Great Lion of God (57 page)

He saw that the stone, moving away, had begun to reveal the black aperture to the tomb, and the terror he had felt before was as nothing to this. He turned and let himself fall headlong on the ground, and he covered his helmeted head with his arms and waited for death, expecting he knew not what.

He closed his eyes for very dread, but the shadow of the light wavered over his lids, even though he tried to protect them with his arms. He did not know how long a time passed, but at length, as he lay shivering and quaking, he heard a slow and monumental footstep. It came toward him, seeming to bend the dry and dusty earth under him, and then it paused beside him. He closed his eyes tighter. He feared to look, for now he remembered, from his Jewish teachings, that those who look upon things not permitted to men must die.

But that which was near him did not go on, as he prayed incoherently in his heart. It remained. So he parted his lashes a little and saw beside him two feet of light, sandaled with gold, and sparkling like alabaster fired from the sun. Against all the screaming of his will, his desire to rise and flee, his urge to shout and roll away, he opened his eyes wider, as if forced, and they rose slowly over a robe brighter than the moon, glowing in every fold, glittering with rushing points of light that flaked and fell and blew away, and they rose to a girdle of gold, then over a breast throbbing with lucency, to a column of pale marble which was a throat.

And then to the Face, the powerful, gentle, stern yet tender Countenance, the Face of a Man such as had never been seen before, implicit with grace, puissant and kingly.

“He,” said Titus Milo to his cousin, Saul, “wished me to sec Him. And I saw. It is enough to last me to the very end of my life. It is more than enough.”

Saul’s face had dwindled, became absolutely white and strained and as tight as if it had been dried and parched for days in the sun and had no juices remaining.

He said, and he tried to smile indulgently, “Did you recognize that—Face?”

Milo looked at him long and somberly. “I did. It was the Face of Jesus of Nazareth. I knew Him at once.” He paused. “He had died, and He had risen. He had been entombed, and angels had rolled away the stone. He had risen—from the dead.”

Saul was silent.

“I must have fainted,” said Milo. “For when I awakened all the soldiers and the guards were still asleep, fallen into a trance like death. And I—I rose and I went away. I went,” said Milo, “to the Temple and I prayed there all the day and told no man.”

“And the tomb?”

“It was empty. The light had receded as the light of the sun falls behind the curve of the world. It was nothing but a tomb. I looked within, by the first light of the morning. The grave-clothes were there, discarded, and their pungent perfume floated in the dense air the tomb. I thought, for a little, that I saw the bright outlines of two of those Titanic forms, but I remembered their celestial indifference, and so I fled. The tomb was empty.”

Chapter 26

I
T WAS
very hot in the shade of the summer portico now and the gardens were humming with multitudes of insects and the fountains splashed and scintillated languidly in the sun. The massed cypresses and karobs and sycamores panted in the bright heat, and the pool had turned to a vivid silver and the water fowl had retreated from it.

The two men in the portico were not aware of their own sweat and discomfort. Their eyes held each other’s. Then Saul rose and went to the edge of the portico and seemed to be regarding the garden. He said, without turning, “There is an explanation. The wine was drugged, or the food, which your men and you consumed.”

Milo uttered an oath in exasperation. “Who would do this? Pilate? Herod? For what purpose? It was the will of Pilate and Herod that He be executed, this Jesus of Nazareth, and that He be entombed, and that He rot, and so kill the faith of His wretched followers and restore, as they said, peace to Israel. Or are you implying that in some fashion His poor disciples drugged our meat and the wine, to which they had had no access? They had fled to the desert, to little hidden towns, all but a very few, among whom was His Mother, as poor as they and as helpless. The soldiers and the guards were struck swooning to the ground. I had eaten and drunk as they had eaten and drunk. I was not affected—”

“Still,” said Saul, his strong back still to his cousin, “you had delusions, hallucinations, which can come only from administered drugs. Who did this I do not know, nor do I know the reason, unless that it was someone’s purpose to steal the body and then so declare that he had—risen. Or, you were hypnotized, and your men with you.”

Again Milo swore, incredulously. “There were no drugs! I have been wounded in my campaigns and was given nepenthe and opium for the pain, and I know the sensations. I did not have them that night. I was awake as I had never been awake before, disturbed and uneasy. As for being hypnotized—who did that to me? My parents, by Jupiter! I saw no one that day but the members of their household. And how is it possible for a large number of men to be hypnotized simultaneously, in the darkness, by an unseen person? I have watched hypnotists, physicians. They gaze into the eyes of those they desire to influence. There was none there that night but the legionnaires and the guards, and myself! Who hypnotized whom?”

“Perhaps you all expected—him—to rise, or some preternatural event to take place. And so you dreamed, or imagined.”

“You are straining wildly, Saul. None expected Him to rise. I had seen Him die. The men were simple soldiers, jesting, eating, gaming, laughing, looking for the dawn. They have testified they saw nothing, and only that they fell like trees to the ground before the lightning. But I—I did not fall. And I saw. I saw Him. With these eyes I saw Him, and none other.”

“Sorcery,” said Saul.

Milo groaned in his vexation. “With a word—which is mysterious in itself—you dismiss the event. Men give a mystery a name and then believe it is solved! I am not hysterical. I am not a woman. I am a soldier, and not a dreamer of dreams, nor do I believe easily. I have told you of the immense radiance that fell on the tomb, which almost blinded me, and blinded my men. How do you explain that, you man of facile words?”

“The moon was exceptionally bright.”

“The moon had fallen before.”

“Then the rising sun struck it.”

“The sun had not yet appeared over the mountains. It was still dark.”

Saul turned suddenly and his freckled face was tense with fury. “What is it you believe? That this Yeshua of Nazareth, this Jesus, as you call him, is the Messias of the Jews, this unknown carpenter from the hills of Galilee? If you believe so, then you are blasphemous, for we know that when He comes, blessed be His Name, the whole world will know in a twinkling, and He will come in clouds of glory for all men to see. He will not creep from obscurity like a thief in the night, with only a miserable handful of the inconsequential to herald Him! Titus Milo, you are a Roman, and you are a man of hard realism. How is it possible for you to believe that—he—is the Messias?”

“I believe He is the Messias,” said Milo. “I believe the testimony of my own senses, my sight and my hearing. I was in your grandfather’s house and I saw the child restored to life. I saw the death of Jesus of Nazareth, and I saw Him rise from the dead. This was not done by the artful magic of unknown deceivers, by Castor and by Pollux! If there are such deceivers, then they know thaumaturgy unknown to other men, and men of such gifts do not move slyly in darkness when they could make their fortune.”

“Listen to me,” said Saul. “I have seen Indu magicians, here in Tarsus. I have seen them toss a long rope into the air which immediately became rigid like a pole, and very high, higher than the height of four men put together. And I have seen several men swarm up that rope—and disappear instantly before my eyes! I do not attempt to explain it, except that I know it is not supernatural. And did not Pharaoh’s magicians perform wonders before Moses, and was he not given the magic to surpass them? This is not unknown.”

Milo sighed despondently. “You will not believe.”

“I do not trust, always, the evidence of my senses. Our senses are frail and easily deceived and distorted. There are a thousand rational explanations for what you believe happened.”

“And each of them is more incredible than the other,” said Milo. “I have brought you letters. Read them.”

With a face full of dark suspicion Saul read the letter from his sister, Sephorah, in which she related what had occurred in her grandfather’s house, as Milo had related it. “He is surely the Messias!” she wrote, in words of joy. “We know it, in our hearts and our souls, all of our household. The house is blessed, that He entered it and restored our son to us. We wept when we heard He had been condemned for inciting riots and rebellions against Rome, and for blasphemy. But we remembered the prophecies. We waited in patience—and He rose from the dead, as He had raised our son from the dead. Blessed is Israel that she has known this day, and blessed are we that we lived in His years. Now with greater happiness and dearer peace we can say, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One!’”

Saul shuddered. How was it possible that his sister, gently reared like a princess in her father’s house, fastidious, cosseted and loved, a daughter of a noble name, could believe that this Galilean was the Messias? The very thought horrified the young Pharisee, and shamed him, and he feared for her soul for this blasphemy. His enormous pride was wounded, and it smarted with rage, for had not Sephorah complained of this Yeshua a few months before? Now she adored him!

There was a brief letter from Joseph of Arimathaea who had written:

“Your cousin, Titus Milo Platonius, will tell you what he saw with his own eyes and what he heard with his own ears. But I knew Him from the beginning. I gave Him the tomb in which His mortal Body reposed for a brief space, and I knew it would be brief. I had seen Him die, but I knew it would be so, as it was prophesied. I wished to see Him rise from the dead, as He had foretold, but I was given a silent message that I must not be there. I was sorrowful in my heart, but now I know that if I had been present it would be rumored that I had stolen Him away and had secreted Him in my own house! Such is the infamy of the human mind, and the soul’s rejection of truth. I rejoice! For God has not forgotten His people, and has given to us our Messias, and the world has been moved from her place and has been absolved of her sins. For the Messias had said, and I heard Him, that He came not to destroy the Law but to fulfill it.”

Saul put aside the letter in gloomy silence, then stared down at it where it lay on the table. He felt he hated Joseph of Arimathaea for this appalling folly; he felt personally betrayed, for had he not come to love Joseph as a second father? He remembered that day on the desert, and Jochanan the Essene, whom the Greeks called John the Baptist. Was it on such that men of great houses and culture and nobility, and of education and intellect and pride, built their immortal hopes? And their faith? Had these cultivated men lost their reason, their wits, that they could descend to worship and to hail vagabonds and mountebanks? Had they, unaware of it, themselves, absorbed the Greek mythologies of gods disguising themselves as men and performing wonders and rising from the dead? Or the Egyptian myths? Adonis and Osiris: They were fantasies as surely this Yeshua of Nazareth was a fantasy of fevered and hopeful minds. They, too, Adonis and Osiris, had risen from the dead! It was an old, and pretty, story, but it was only a tale for children.

Saul turned to Titus Milo and the Praetorian captain saw, with considerable grief, the great distaste and even dislike his cousin revealed for him, and the umbrage.

“I will return at once to Jerusalem,” said Saul. “I will do what I can, with what influence I own, and with what money, and what knowledge, to destroy this myth of Yeshua of Nazareth, for if it is not destroyed then must all Israel perish in heresy and blasphemy. The wrath of God must be appeased.”

Milo said, “Seek, rather, that you, yourself, do not provoke it, Saul of Tarshish.”

Chapter 27

S
AUL
, in his young manhood, had become mistrustful of his own subjective apprehensions, emotions and observations, for, as Rabban Gamaliel had often told him, “It is a fallacy, and often a dangerous one, to expect others to accept our subjective conclusions and experiences as objective fact. Therein lies peril, as the history of good men has often illustrated, for good men, convinced that their subjective convictions have verity, have sought to impose them on others—with considerable violence and enthusiasm—and this has frequently led to massacres, cruel and oppressive laws, coercions, despotisms, and universal madness.”

Saul, who tended in his own nature to excess and positive affirmations-or negative ones equally intense and violent-reluctantly had to admit that the Rabban had been quite correct. He practiced self-discipline at all times, sometimes successfully and sometimes with no success at all. He now had a wary mistrust of his subjective impressions, suspecting that he threw the shadow of his mind on reality and called it a fact which should, surely, be obvious to other men!

Yet, when he entered Jerusalem his senses, or his intuitions, or his imagination, led him to believe that the city had changed in some indescribable and subtle way. As he was driven through the streets in a car he had engaged at Joppa, he saw, or thought he saw, a certain stillness that permeated all things, even the market rabble, and that the light had altered. He told himself that this was absurd. He had expected some change and his imagination had obliged him. But—was that not a different aspect on faces now, a thoughtfulness? Were the markets and the narrow rising and winding streets less noisy? Was it possible that a city had a life of its own, secret from Wen, and that its vast and hidden thoughts metamorphosed the very air, the angles of light, the cast of shadows, and made men vaguely aware of them?

It was late summer and the hills and fields were golden with the I coming harvest, and the distant mountains were a deep pulsing purple, and the twisting walls of Jerusalem had had, to Saul’s eye, a deeper and brighter yellow than he had ever seen before. Still, he remembered, no day or night or even hour was the same as the one preceding it, and in nearly a year Jerusalem must have inexorably altered. That was what the traveler discerned; the inhabitant did not observe.