The horrors of the siege, famine, rapine, and dissension within, crucifixion and torture for those who deserted, are detailed by Josephus. “A deep silence also and a kind of deadly night had seized on the city; while yet the robbers were still more terrible than these miseries were themselves”; yet there was no thought of submission among those desperate men who fought on for all that was dear to them--for faith and freedom as of old. They had been goaded to rebellion after years of oppression, and Nero was as guilty of the burning of Jerusalem as he was of the burning of Rome. Yet without the miseries of those four months the new world could not begin. The Christian and the Jew alike were set free from the shackles of the past when the undying fire went out for ever on Tammuz 17--thenceforth a fast-day in Israel.[357] [Sidenote: THE ROMAN WALL] All through May the struggle for Antonia went on, from the thirty-eighth day of the siege till the sixty-eighth day. The Roman banks in the fosse were undermined--no doubt by use of the rock tunnel leading to the Pool Strouthios--and the Romans were forced for a time to abandon their engines. The banks against the upper city were also destroyed, and Titus, after these repulses, determined to surround the city with a blockading wall, and so to starve out the defenders. The length of 40 furlongs, or 5 miles, given by Josephus for this vallum[358] appears to be fairly correct. It had thirteen small forts along its line. Its appearance may be judged from the existing remains of a similar wall, built by Silva round Masada[359] a little later, on which I have looked down from the heights of that desert fortress near the Dead Sea. It is a dry-stone rampart, with two large camps behind it on the north-west and north-east. Its length is less than 3,000 yards, and in part of this distance there are six small forts on the line at intervals of 500 feet on the average. The vallum of Titus began near his own headquarters at the “Camp of the Assyrians,” and stretched east through Bezetha and over the Kidron to Olivet, where it bent at the “Rock of the Dovecote.” This point seems to be fixed by the description of an existing rock cutting noted[360] by Sir Charles Wilson in 1864: “Entering the village of Siloam on the north, there is on the left a high cliff which bears evident signs of having been worked as a quarry, and on the summit of which is a curious place which appears to have been an old dovecote cut in the rock.” Thence the wall went to the “other hill” (the south summit of Olivet), “over the valley which reaches to Siloam.” It then crossed the “Valley of the Fountain,” by which perhaps we may understand the present “Well of Job,” and climbed the south precipice of Hinnom, near the “monument of Ananus the high-priest,” which was probably the fine tomb now called the “Retreat of the Apostles,” which was converted later into a chapel with a frescoed roof.[361] The wall ran along the cliff to the west