III.—­The Abomination of Desolation

And through all these awful years of incessant warfare I was now lifted up on a wave of victory to heights of dazzling glory, and now plunged down into the abysm of defeat.  I saw my wife and children torn from me; restored, only to be dragged away again.  I saw Rome driven from the Holy City, only to see her return in triumph.  And all through these maddening vicissitudes, suspected by my own people, and knowing my own infamy, I heard the voice, “Tarry thou till I come!”

The fall of our illustrious and unhappy city was supernatural.  During the latter days of the siege, a hostility, to which that of man was as the grain of sand to the tempest that drives it on, overpowered our strength and senses.  Fearful shapes and voices in the air; visions startling us from our short and troubled sleep; lunacy in its most hideous forms; sudden death in the midst of vigour; the fury of the elements let loose upon our unsheltered heads; we had every evil and terror that could beset human nature, but pestilence, the most probable of all in a city crowded with the famishing, the diseased, the wounded, and the dead.  Yet, though the streets were covered with the unburied; though every wall and trench was teeming; though six hundred thousand corpses lay flung over the ramparts, and naked to the sun—­pestilence came not.  But the abomination of desolation, the pagan standard, was fixed; where it was to remain until the plough passed over the ruins of Jerusalem.

On this fatal night no man laid his head upon his pillow.  Heaven and earth were in conflict.  Meteors burned above us; the ground shook under our feet; the volcano blazed; the wind burst forth in irresistible blasts, and swept the living and the dead in whirlwinds far off into the desert.  Thunder pealed from every quarter of the heavens.  Lightning, in immense sheets, withering eye and soul, burned from the zenith to the ground, and marked its track by forests on flame, and the shattered summits of hills.

Defence was unthought of; for the mortal enemy had passed from the mind.  Our hearts quaked from fear, but it was to see the powers of heaven shaken.  All cast away the shield and the spear, and crouched before the descending judgment.  Our cries of remorse, anguish, and horror were heard through the uproar of the storm.  We howled to the caverns to hide us; we plunged into the sepulchres, to escape the wrath that consumed the living.

I knew the cause, the unspeakable cause; knew that the last hour of crime was at hand.  A few fugitives, astonished to see one man not sunk into the lowest feebleness of fear, besought me to lead them into safety.  I said they were to die, and pointed them to the hallowed ground of the Temple.  More, I led them towards it myself.  But advance was checked.  Piles of cloud, whose darkness was palpable even in the midnight, covered the holy hill.  I attempted to pass through it, and was swept downward by a gust that tore the rocks in a flinty shower around me.