to his bones; misery was in every feature; the voice was scarcely above a whisper.
“Rise,” said this wretched being, “prince of Naphtali, you are free; follow me.”
Strange thoughts were in the words. Was this indeed the universal summoner—the being whom the prosperous dread, but the wretched love? Had the King of Terrors stood before me I could not have gazed on him with more wonder.
“Rise,” said the voice impatiently; “we have but an hour till daybreak, and you must escape now or never.”
The sound of freedom scattered my apathy. The world opened upon my heart; country, friends, children were in the world, and I started up with the feeling of one to whom life is given on the scaffold.
My guide hurried forward through the winding way to the door. He stopped; I heard him utter a groan, strike fiercely against the bars, and fall. I found him lying at the threshold without speech or motion; carried him back, and, by the help of the cruse of water left to moisten my solitary meal, restored him to his senses.
“The wind,” said he, “must have closed the door, and we are destined to die together. So be it; with neither of us can the struggle be long. Farewell!”
He flung himself upon his face. A noise of some heavy instrument roused us both. He listened, and said: “There is hope still. The slave who let me in is forcing the door.” We rushed to assist him, and tugged and tore at the massive stones in which the hinges were fixed, but found our utmost strength as ineffectual as an infant’s. The slave now cried out that he must give up the attempt, that day was breaking and the guard was at hand. We implored him to try once more. By a violent effort he drove his crowbar through one of the panels; the gleam of light gave us courage, and with our united strength we heaved at the joints, which were evidently loosening. In the midst of our work the slave fled, and I heard a plunge into the pool beneath.
“He has perished,” said my companion. “The door is on the face of a precipice. He has fallen, in the attempt to escape, and we are now finally undone.”
The guard, disturbed by the noise, arrived, and in the depths of our cell we heard the day spent in making the impassable barrier firmer than ever.
For some hours my companion lay in that state of exhaustion which I could not distinguish from uneasy slumber, and which I attributed to the fatigue of our common labors. But his groans became so deep that I ventured to rouse him, and even to cheer him with the chances of escape.
“I have not slept,” said he; “I shall never sleep again, until the grave gives me that slumber in which the wretched can alone find rest. Escape! No—for months, for years, I have had but one object. I have traversed mountain and sea for it; I have given to it day and night, all that I possessed in the world; I could give no more but my life, and that too I was to give. I stood within sight of that object. But it is snatched from me, and now the sooner I perish the better.” He writhed with mental pain.
“But what cause can you have for being here? You have not fought our tyrants. Who are you?”
“One whom you can never know—a being born to honor and happiness, but who perverted them by pride and revenge, and whose last miserable hope is, that he may die unknown, and without the curses that fall on the traitor and the murderer. Prince of Naphtali, farewell!”
I knew the speaker in those words of wo. I cried out: “Jubal, my friend, my kinsman, my hero! Is it you, then, who have risked your life to save me?”
I threw myself beside him. He crept from me. I caught his meager hand; I adjured him to live and hope.
He started away wildly. “Touch me not; I am unfit to live. I—I have been your ruin, and yet He who knows the heart, knows that I alone am not to blame. I was a dupe to furious passions, the victim of evil counselors, the prey of disease of mind. On my crimes may Heaven have mercy! They are beyond the forgiveness of man.”
By the feeble light, which showed scarcely more than the wretchedness of my dungeon, I made some little preparations for the refreshment of this feverish and famished being. His story agitated him, and strongly awakened as my curiosity was, I forbore all question. But it lay a burden on his mind, and I suffered him to make his confession.
“I loved Salome,” said he; “but I was so secure of acceptance, according to the custom of our tribe, that I never conceived the possibility of an obstacle to our marriage. My love and my pride were equally hurt. The new distinctions of her husband made my envy bitterness. To change the scene, I went to Jerusalem. I there found malice active. Your learning and talents had made you obnoxious long before; your new fame and rank turned envy into hatred. Onias, whose dagger you turned from the bosom of the noble Eleazar, remembered his disgrace. He headed the conspiracy against you, and nothing but the heroic vigor with which you stirred up the nation could have saved you long since from the last extremities of faction. My unhappy state of mind threw me into his hands. I was inflamed against you by perpetual calumnies. It was even proposed that I should accuse you before the Sanhedrin of dealing with the powers of darkness. Proofs were offered which my bewildered reason could scarcely resist. I was assailed with subtle argument; stimulated by sights and scenes of strange import, horrid and mysterious displays, which implicate the leaders of Jerusalem deeply in the crime of the idolaters. Spirits, or the semblances of spirits, were raised before my eyes; voices were heard in the depths and in the air, denouncing you, even you, as the enemy of Judea and of man; I was commanded, in the midst of thunders, real or feigned, to destroy you.”
Here his voice sank, his frame quivered; and wrapping his head in his cloak, he remained long silent. To relieve him from his confession, I asked for intelligence of my family and of the country.
“Of your family I can tell you nothing,” said he mournfully; “I shrank from the very mention of their name. During these two years I had but one pursuit—the discovery of your prison. I refused to hear, to think, of other things. I felt that I was dying, and I dreaded to appear before the great tribunal with the groans from your dungeon rising up to stifle my prayers.”
“But is our country still torn by the Roman wolves?”
“The whole land is in tumult.[38] Blood and horror are under every roof from Lebanon to Idumea. The Roman sword is out, and it falls with cruel havoc; but the Jewish dagger pays it home, and the legions quail before the naked valor of the peasantry. Yet what is valor or patriotism to us now? We are in our grave!”
The thought of my family exposed to the miseries of a ferocious war only kindled my eagerness to escape from this den of oblivion. It was evening, and the melancholy moon threw the old feeble gleam on the water which had so long been to me the only mirror of her countenance. I suddenly observed the light darkened by a figure stealing along the edge of the pool. It approached, and the words were whispered: “It is impossible to break open the door from without while the guard is on the watch; but try whether it can not be opened from within.” A crowbar was pushed into the loophole; its bearer, the slave, who had escaped by swimming, jumped down and was gone.
I left Jubal where he lay, lingered at the door till all external sounds ceased, and then made my desperate attempt. I was wasted by confinement, but the mind is force. I labored with furious effort at the mass of bolt and bar, and at length felt it begin to give way. I saw a star, the first for two long years, twinkling through the fracture. Another hour’s labor unfixed the huge hinge, and I felt the night air, cool and fragrant, on my cheek. I now grasped the last bar, and was in the act of forcing it from the wall when the thought of Jubal struck me. There was a struggle of a moment in my mind. To linger now might be to give the guard time to intercept me. I was hungering for liberty. It was to me at that moment what water in the desert is to the dying caravan—the sole assuaging of a frantic thirst, of a fiery and consuming fever of the soul. If the grains of dust under my feet were diamonds, I would have given them to feel myself treading the dewy grass that lay waving on the hillside before me.
A tall shadow passed along. It was that of a mountain shepherd, spear in hand, guarding his flock from the wolves. He stopped at a short distance from the dungeon, and, gazing on the moon, broke out with a rude but sweet voice into song. The melody was wild, a lamentation over the fallen glories of Judea, “whose sun was set, and whose remaining light, sad and holy as the beauty of the moon, must soon decay.” The word freedom mingled in the song, and every note of that solemn strain vibrated to my heart. The shepherd passed along.
I tore down the bar and gazed upon the glorious face of heaven. My feet were upon the free ground! I returned hastily to the cell and told Jubal the glad tidings, but he heard me not. To abandon him there was to give him up to inevitable death, either by the swords of the guard or by the less merciful infliction of famine. I carried him on my shoulders to the entrance. A roar of ridicule broke on me at the threshold. The guard stood drawn up in front of the dilapidated door; and the sight of the prisoner entrapped in the very crisis of escape was the true food for ruffian mirth. Staggering under my burden, I yet burst forward, but was received in a circle of leveled spears. Resistance was now desperate; yet even when sunk upon the ground under my burden, I attempted to resist or gather their points in my bosom and perish. But my feeble efforts only raised new scoffing. I was unworthy of Roman steel, and the guard, after amusing themselves with my impotent rage, dragged me within the passage, placed Jubal, who neither spoke nor moved, beside me, blocked up the door, and wished me “better success the next time.”
I spent the remainder of that night in fierce agitation. The apathy, the protecting scorn of external things, that I had nurtured, as other men would nurture happiness, was gone. The glimpse of the sky haunted me; a hundred times in the night I thought that I was treading on the grass; that I felt its refreshing moisture; that the air was breathing balm on my cheek; that the shepherd’s song was still echoing in my ears, and that I saw him pointing to a new way of escape from my inextricable dungeon.
In one of those half-dreams I flung the crowbar from my hand. A sound followed, like the fall of stones into water. The sound continued. Still stranger echoes followed, which my bewildered fancy turned into all similitudes of earth and ocean—the march of troops, the distant roar of thunder, the dashing of billows, the clamor of battle, boisterous mirth, and the groaning and heaving of masts and rigging in storm. The dungeon was as dark as death, and I felt my way toward the sound. To my surprise, the accidental blow of the bar had loosened a part of the wall and made an orifice large enough to admit the human body. The pale light of morning showed a cavern beyond, narrow and rugged. It branched into a variety of passages, some of them fit for nothing but the fox’s burrow. I returned to the lair of my unhappy companion, and prevailed on him to follow only by the declaration that if he refused I must perish by his side. My scanty provisions were gathered up. I led the way, and, determined never to return to the place of my misery, we set forward to tempt in utter darkness the last chances of famine—pilgrims of the tomb.
We wandered through a fearful labyrinth for a period which utterly exhausted us. Of night and day we had no knowledge. I was sinking, when a low groan struck my ear. I listened pantingly; it came again. It was evidently from some object close beside me. I put forth my hand and pushed in the door of a large cavern; a flash of light illumined the passage. Another step would have plunged us into a pool a thousand feet below.
The cavern thus opened to us[39] seemed to be the magazine of some place of trade. It was crowded with chests and bales, heaped together in disorder. What dangerous owners we might meet cost us no question; life and liberty were before us. I cheered Jubal till his scattered senses returned, and he clasped my feet in humiliation and gratitude.
We were now like men created anew. We forced our way through piles that but an hour before would have been mountains to our despairing strength. The cavern opened into another, which seemed the dwelling of some master of extraordinary opulence. Silken tissues hung on the walls; the ceiling was a Tyrian canopy; precious vases stood on tables of citron and ivory. A large lyre, superbly ornamented, was suspended in an opening of the rock, and gave its melancholy music to the wind. But no human being was to be seen. Was this one of the true wonders that men classed among the fictions of Greece and Asia? The Nereids with their queen could not have sought a more secluded palace. Onward we heard the sounds of ocean. We followed them, and saw one of those scenes of grandeur which nature creates, as if to show the littleness of man.
An arch three times the height of the loftiest temple, and ribbed with marble, rose broadly over our heads. Innumerable shafts of the purest alabaster, rounded with the perfection of sculpture, rose in groups and clusters to the solemn roof; wildflowers and climbing plants of every scent and hue gathered round the capitals, and hung the gigantic sides of the hall with a lovelier decoration than ever was wrought in loom. The awful beauty of this ocean temple bowed the heart in instinctive homage. I felt the sacredness of nature. But this grandeur was alone worthy of the spectacle to which it opened. The whole magnificence of the Mediterranean spread before our eyes, smooth as polished silver and now reflecting the glories of the west. The sun lay on the horizon in the midst of crimson clouds, like a monarch on the funeral pile, sinking in the splendors of a conflagration that lighted earth and ocean.
But at this noble portal we had reached our limit. The sides of the cavern projected so far into the waters as to make a small anchorage. Access or escape by land was palpably impossible. Yet, here at least, we were masters. No claimant presented himself to dispute our title. The provisions of our unknown host were ample, and, to our eager tastes, were dangerous from their luxury. The evening that we passed at the mouth of the cave, exhilarated with the first sensation of liberty, and enjoying every aspect and voice of the lovely scene with the keenness of the most unhoped-for novelty, was a full recompense for the toils and terrors of the labyrinth.
The sun went down. The surge that died at our feet murmured peace; the wheeling sea-birds, as their long trains steered homeward, pouring out from time to time a clangor of wild sounds that descended to us in harmony; the little white-sailed vessels, that skimmed along the distant waters like summer flies; the breeze waving the ivy and arbutus, that festooned our banquet-hall, alike spoke to the heart the language of peace.
“If,” said I, “my death-bed were to be left to my own choice, on the edge of this cavern would I wish to take my last farewell.”
“To the dying all places must be indifferent,” replied my companion; “when Death is at hand, his shadow fills the mind. What matters it to the exile, who in a few moments must leave his country forever, on what spot of its shore his last step is planted? Perhaps the lovelier that spot the more painful the parting. If I must have my choice, let me die in the dungeon or in battle: in the chain that makes me hate the earth, or in the struggle that makes it forgotten.”
“Yet,” said I, “even for battle, if we would acquit ourselves as becomes men, is not some previous rest almost essential? and for the sterner conflict with that mighty enemy before whom our strength is vapor, is it not well to prepare the whole means of mental fortitude? I would not perish in the irritation of the dungeon, in the blind fury of man against man, nor in the hot and giddy whirl of human cares. Let me lay my sinking frame where nothing shall intrude upon the nobler business of the mind. But these are melancholy thoughts. Come, Jubal, fill to the speedy deliverance of our country.”
“Here, then, to her speedy deliverance, and the glory of those who fight her battles!” The cup was filled to the brim, but just as the wine touched his lips he flung it away. “No,” exclaimed he, in bitterness of soul, “it is not for such as I to join in the aspirations of the patriot and the soldier. Prince of Naphtali, your generous nature has forgiven me, but there is an accuser here”—and he struck his withered hand wildly upon his bosom—“that can never be silenced. Under the delusions, the infernal delusions of your enemies, I followed you through a long period of your career, unseen. Every act, almost every thought, was made known to me, for you were surrounded by the agents of your enemies. I was driven on by the belief that you were utterly accursed by our law, and that to drive the dagger to your heart was to redeem our cause. But the act was against my nature, and in the struggle my reason failed. When I stood before you on the morning of the great battle, you saw me in one of those fits of frenzy that always followed a new command to murder. The misery of seeing Salome’s husband once more triumphant finally plunged me into the Roman ranks to seek for death. I escaped, followed the army, and reached Bethhoron in the midst of the assault. Still frantic, I thought that in you I saw my rival victorious. It was this hand, this parricidal hand, that struck the blow.” He covered his face and wept convulsively.
The mystery of my captivity was now cleared up, and feeling only pity for the ruin that remorse had made, I succeeded at last in restoring him to some degree of calmness. I even ventured to cheer him with the hope of better days, when in the palace of his fathers I should acknowledge my deliverer.
With a pressure of the hand and a melancholy smile, “I know,” said he, “that I have not long to live. But if a prayer of mine is to be answered by that greatest of all Powers whom I have so deeply offended, it would be, to die in some act of service for my prince and my pardoner! But hark!”
A groan was uttered close to the spot where we sat. I perceived for the first time an opening behind some furniture; entered, and saw lying on a bed a man apparently in the last stage of exhaustion.
He exclaimed: “Three days of misery—three days left alone, to die—without food, without help, abandoned by all. But I have deserved it. Traitor and villain as I am, I have deserved a thousand deaths!”
I looked upon this outcry as but the raving of pain, and brought him some wine. He swallowed it with avidity, but even while I held the cup to his lips, he sank back with a cry of horror.
“Aye,” cried he, “I knew that I could not escape you; you have come at last. Spirit, leave me to die! Or if,” said he, half rising and looking in my face with a steady yet dim glare, “you can tell the secrets of the grave, tell me what is my fate. I adjure you, fearful being, by the God of Israel; by the gods of the pagan, or if you acknowledge any god beyond the dreams of miserable man, tell me what I am to be?”
I continued silent, struck with the agony of his features. Jubal entered, and the looks of the dying man were turned on him.
“More of them!” he exclaimed, “more tormentors! more terrible witnesses of the tortures of a wretch whom earth casts out! What I demand of you is the fate of those who live as I have lived—the betrayer, the plunderer, the man of blood? But you will give me no answer. The time of your power is not come.”
He lay for a short period in mental sufferings; then, starting upon his feet by an extraordinary effort of nature, and with furious execrations at the tardiness of death, he tore off the bandage which covered a wound on his forehead. The blood streamed down and made him a ghastly spectacle.
“Aye,” cried he, as he looked upon his stained hands, “this is the true color; the traitor’s blood should cover the traitor’s hands. Years of crime, this is your reward. The betrayal of my noble master to death, the ruin of his house, the destruction of his name; these were the right beginnings to the life of the robber.”
A peal of thunder rolled over our heads and the gush of the rising waves roared through the cavern.
“Aye, there is your army,” he cried, “coming in the storm. I have seen your angry visages at night in the burning village; I have seen you in the shipwreck; I have seen you in the howling wilderness; but now I see you in shapes more terrible than all.”
The wind bursting through the long vaults forced open the door.
“Welcome, welcome to your prey!” he yelled, and drawing a knife from his sash, darted it into his bosom. The act was so instantaneous that to arrest the blow was impossible. He fell and died with a brief, fierce struggle.
“Horrible end,” murmured Jubal, gazing on the silent form; “happier for that wretch to have perished in the hottest strife of man or nature, trampled in the charge or plunged into the billows! Save me from the misery of lonely death!”
“Yet,” said I, “it was our presence that made him feel. He was guilty of some crime, perhaps of many, that the sight of us awoke to torment his dying hour. I saw that he gazed upon me with evident alarm, and not improbably my withered face, and those rags of my dungeon, startled him into recollections too strong for his decaying reason.”
“Have you ever seen him before?”
“Never.”
I gave a reluctant look at the hideous distortion of a countenance still full of the final agony. I turned away in awe.
“Now, Jubal, to think of ourselves. Soon we shall have fairly tried our experiment. A few days must exhaust our provisions. The surges roll on the one hand; on the other we have the rock.”
“But we shall die at least in pomp,” said Jubal. “No king of Asia will lie in a nobler vault, nor even have sincerer rejoicings at his end; the crows and vultures are no hypocrites.”
The dead man’s turban had fallen off in his last violence, and I perceived the corner of a letter in its folds. I read it; its intelligence startled me. It was from the commandant of the Roman fleet on the coast mentioning that a squadron was in readiness to “attack the pirates in their cavern.”
A heavy sound, as if something of immense weight had rushed into the entrance of the arch, followed by many voices, stopped our conversation.
“The Romans have come,” said I, “and now you will be indulged with your wish—our lives are forfeited—for never will I go back to the dungeon.”
“I hear no sound but that of laughter,” said Jubal, listening; “those invaders are the merriest of cutthroats. But before we give ourselves actually into their hands, let us see of what they are made.”
We left the chamber and returned to the recess from which we had originally emerged. It commanded a view of the chief avenues of the cavern; and while I secured the door, Jubal mounted the wall, and reconnoitered the enemy through a fissure.
“These are no Romans,” whispered he, “but a set of the most jovial fellows that ever robbed on the seas. They have clearly been driven in by the storm, and are now preparing to feast. Their voyage has been lucky, if I am to judge by the bales that they are hauling in; and if wine can do it, they will be in an hour or two drunk to the last man.”
“Then we can take advantage of their sleep, let loose one of their boats, and away,” said I.
I mounted to see this pirate festivity. In the various vistas of the huge cavern groups of bold-faced and athletic men were gathering, all busy with the work of the time; some piling fires against the walls and preparing provisions; some stripping off their wet garments and bringing others out of heaps of every kind and color, in the recesses of the rock; some wiping the spray from rusty helmets and corselets. The vaults rang with songs, boisterous laughter, the rattling of armor, and the creaking and rolling of chests of plunder. The dashing of the sea under the gale filled up this animated dissonance; and at intervals the thunder, bursting directly above our heads, mingled with all and overpowered all.
The chamber whose costly equipment first told us of the opulence of its masters was set apart for the chief rovers, who were soon seated at a large table in its center, covered with luxury. Flagons of wine were brought from cellars known only to the initiated; fruits piled in silver baskets blushed along the board; plate of the richest workmanship, the plunder of palaces, glittered in every form; tripods loaded with aromatic wood threw a blaze up to the roof; and from the central arch hung a superb Greek lamp, shooting out light from a hundred mouths of serpents twined in all possible ways. The party before me were about thirty[40] as fierce-looking figures as ever toiled through tempest; some splendidly attired, some in the rough costume of the deck; but all jovial, and evidently determined to make the most of their time. Other men had paid for the banquet, and there was probably not a vase on their table that was not the purchase of personal hazard. They sat, conquerors, in the midst of their own trophies; and not the most self-indulgent son of opulence could have luxuriated more in his wealth, nor the most exquisite student of epicurism have discussed his luxuries with more finished and fastidious science. Lounging on couches covered with embroidered draperies, too costly for all but princes, they lectured the cooks without mercy: the venison, pheasants, sturgeon, and a multitude of other dishes were in succession pronounced utterly unfit to be touched, and the wine was tasted, and often dismissed, with the caprice of palates refined to the highest point of delicacy. Yet the sea air was not to be trifled with, and a succession of courses appeared, and were despatched with a diligence that prohibited all language beyond the pithy phrases of delight or disappointment.
The wine at length set the conversation flowing, and from the merits of the various vintages the speakers diverged into the general subjects of politics and their profession; on the former of which they visited all parties with tolerably equal ridicule; and on the latter, declared unanimously that the only cause worthy of a man of sense was the cause for which they were assembled round that table. The next stage was the more hazardous one of personal jocularity; yet even this was got over with but a few murmurs from the parties suffering. Songs and toasts to themselves, their loves, and their enterprises in all time to come relieved the drier topics; and all was good fellowship until one unlucky goblet of spoiled wine soured the banquet.
“So, this you call Chian,” exclaimed a broad-built figure, whose yellow hair and blue eyes showed him to be a son of the North; “may I be poisoned,” and he made a hideous grimace, “if more detestable vinegar ever was brewed; let me but meet the merchant, and I shall teach him a lesson that he will remember when next he thinks of murdering men at their meals. Here, baboon, take it; it is fit only for such as you.”
He flung the goblet point-blank at the head of a negro, who escaped it only by bounding to one side with the agility of the ape that he much resembled.
“Bad news, Vladomir, for our winter’s stock, for half of it is Chian,” said a dark-featured and brilliant-eyed Arab, who sat at the head of the table. “Ho! Syphax, fill round from that flagon, and let us hold a council of war upon the delinquent wine.”
The slave dexterously changed the wine; it was poured round, pronounced first-rate, and the German was laughed at remorselessly.
“I suppose I am not to believe my own senses,” remonstrated Vladomir.
“Oh! by all means, as long as you keep them,” said one, laughing.
“Will you tell me that I don’t know the difference between wine and that poison?”
“Neither you nor any man, friend Vladomir, can know much upon the subject after his second dozen of goblets,” sneered another at the German’s national propensity.
“You do him injustice,” said a subtle-visaged Chiote at the opposite side of the table. “He is as much in his senses this moment as ever he was. There are brains of that happy constitution which defy alike reason and wine.”
“Well, I shall say no more,” murmured the German sullenly, “than confound the spot on which that wine grew, wherever it lies; the hungriest vineyard on the Rhine would be ashamed to show its equal. By Woden, the very taste will go with me to my grave.”
“Perhaps it may,” said the Chiote, irritated for the honor of his country, and significantly touching his dagger. “But were you ever in the island?”
“No; nor ever shall, with my own consent, if that flagon be from it,” growled the German, with his broad eye glaring on his adversary. “I have seen enough of its produce, alive and dead to-night.”
The wind roared without, and a tremendous thunder-peal checked the angry dialog. There was a general pause.
“Come, comrades, no quarreling,” cried the Arab. “Heavens, how the storm comes on! Nothing can ride out to-night. Here’s the captain’s health, and safe home to him.”
The cups were filled; but the disputants were not to be so easily reconciled.
“Ho! Memnon,” cried the master of the table to a sallow Egyptian richly clothed, whose simitar and dagger sparkled with jewels. He was engaged in close council with the rover at his side. “Lay by business now; you don’t like the wine or the toast?”
The Egyptian, startled from his conference, professed his perfect admiration of both, and sipping, returned to his whisper.
“Memnon will not drink for fear of letting out his secrets; for instance, where he found that simitar, or what has become of the owner,” said a young and handsome Idumean with a smile.
“I should like to know by what authority you ask me questions on the subject. If it had been in your hands, I should have never thought any necessary,” retorted the scowling Egyptian.
“Aye, of course not, Memnon; my way is well known. Fight rather than steal; plunder rather than cheat; and, after the affair is over, account to captain and crew, rather than glitter in their property,” was the Idumean’s answer, with a glow of indignation reddening his striking features.
“By the by,” said the Arab, in whose eye the gems flashed temptingly, “I think Memnon is always under a lucky star. We come home in rags, but he regularly returns the better for his trip; Ptolemy himself has not a more exquisite tailor. All depends, however, upon a man’s knowledge of navigation in this world.”
“And friend Memnon knows every point of it but plain sailing,” said the contemptuous Idumean.
The Egyptian’s sallow skin grew livid. “I may be coward, or liar, or pilferer,” exclaimed he; “but if I were the whole three, I could stand no chance of being distinguished in the present company.”
“Insult to the whole profession,” laughingly exclaimed the Arab. “And now I insist, in the general name, on your giving a plain account of the proceeds of your last cruise. You can be at no loss for it.”
“No; for he has it by his side, and in the most brilliant arithmetic,” said Hanno, a satirical-visaged son of Carthage.
“I must hear no more on the subject,” bitterly pronounced the Egyptian. “Those diamonds belong to neither captain nor crew. I purchased them fairly, and the seller was, I will undertake to say, the better off of the two.”
“Yes; I will undertake to say,” laughed the Idumean, “that you left him the happiest dog in existence. It is care that makes man miserable, and the less we have to care for the happier we are. I have not a doubt you left the fellow at the summit of earthly rapture!”
“Aye!” added the Arab, “without a sorrow or a shekel in the world.”