Vashti, loth to go with him, yet not daring to refuse, accompanied Simon to the tower adjacent to the Valley Gate. Entering the first room that he came to, the Zealot chief peremptorily ordered out of it three or four of his followers who were sitting there occupied with dice and wine. “Here,” said he, addressing Vashti, when the men had withdrawn, “here are six dried grapes, a fig, and a morsel of bread. No more at present. Put a curb upon your appetite, if you would live.” To Vashti’s mind there was something selfish in eating while thousands of her fellow-citizens were dying of want--doubly selfish, when she reflected that this food had perhaps been wrung by violence from the famishing people. Natural appetite, however, prevailed over sentiment; and with a strange feeling towards Simon, a feeling compounded of gratitude and repulsion, Vashti began the slow eating of what was to her a repast more delicious than that in the banquet-hall of Florus, though her enjoyment was somewhat marred by the unpleasant odor that seemed to cling around everything in this vicinity. That she did not know its cause seemed to surprise Simon. Perceiving that her ignorance was real and not feigned, he rose, and said, “Come with me, if you would learn.” Vashti began to regret her curiosity, being all-anxious now to return home with the promised loaves. Not wishing, however, to offend the Zealot she followed him up a stone staircase, and through a doorway that opened upon the ramparts. Simon, first handing her his perfume box, bade her look down over the battlements. And Vashti looked. It was a moonless night, but the sky was jeweled with stars whose faint light was just sufficient to give her a glimmering of what lay below. It was the light required for such a scene: the full blaze of the noonday sun would have made it a horror too great to be endured by human nerves. “_They shall look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me!_” Vashti, peering down, could dimly see that the deep and shadowy ravine of Hinnom--that ravine already regarded in Hebrew theology as the type of hell--was filled with the remains of the dead, who were to be counted not by hundreds, but by tens of thousands. The bodies lay, piled promiscuously, some clothed, some naked, in every possible stage of decay, from that of the newly dead to that of the whitened skeleton glimmering ghastly through the gloom. The air that hung above and around the ravine was tainted with an effluvium so gross as to be all but palpable to the touch, and so loathsome that but for the perfume box Vashti would have sunk to the ground overpowered. More dreadful still, from every part of the gloom came significant and horrid rustlings, intermingled with sounds like to the tearing of flesh by some sharp instrument. “Mark!” said Simon.