He had come far, without rest. Even now, with the crisis of his long journey at hand, he labored under prostrating weariness and a torturing desire to sleep. He had periods of mental blankness from which he aroused with a start. But as the night's cold deepened, after the day of withering heat, the sharp change added to the weakening influences. He meditated on the Feast of Junia and the succession of Classicus, until his body became a column finishing the front of Agrippa's palace, at which a mob at Baiae threw stones. He flinched, and the night on the desert of Syria passed across his vision once more. But it was good to lie down on the couch at the triclinum of Caligula, restful, indeed, if it were sinful. But not for long, because Lydia was beside him, and he spent hours imploring her to give up Jove and pour libations to Jehovah instead, for since Saul of Tarsus was Caesar, she would be chained to a soldier under sentence in the Praetorium. Even now there approached a decurion with manacles thrown over his shoulder! Again, he saw the drooping head of his horse before him in the dark, the pallid stretch of sand, and felt the sweep of harsh winds on his face. But Lollia Paulina had laid her sesterces on this worn-out animal, when she knew that Cneius Domitius' horses were the best in the Circus! Why did the woman insist on sitting with him, when she wanted so much to be with the Roman? But nobody was good. Even Stephen had died in heresy, and Lydia, for whom he had lost his soul, was an apostate! The multitude had her! Classicus turned his back upon her! Flaccus stood within twenty paces of her and leveled a pilum at her breast! And Saul bound his arms! Help! Mercy-- But a brambly desert shrub had caught at his garments, and its sharp dead thorns had pierced him. The next mid-morning he rode up a chalky ridge and saw the picture that had brought praise to the lips of the prophets of despair, when Israel was a captive with no hope. It was a vale so enchanting, so perfect, so golden that he doubted his eyes and feared that it was an unreality the desert had fashioned to lure him on to destruction--or another but kindlier dream. Yellow roadways, slender and winding, wandered hither and thither through emerald oceans of young grain, past ancient vineyards and orchards of olives, and citrons, and groves of walnuts. Yonder was a cluster of palms, pilasters of silver with feathery capitals, and under it was builded a little town--a hive of soft-colored houses, half smothered in delicate green. Beyond, the roads spread out again, from their convergence in the little settlement, and ran abroad once more between hedges of roses and oleanders, across the River Pharbar, curving midway across the vale like a simitar dropped in the green, through crowding gardens, among low-lying roofs, past spreading villas of the rich, on to a glittering vision of towers, walls, cupolas, white as frost on the head of Mount Tabor in the morning.