Down, down, the narrow winding way, the caravan descended, and where the hot brooding malarial air of the Jordan smote them, the pebbly shaly path turned to clay trampled to mire by the refugees fleeing the siege for open desert and rocky cave. The current was dark and sullen and flowed with the hurrying rage of human passion driving to the nemesis of its own destiny. The heat was hideous and the din deafened thought. At the ford of the sullen dark river, they paused to water their beasts, and mounting his horse, the young presbyter rode abreast the Princess’ camel and signaled the Idumean to ride for her safety on the other side. “So would I ride with you through the Gates of Death, my Princess,” he whispered, leaning towards the white face in the muffled cloak. “’Twas here Christ was baptized and tempted of Self and the Evil One, and renounced all earthly power to save men for the Glad Kingdom. You, too, another time in safer place shall join our ranks by the sacred rite of baptism, my Bernice.” But the white face answered never a word. She reached out her arm, where she sat, and touched his brow with a hand cold as death. Then the caravan plunged in the ford. The horses swam and scattered slightly, heading downstream with the waves, but the camels kept footing and floundered. As the beasts came panting up the far bank in a thicket of willows and oleanders, the Idumean led to force the way, for the narrow road past Jericho was packed with a slow-moving mass of fleeing women and children and aged, escaping from the siege of the Holy City on Zion Hill. Apollos, the great master, rode back abreast the Princess, and the presbyter, Onesimus, led her camel afoot. “And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, know that the desolation thereof is nigh,” Apollos said. “Let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains. They shall fall by the edge of the sword. They shall be led away captive into all nations. Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles. When these things begin to come, then look up, and lift up your heads; for redemption draweth nigh. Know you Who spoke those words, your Highness?” But the Princess answered never a word; for her heart was cold with fear of the sights she saw as in a shadow by the silver starlight. Where Herod’s Pleasure Gardens had lain at Jericho, was such a press of soldiers, they could not approach the city gates. The clank of the forges for the engines of war had become as the rumble of thunder or earthquake. Where she knew the Holy City must stand on Zion Hill, she could discern only the blaze of towers and uptossing in midsky of flaming javelin and torch to throw destruction inside the city walls; and as the caravan advanced through the press of legion and cohort in serried ranks of helmet and breastplate and spear, the narrow ascending mountain road lay thick in a screen of smoke with a sickening odor of burning she had not known could exist outside the purlieus of a nether world.