A year has passed since the tragedy related in the last chapter. Menelaüs, thanks chiefly to the fickle temper of Antiochus, had escaped the fate which overtook his accomplice Andronicus, and had returned to pillage his unfortunate countrymen in Palestine. But his lease of power had come to an end. Jason, his dispossessed rival, had taken the opportunity of a report that Antiochus was dead, and attacked him. There could hardly be any choice between the two men. Both were equally rapacious; equally unfaithful to their religion and their country. But Jason had been out of power for two years, and his misdeeds had faded a little from the memory of the people; Menelaüs’s enormities were still fresh in their recollection. After a sharp conflict, the losses of which were utterly out of proportion to any gain that could possibly come from it, Jason had won the day, and his rival had been compelled to take refuge in the Castle. Then came the news that the report of the death of Antiochus was false. He had settled affairs in Egypt after his liking, and was now on his way northwards, furious at the trouble which this obstinate province was giving him, and resolved, as he said, to quiet it for good. Jason had fled in headlong haste, and his partisans, and, indeed, most of those who had the means to go, had followed his example. Meanwhile Jerusalem was awaiting the future with fear and trembling. It is an evening in the early summer, and the western wall of the city is crowded with men and women, who are gazing with awe-stricken faces on the strange appearance of the sunset. All day people had been talking of the marvellous shapes which had appeared the evening before in the western sky, and now a great multitude had assembled to see whether the marvel would be repeated, and, if so, to judge of it for themselves. Nor had they assembled in vain. Never, within the memory of man, had the heavens worn a stranger, a more terrifying look. Above the spot where the sun was just sinking to his rest the whole sky glowed with a red and angry light. On this background, so to speak, the clouds of a lower stratum had shaped themselves into the forms of two armies ready to engage in battle. The spectators seemed to be able to trace in one place the serried ranks of infantry, in another the massed array of chariots and horses. A space, brilliantly coloured, as it might seem, with something like the hue of blood, intervened between the two airy hosts. But these seemed to be slowly nearing each other, and the gazing people watched the lessening space, expecting, one might think, to hear the actual clash of arms when they should have met. But then the sun set, and with the sudden failing of light that marks the evening of more southern climes than ours, the whole pageant vanished from before the eyes of the spectators.