Ben-Hur

by Wallace, Lew

  None answered.

  “Christ the Lord is born; said he not so?”

  Then another recovered his voice, and replied, “That is what he said.”

  “And did he not also say, in the city of David, which is our Bethlehem yonder. And that we should find him a babe in swaddling-clothes?”

  “And lying in a manger.”

  The first speaker gazed into the fire thoughtfully, but at length said, like one possessed of a sudden resolve, “There is but one place in Bethlehem where there are mangers; but one, and that is in the cave near the old khan. Brethren, let us go see this thing which has come to pass. The priests and doctors have been a long time looking for the Christ. Now he is born, and the Lord has given us a sign by which to know him. Let us go up and worship him.”

  “But the flocks!”

  “The Lord will take care of them. Let us make haste.”

  Then they all arose and left the mârâh.

  Around the mountain and through the town they passed, and came to the gate of the khan, where there was a man on watch.

  “What would you have?” he asked.

  “We have seen and heard great things to-night,” they replied.

  “Well, we, too, have seen great things, but heard nothing. What did you hear?”

  “Let us go down to the cave in the enclosure, that we may be sure; then we will tell you all. Come with us, and see for yourself.”

  “It is a fool’s errand.”

  “No, the Christ is born.”

  “The Christ! How do you know?”

  “Let us go and see first.”

  The man laughed scornfully.

  “The Christ indeed! How are you to know him?”

  “He was born this night, and is now lying in a manger, so we were told; and there is but one place in Bethlehem with mangers.”

  “The cave?”

  “Yes. Come with us.”

  They went through the court-yard without notice, although there were some up even then talking about the wonderful light. The door of the cavern was open. A lantern was burning within, and they entered unceremoniously.

  “I give you peace,” the watchman said to Joseph and the Beth-Dagonite. “Here are people looking for a child born this night, whom they are to know by finding him in swaddling-clothes and lying in a manger.”

  For a moment the face of the stolid Nazarene was moved; turning away, he said, “The child is here.”

  They were led to one of the mangers, and there the child was. The lantern was brought, and the shepherds stood by mute. The little one made no sign; it was as others just born.

  “Where is the mother?” asked the watchman.

  One of the women took the baby, and went to Mary, lying near, and put it in her arms. Then the bystanders collected about the two.

  “It is the Christ!” said a shepherd, at last.

  “The Christ!” they all repeated, falling upon their knees in worship. One of them repeated several times over,

  “It is the Lord, and his glory is above the earth and heaven.”

  And the simple men, never doubting, kissed the hem of the mother’s robe, and with joyful faces departed. In the khan, to all the people aroused and pressing about them, they told their story; and through the town, and all the way back to the mârâh, they chanted the refrain of the angels, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will towards men!”

  The story went abroad, confirmed by the light so generally seen; and the next day, and for days thereafter, the cave was visited by curious crowds, of whom some believed, though the greater part laughed and mocked.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE eleventh day after the birth of the child in the cave, about mid-afternoon, the three wise men approached Jerusalem by the road from Shechem. After crossing Brook Cedron, they met many people, of whom none failed to stop and look after them curiously.

  Judea was of necessity an international thoroughfare; a narrow ridge, raised, apparently, by the pressure of the desert on the east, and the sea on the west, was all she could claim to be; over the ridge, however, nature had stretched the line of trade between the east and the south; and that was her wealth. In other words, the riches of Jerusalem were the tolls she levied on passing commerce. Nowhere else, consequently, unless in Rome, was there such constant assemblage of so many people of so many different nations; in no other city was a stranger less strange to the residents than within her walls and purlieus. And yet these three men excited the wonder of all whom they met on the way to the gates.

  A child belonging to some women sitting by the roadside opposite the Tombs of the Kings saw the party coming; immediately it clapped its hands, and cried, “Look, look! What pretty bells! What big camels!”

  The bells were silver; the camels, as we have seen, were of unusual size and whiteness, and moved with singular stateliness; the trappings told of the desert and of long journeys thereon, and also of ample means in possession of the owners, who sat under the little canopies exactly as they appeared at the rendezvous beyond the Jebel. Yet it was not the bells or the camels, or their furniture, or the demeanor of the riders, that were so wonderful; it was the question put by the man who rode foremost of the three.

  The approach to Jerusalem from the north is across a plain which dips southward, leaving the Damascus Gate in a vale or hollow. The road is narrow, but deeply cut by long use, and in places difficult on account of the cobbles left loose and dry by the washing of the rains. On either side, however, there stretched, in the old time, rich fields and handsome olive-groves, which must, in luxurious growth, have been beautiful, especially to travellers fresh from the wastes of the desert. In this road the three stopped before the party in front of the Tombs.

  “Good people,” said Balthasar, stroking his plaited beard, and bending from his cot, “is not Jerusalem close by?”

  “Yes,” answered the woman into whose arms the child had shrunk. “If the trees on yon swell were a little lower you could see the towers on the market-place.”

  Balthasar gave the Greek and the Hindoo a look, then asked,

  “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?”

  The women gazed at each other without reply.

  “You have not heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Well, tell everybody that we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.”

  Thereupon the friends rode on. Of others they asked the same question, with like result. A large company whom they met going to the Grotto of Jeremiah were so astonished by the inquiry and the appearance of the travellers that they turned about and followed them into the city.

  So much were the three occupied with the idea of their mission that they did not care for the view which presently rose before them in the utmost magnificence: for the village first to receive them on Bezetha; for Miz pah and Olivet, over on their left; for the wall behind the village, with its forty tall and solid towers, superadded partly for strength, partly to gratify the critical taste of the kingly builder; for the same towered wall bending off to the right, with many an angle, and here and there an embattled gate, up to the three great white piles Phasaelus, Mariamne, and Hippicus; for Zion, tallest of the hills, crowned with marble palaces, and never so beautiful; for the glittering terraces of the temple on Moriah, admittedly one of the wonders of the earth; for the regal mountains rimming the sacred city round about until it seemed in the hollow of a mighty bowl.

  They came, at length, to a tower of great height and strength, overlooking the gate which, at that time, answered to the present Damascus Gate, and marked the meeting-place of the three roads from Shechem, Jericho, and Gibeon. A Roman guard kept the passage-way. By this time the people following the camels formed a train sufficient to draw the idlers hanging about the portal; so that when Balthasar stopped to speak to the sentinel, the three became instantly the centre of a close circle eager to hear all that passed.

  “I give you peace,” the Egyptian said, in a clear voice
.

  The sentinel made no reply.

  “We have come great distances in search of one who is born King of the Jews. Can you tell us where he is?”

  The soldier raised the visor of his helmet, and called loudly. From an apartment at the right of the passage an officer appeared.

  “Give way,” he cried, to the crowd which now pressed closer in; and as they seemed slow to obey, he advanced twirling his javelin vigorously, now right, now left; and so he gained room.

  “What would you?” he asked of Balthasar, speaking in the idiom of the city.

  And Balthasar answered in the same,

  “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?”

  “Herod?” asked the officer, confounded.

  “Herod’s kingship is from Caesar; not Herod.”

  “There is no other King of the Jews.”

  “But we have seen the star of him we seek, and come to worship him.”

  The Roman was perplexed.

  “Go farther,” he said, at last. “Go farther. I am not a Jew. Carry the question to the doctors in the Temple, or to Hannas the priest, or, better still, to Herod himself. If there be another King of the Jews, he will find him.”

  Thereupon he made way for the strangers, and they passed the gate. But, before entering the narrow street, Balthasar lingered to say to his friends, “We are sufficiently proclaimed. By midnight the whole city will have heard of us and of our mission. Let us to the khan now.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  THAT evening, before sunset, some women were washing clothes on the upper step of the flight that led down into the basin of the Pool of Siloam. They knelt each before a broad bowl of earthenware. A girl at the foot of the steps kept them supplied with water, and sang while she filled the jar. The song was cheerful, and no doubt lightened their labor. Occasionally they would sit upon their heels, and look up the slope of Ophel, and round to the summit of what is now the Mount of Offence, then faintly glorified by the dying sun.

  While they plied their hands, rubbing and wringing the clothes in the bowls, two other women came to them, each with an empty jar upon her shoulder.

  “Peace to you,” one of the new-comers said.

  The laborers paused, sat up, wrung the water from their hands, and returned the salutation.

  “It is nearly night—time to quit.”

  “There is no end to work,” was the reply.

  “But there is a time to rest, and—”

  “To hear what may be passing,” interposed another.

  “What news have you?”

  “Then you have not heard?”

  “No.”

  “They say the Christ is born,” said the newsmonger, plunging into her story.

  It was curious to see the faces of the laborers brighten with interest; on the other side down came the jars, which, in a moment, were turned into seats for their owners.

  “The Christ!” the listeners cried.

  “So they say.”

  “Who?”

  “Everybody; it is common talk.”

  “Does anybody believe it?”

  “This afternoon three men came across Brook Cedron on the road from Shechem,” the speaker replied, circumstantially, intending to smother doubt. “Each one of them rode a camel spotless white, and larger than any ever before seen in Jerusalem.”

  The eyes and mouths of the auditors opened wide.

  “To prove how great and rich the men were,” the narrator continued, “they sat under awnings of silk; the buckles of their saddles were of gold, as was the fringe of their bridles; the bells were of silver, and made real music. Nobody knew them; they looked as if they had come from the ends of the world. Only one of them spoke, and of everybody on the road, even the women and children, he asked this question—‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’ No one gave them answer—no one understood what they meant; so they passed on, leaving behind them this saying: ‘For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.’ They put the question to the Roman at the gate; and he, no wiser than the simple people on the road, sent them up to Herod.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “At the khan. Hundreds have been to look at them already, and hundreds more are going.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Nobody knows. They are said to be Persians—wise men who talk with the stars—prophets, it may be, like Elijah and Jeremiah.”

  “What do they mean by King of the Jews?”

  “The Christ, and that he is just born.”

  One of the women laughed, and resumed her work, saying, “Well, when I see him I will believe.”

  Another followed her example: “And I—well, when I see him raise the dead, I will believe.”

  A third said quietly, “He has been a long time promised. It will be enough for me to see him heal one leper.”

  And the party sat talking until the night came, and, with the help of the frosty air, drove them home.

  Later in the evening, about the beginning of the first watch, there was an assemblage in the palace on Mount Zion, of probably fifty persons, who never came together except by order of Herod, and then only when he had demanded to know some one or more of the deeper mysteries of the Jewish law and history. It was, in short, a meeting of the teachers of the colleges, of the chief priests, and of the doctors most noted in the city for learning—the leaders of opinion, expounders of the different creeds; princes of the Sadducees; Pharisaic debaters; calm, soft-spoken, stoical philosophers of the Essene socialists.

  The chamber in which the session was held belonged to one of the interior court-yards of the palace, and was quite large and Romanesque. The floor was tessellated with marble blocks; the walls, unbroken by a window, were frescoed in panels of saffron yellow; a divan occupied the centre of the apartment, covered with cushions of bright-yellow cloth, and fashioned in form of the letter U, the opening towards the doorway; in the arch of the divan, or, as it were, in the bend of the letter, there was an immense bronze tripod, curiously inlaid with gold and silver, over which a chandelier dropped from the ceiling, having seven arms, each holding a lighted lamp. The divan and the lamp were purely Jewish.

  The company sat upon the divan after the style of Orientals, in costume singularly uniform, except as to color. They were mostly men advanced in years; immense beards covered their faces; to their large noses were added the effects of large black eyes, deeply shaded by bold brows; their demeanor was grave, dignified, even patriarchal. In brief, their session was that of the Sanhedrim.

  He who sat before the tripod, however, in the place which may be called the head of the divan, having all the rest of his associates on his right and left, and, at the same time, before him, evidently president of the meeting, would have instantly absorbed the attention of a spectator. He had been cast in large mould, but was now shrunken and stooped to ghastliness; his white robe dropped from his shoulders in folds that gave no hint of muscle or anything but an angular skeleton. His hands, half-concealed by sleeves of silk, white and crimson striped, were clasped upon his knees. When he spoke, sometimes the first finger of the right hand extended tremulously; he seemed incapable of other gesture. But his head was a splendid dome. A few hairs, whiter than fine-drawn silver, fringed the base; over a broad, full sphered skull the skin was drawn close, and shone in the light with positive brilliance; the temples were deep hollows, from which the forehead beetled like a wrinkled crag; the eyes were wan and dim; the nose was pinched; and all the lower face was muffled in a beard flowing and venerable as Aaron’s. Such was Hillel the Babylonian! The line of prophets, long extinct in Israel, was now succeeded by a line of scholars, of whom he was first in learning—a prophet in all but the divine inspiration! At the age of one hundred and six, he was still Rector of the Great College.

  On the table before him lay outspread a roll or volume of parchment inscribed with Hebrew characters; behind him, in waiting, stood a page richly habited.

  There had been discussion, but
at this moment of introduction the company had reached a conclusion; each one was in an attitude of rest, and the venerable Hillel, without moving, called the page.

  “Hist!”

  The youth advanced respectfully.

  “Go tell the king we are ready to give him answer.”

  The boy hurried away.

  After a time two officers entered and stopped, one on each side the door; after them slowly followed a most striking personage—an old man clad in a purple robe bordered with scarlet, and girt to his waist by a band of gold linked so fine that it was pliable as leather; the latchets of his shoes sparkled with precious stones; a narrow crown wrought in filigree shone outside a tarbooshe of softest crimson plush, which, encasing his head, fell down the neck and shoulders, leaving the throat and neck exposed. Instead of a seal, a dagger dangled from his belt. He walked with a halting step, leaning heavily upon a staff. Not until he reached the opening of the divan did he pause or look up from the floor; then, as for the first time conscious of the company, and roused by their presence, he raised himself, and looked haughtily round, like one startled and searching for an enemy—so dark, suspicious, and threatening was the glance. Such was Herod the Great—a body broken by diseases, a conscience seared with crimes, a mind magnificently capable, a soul fit for brotherhood with the Caesars; now seven-and-sixty years old, but guarding his throne with a jealousy never so vigilant, a power never so despotic, and a cruelty never so inexorable.

  There was a general movement on the part of the assemblage—a bending forward in salaam by the more aged, a rising-up by the more courtierly, followed by low genuflections, hands upon the beard or breast.

  His observations taken, Herod moved on until at the tripod opposite the venerable Hillel, who met his cold glance with an inclination of the head, and a slight lifting of the hands.

  “The answer!” said the king, with imperious simplicity, addressing Hillel, and planting his staff before him with both hands. “The answer!”