Chapter 4

‘I hope he is still there next week when we return,’ the distinguished-looking slave was saying. ‘I should like to hear him again. But it is doubtful whether he will be at large by that time. The legionaries will have taken him in; for, as you have said, it was very inflammatory talk. But, by the Gods, Aulus, it was all true—what he was saying.’

‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Aulus, ‘the world is bad enough to deserve a drubbing, and it always was. But—the fellow is crazy as a beetle, Tim.’ The older man turned his full face and Fara saw a long scar across his cheek; relic of a savage fight long ago, she thought.

‘That’s where we differ, Aulus,’ countered Tim. ‘What the hermit was preaching showed him to be indiscreet, foolhardy; but no merely crazy man could collect a crowd like that and keep them standing for hours in the broiling sun listening with wide eyes and open mouths; and they say he has been doing it day after day!’

‘Oh, you know how people are,’ said Aulus indifferently. ‘This half-starved fanatic, living on dreams and desert bugs, climbs up on a big rock and begins to yell that the world is due for punishment. Naturally the rabble, with nothing better to do, gathers around to watch his antics and shudder at his predictions.’ Aulus shifted his position in the creaking chair and continued to extemporize. ‘People like to be scared, Tim. Their empty lives are without stimulating sensations and they enjoy feeling the cold shivers run down their backs—especially when their instinct tells them it’s all a lot of damned nonsense.’

There was quite a pause here, and Fara, who had been intently eavesdropping, leaned forward a little, hoping that Aulus hadn’t said the last word. Presently Tim remarked soberly, ‘I wonder if it is—just damned nonsense.’

‘Poof!’ scoffed Aulus. ‘The fellow is crazy as a beetle!’ He rose, stretched, yawned. ‘And so are you,’ he added. ‘I’ll see you at supper. I must have another look at that lame camel.’

‘Just a minute, Aulus.’ Tim patted the arm of the adjoining chair and his scar-faced friend sat down again with an indulgent grin. ‘You have been talking of that throng at Hebron as if it were composed entirely of ignorant and lousy nobodies who would as gladly stand all day watching a caged monkey scratch itself. But that doesn’t account for it. There were at least a dozen well-dressed, intelligent men in the crowd giving serious attention to everything the hermit said.’

Aulus dismissed this with a negligent flick of his hand.

‘Local citizens, no doubt,’ he explained, ‘annoyed by the fellow’s presence in their town, and waiting for him to start a brawl—so that they could lock him up as a disturber of the peace.’

‘But some of them had come from afar, Aulus. I asked a bright-looking camel-boy if he wanted a job, and he loftily replied that he was in the employ of an eminent lawyer, Ben-Judah, a member of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.’