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580 DARKNESS AND DAWN
the streets and houses full only of the corpses of those whom
famine had slain ;
the horrible disorders of rampant licentiousness,
which were the expression of blasphemous despair.
He saw Martha, the daughter of the wealthy Gamaliel, trying
to pick grains for food from the ordure of the streets he saw
;
the miserable mother who, in the pangs of hunger, roasted
and devoured her own child. He heard the incessant thunder
of the battering-rams upon the walls, and the whizz of the
dazzling stones hurled from the catapults, and the monotonous
cry of the poor scourged maniac wandering about day and
night with the wail '
A voice from the East, a voice from the
:
West, a voice from the four winds ! Woe, woe to Jerusalem,
and to the people, and to the Holy House He !
' heard Josephus
and Titus pleading with the frantic people, and the false
prophets deluding them. He heard the crash of the falling
cloister which buried six thousand men, women, and children
under its ruins, and the roaring of the flames, and the groans
of the wounded, and the shout of the victors, and the despairing
yell of the defeated. He saw the priests tearing the
gilded spikes from the Temple roof, and hurling them down
upon the Romans. In spite of the strong efforts of Titus
under the urgent entreaties of Agrippa and Josephus to
spare the Temple, he saw a Roman soldier, as though inspired
by some divine fury, snatch up a burning brand, and spring
upon the back of a comrade, and hurl his torch through the
golden window of one of the chambers which surrounded the
Holiest Place ;
and then, when the flames burst out on every
side, he saw the whole Temple hill assume the aspect of a
great bellowing volcano stored with fire, while amid the
upheaped corpses the blood, streaming in rivers from fresh
wounds, hissed and bubbled as though
it would almost have
quenched the flames. He saw something of that awfully desperate
struggle of madness and fury,
1
When through the cedarn courts, and gates of gold,
T" e trampled ranks in miry carnage rolled.
To save their Temple every hand essayed,
And with cold fingers clutched the feeble blade ;
Through their torn veins reviving fury ran,
And life's last anger warmed the dying man.'
And how his life was preserved famine-stricken, wounded,
as he was in that circle of fire in
horrified, daily imperilled