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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Not that I suspect you will make the city harder to take, but I should dislike to make war on an old comrade in my Ephesian revels." The Maccabee looked doubtful. "I can not promise," he said. "At least do not hold off the siege until you see me again without the walls. It might lose you prestige in Rome." Titus swung his bridle while he gazed at the Maccabee.
There was the click of a horse's hoof beside him. He glanced up with a nervous start to see Julian of Ephesus, scowling, at hand. "It is time," he said, "for us to be off." The Maccabee instantly determined that Julian of Ephesus should not come up with this defenseless girl again. "I am not ready," he returned promptly. "It was three days, this morning, that you have lost.
Around the Maccabee and Laodice roared the comment of the multitude. "They say he climbed to the summit of the outer wall overlooking Tophet and remains there a target for the Roman arrows, which rebound from him!" cried one. "One of John's men says that the heads of the arrows are blunted and the most of them snapped in two when they are picked up." "The Romans have ceased to shoot at him!"
The great hall shook with the magnificent power of his only song! The Maccabee confronted Amaryllis, with fierce question in his eyes. She pointed calmly at the heavy white curtain pulled to one side and caught on a bracket. The brass wicket over the black mouth of the tunnel was wide. Without a word, the Maccabee plunged into it and was swallowed up. Amaryllis looked after him.
He came upon it, a solid square building of stone with an Egyptic façade and an architrave carved with a great stone flower set in an olive wreath. Without was the proseuchae, paved with boulders now worn smooth by the summer sittings of the congregation who gathered around the reader's stone. The Maccabee stopped at the gate and unlacing his pagan sandals set them outside the threshold.
The Maccabee nodded. It was as he had expected. The city was besieged. It was afternoon, a week-day at the busiest portal of Jerusalem; but save for the fixed and pygmy sentry upon the tower, there was no living thing to be seen, no single sound to be heard. Beyond the mounting hills of the City of David stood up, shouldering like mantles of snow their burden of sun-whitened houses.
The slightest sound from the haunted hills elicited a start from him and his intense attention until the origin of the sound proved itself. Many Passover pilgrims who had proceeded by night passed under his close scrutiny and from time to time he stopped the Maccabee in a speech with a peremptory command to listen.
And because of her fear that Philadelphus might be searching for her, she stayed in the sunless crypt day by day until the Maccabee, noting with affectionate distress that she was growing white and weak, bade her take one of the women and venture up to the light.
The Maccabee heard the woman give her word. After a little further communication, he heard them move toward the entrance. The white light from the day without revealed to him in a few steps, a veiled woman, a deformed old man and a young rabbi.
When his outraged kinsman put out vengeful hands to seize him, the Maccabee grasped the air. Julian of Ephesus had vanished! Among the rocks at the base of the cliff that sheltered Christian Pella from the rude winds of the Perean mountains, the procurator of the city, Philadelphus Maccabaeus, and his wife, Laodice, sat side by side in the morning sun.
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