It was just as the mists of morning were rising that some of the soldiers stirred uneasily in their sleep to the echo of the trumpets and bugles sounding reveille and the sharp iron-shod pound of the two horses ridden at furious pace over the flinty rocks. Some of them sat up wearily. A few commanders sprang to their feet, sword in hand. Their first thought was of fresh dispatches from Rome, or word of surrender from the besieged Holy City. What they decried through the rising gauzy mist was the figure of a woman leaping from her horse in front of the commander’s tent, followed by a soldier throwing himself from his horse across her way and thrusting his lance before the tent entrance. Not thus had refugees escaping over the walls of the besieged city by rope come to the Roman for permission to seek safety in the caves beyond the Dead Sea. The officers smiled in hard contempt. The soldiers laughed, an ugly suggestive laugh. They laughed because they knew that while the war lasted, if a goddess had come garbed as a woman, she would not be received in that tent. They trusted, loved and idolized their commander as they would a god, and already openly talked of Titus as the army’s future Emperor, when the cares of Rome from Gaul to Ganges would have worn out his father, Vespasian. The Roman Legions lay encamped on valley and hill in front of Jerusalem. Seven months now had they besieged the Holy City from Passover Week in spring when a million Hebrews from every country in the known world had come up to Jerusalem to celebrate the birth of their nation from the bondage of slavery in Egypt. It was now the golden summer season, which we know as the end of August and opening of September. Russet mist shimmered on earth and sky. As the sun rose over the red mountain rims of Moab far to the east of the Dead Sea, the gauzy clouds took to themselves wings and rose to mid-heaven, white as the snow of Hermon in the north, and joyous as the lark’s greeting to newborn day. [Illustration: THE TEMPLE REBUILT BY HEROD]