Over all this immense slope the eyes of Costobarus wandered. However
he had felt in the preceding days when he looked upon this ruin of the
land of milk and honey, he realized now suddenly and in all its
fearful actuality the predicament of Judea, its despair and the
gigantic travail before those who would save it from the united
sentence passed upon it by God and the powers. Immense dejection
seized him. He looked from the face of the country, upon which not a
single thing of profit showed, toward the bowed head and oppressed
figure of his young and inexperienced daughter who was to put her
tender self between Ruin and its victim. Chills, succeeded by flashes
of fever, swept over him. He raised himself as if to give command to
Aquila but settled back under the canopy, grown immeasurably older and
feebler in that moment of helpless surrender to conditions of which he
had been part an artificer. It was not as if he had made an incautious
move in a political game; it was, as it seemed to him undeniably then,
that he had advanced against the Lord God of Hosts, and there was no
turning back!
He settled slowly into a stunned anguish that seemed to rise
gradually, like a filling tide, shutting out the sunset and the
seaboard, the bald earth and the streaming wind, and engulfing him in
roaring darkness and intense cold.
They were in sight of a cluster of Syrian huts, the first inhabited
village they had come upon since leaving Ascalon, but he was not aware
of it. The sudden halting of his camel and a hoarse strained cry at
hand seemed to bear some relation to his condition, but he did not
care. He felt his howdah lurch to one side as some one leaped up
beside him; he felt remotely the great grasp of hands on him, which
must have been Momus'; the quick military voice of Aquila he heard and
then, keen and distinct as a call upon him, the sound of Laodice's
tones made sharp with terror.
He opened his eyes and saw her, holding him in her arms. Somewhere in
the background were the faces of Momus and Aquila. Between the pagan
and the old servant passed a look that the old man caught. Then he
heard Aquila say: "The village--his sole chance, if there is a physician there."
Laodice held him fast only for a moment, when it seemed that she was
wrenched away. The dying man was glad. If this were pestilence, she
should not come near. The hiss of the lash and the bound of the stung
camel disturbed him but he lapsed into the immense cold again as they
raced down the slight declivity toward the Syrian village. But
Pestilence was riding with them and the odds were with it.