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CHAPTER XXXII

CHRISTOPHERUS

Ir was but a little space till Simon of Cyrene could gaze again. Then found he him a-standing on a fragment of that gallery floor whereon he had toiled and beheld strange visions. He attempted to shout, "Nay-ree-yaw-hoo!" which is to say, "O Light of Jehovah!" but could not. The end-face of the wall had dropped, as it never had existed, and, in its stead, a dazzling emptiness of silent air. For his ears were stopped with the thunders which had come at the riving of the mountain, yea with the dropping of his walls were the gates of sound stopped up. Came shrill cries from an eagle far below: Simon heard as one in a sealed-up cell. He looked down over the stone whereon he stood, to behold the eagle! And drew back quickly, and clung to the solid rock through fear.

Then gazed he into the sky, the house of Jehovah. Turning clouds of bossiness, floating on crystalline void! Now the largest of the masses was shaped, as Simon believed, to resemble a mighty, if aweary, man. And the man swam on a mist of great cloud-ocean, bordered by a jagged shore of cloud-land rocks. The giant, turning his hoary head as he swam, sought for a haven amid the shore of stone. For a time he did well truly, even became jubilant and uplift. Then, out of somewhere-but who could say just whence-an influence arose which moved him (mocking) in the opposite way; the cloudman's head sank upon the waters, it passed down within them, it was gone.

Simon adventured to turn his eyes once more over the shelf. Then saw he the thing which had been. Far down in the valley below, he beheld that portion of the mountain in which the mine had been hollowed out. Gone! All gone! Greed had done its uttermost. The galleries, the rooms, the shafts, the slaves, the supervisors, the higher officers and all-all gone. Only a bit of accidental shelf remained, fastened to the standing portion of the mountain. Even the end-face of the wall was gone down into nothingness. Solely the shelf on which he stood, the straight wall running high above it, and, over that, another and farther jutting shelf.

And when he had begun to comprehend the whole of the great thing which had happened, he attempted to lift a clear voice in words of sweet praise unto God, for at least the salvation of himself. But behold! there were no words that came into his mouth nor syllables upon his tongue. For the long years, the long, long voiceless

years, had left him inarticulate. Yet he said within himself, "All that hath happened unto me hath happened by thy will, O Lord: I have had no choice, but thou alone hast chosen for me. And what, O Lord, am I?"

Now it began to come into his mind that some of the soldiers of Cæsar might, by a chance, have been upon the solider portion of the mountain when the landslide came, and thus have escaped injury. If so, they might soon come and apprehend him. Moreover, although the mine in which he had been confined was the worst of all, yet it was not by any means the one and only. But every hill within his view was either pierced by some dark mine of wretchedness, or else (as he clearly foresaw) it would be so pierced upon some future day. How should he get wholly away from hence?

He looked down over the shelf once more. The eagle was yet a-weighing of its wings, though it had come a little higher up unto him. Far, far below the eagle, was a vast reach of verdant valley, through which a peaceful river ran. Ah, that placid river! With what an emotion had he gazed upon it (God knew how many years gone by!) before he had entered the shaft which had led down into these mines! Over the stream was, here and there, an arch of stone. Cæsar! Was he indeed out of prison? Had he truly escaped? Were there not prisons without walls? incarcerations without confinement? Beyond the stream were forests indeed, showing but tiny parellelograms of clearing. But, of a sudden, his eye was caught by a swiftly moving object, not transfluvial. There in the rolling plain which led from the river toward the new-fallen mount, it seemed to catch and cast the light around violently. Then he began to perceive that the object was longer than at first he had thought, and that it wound snakelike along a yellow trench of road which was deeply cut into the verdure of the near champaign.

A body of soldiers in steel and brass!

By straining his pore-blind and light-unaccustomed eyes he could just discern at intervals, both the soldiers' helmets and the heads of horses. The slide-it had been discovered!

He suffered himself just one more look at the awful flank of the mountain which had been removed by the careless and greedy hands of men, guided by the absolutely unerring, if unseeing, finger of God. Then he said, deep down in the chambers of his heart: "Thou hast left a little also, O Lord, for these, mine own, hands, to accomplish." So he put his muscles and his bones to the work.

The solid wall behind him, as it arose, reached out over his tiny

niche, stretching like a cape into the airy, infinite nothing. Now it was round that shelf of rock that Simon must go, fly-fashion, if he meant to escape from the niche and so from Cæsar.

That was impossible, was it not? Could a man crawl upside down, just like a fly?

And what of his case even then, supposing that a human being (not an ethereal ship) could, of a verity, circumnavigate the awful sea of graspless ether around and about that mighty cape of outstanding rock?

In what position might he find himself then? Perchance once more upon a place from which led no path.

So the man cast again about him, devising and devising.

The sun shone straight into his niche. The rock was returning the heat, and his head grew giddy.

Then a consuming thirst seized him.

He examined the surface of the wall, as though he had never beheld the side of his gallery before. Glittering particles grasped and held his eye. Gold! Life! Life! Safety! Power! Ophidion! Revenge!

Leaping upon the cliff, he squeezed his stark naked flesh tight into the sharp recesses of the rock until it held there. Then reached up for further handholds. And so on and on until he had got to the outshelving portion of the wall.

Now a great vertigo came upon him. He perceived himself as though he were some other person, whose feet were of no, yet of the utmost, importance to him, working a tortured journey out above the abyss; hanging rigid there, upside down, by mere torn ends of fingers and bleeding sides of bruised and riven calves. Never did he cease to climb a little. To cling. To clutch. To press in. To slip along. Almost to fall, and yet to get tight hold again. And so on out to the end of the lower surface of the shelf.

Then it seemed to Simon of Cyrene as if the moments of his days were surely numbered.

He could not get back into his starting-place, yet neither could he go on round the thick end of the shelf.

For a moment he closed his eyes, and when he had again opened them he beheld once more the glitter of the gold in the rock.

"Wealth! Power! Life! Bone of thy people, Jehovah!" He reached up like Samson of old around the shelf, caught a sharp strong point on the upper face thereof, half turned and grasped also with the other bleeding hand, hugged tight with knees below still, drew up yet a little farther on, caught well the hard chin

into the rough advantage of a hollow, let go both legs, and, panting, exasperated, exhausted, half weeping, and shouting, at least within his bosom, delirious, well-nigh sacrilegious words, dragged his twisted, tortured body to the upper portion of the ledge and so on to safety.

For a time he lay unmoving, and when he had come into his right mind again, he arose and looked about, and beheld there were numerous paths that led away, to all appearance into freedom, safety, and by calm and gentle slopes.

At about this time, the Jew believed he heard some sweet voice crying out anigh unto him-the voice indeed of Berith, Leah, Amahnah. It said, "Simon, Simon! Come unto me!" Then would the man have gone and searched vigilantly among the rocks which lay off in the way from which the voice had sounded, but that, at the moment, he happened to espy, at no great distance from him, the enormous crucible sheds where, as he knew, the precious metal had been extracted from the stone.

Then he ran with all his might down into the sheds, crying (for at last he had found his tongue) "Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!"

So these two-Simon and Amahnah-were verily close together, and yet, in a way, also a mountain apart, for Simon went not to search for her when he had once got into the sheds. Besides, he had thought: "It is only an hallucination. What should she be doing here? Is she not in Palestine, there only?" But mostly his mind was filled with the thought of gold, whereof he found a plenteous abundance. And they that had been in the sheds had gone off into the valley in a panic.

He gathered the nuggets up, the ingots also, and the bars-in mighty clankling, glowing, overheavy handfuls, in wondrous heaps and all he could carry. Then searching about a little, he found a traveller's pallium, two good swords, and a very wide scrip. Also a great leathern bulga.

He said, "I will even separate my wealth, putting a portion of it in the bulga, another in the scrip, yet another also where it will be more hidden. For behold! the Mines have been as a school to me in far more branches than one-and one of these branches, is it not Suspicion?" He therefore filled the bulga and the scrip. Then, taking a beam most excellent, and bending it with his hands about his body, made thereof a girdle, which held tight to him.

And he found both food and drink. And when he had well eaten

and drunken, he arose. And behold-a Roman soldier with a drawn sword, which was running up to attack him.

Simon wasted not time to speak to him, but struck with the heavy bulga on his head, that the brains ran out. Therefore the earliest fruits of Simon's Roman gold were solely sin. And sin without repentance, for Simon thought: "Behold, it is well I have killed this man, else he had taken this gold from me. earned thrice over in these mines, yea and tenfold also. shall molest me, or take from me my gold."

But it I have

And no man

From that time forward Simon of Cyrene loved bright gold with a more passionate devotion even than when he was in the Mines, for that he had fought about that metal, and had made it, in a manner of speaking, a portion of his blood. And from having protected the gold, he began to feel that the gold had protected him. So that, from that time onward, he loved with a love which language cannot express the look and the feel of gold, the power and the homage that are tied up closely in gold. Nay more. Everything that dazzled, or blazed, glittered, shone, glowed, sparkled, coruscated, or even merely twinkled, he loved devotedly, passionately, blindly, without the least reserve or concealment, and without cessation to the end of his years.

Yet, for the present, and first of all, it was needful to get beyond the possibility of recapture.

He slunk off into the wildest mountain paths.

By shut of eve he was well down into the valley, and for days travelled by narrow winding ways, in marshes that had no paths in them, or in shadowy, beast-filled forests. But into the roads of the Romans he would nowise venture, for a very long time.

Then, on a rainy morning, he went up to a village inn, called "The Inn of Them That are Happy," for the rain was turning fast to sleet.

But the caupona, looking on him with narrowed eye, said: "Lodging? We are filled up."

So he left that place, and went on to another. But there also the beds were full.

Then another. But there, likewise, the cubicula were filled.

And at shut of eve he went out into the country, and taking a Roman road, because the night was very dark and the sleet falling thickly, he came, in the course of many hopeless hours, unto a hulk of a building by the roadside, that had a lighted torch over its door and a legend in very pleasant letters-"Inn to the Golden Lamb." Out from the court of the building came sounds of great singing and laughter.

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