Hundreds, rushing upon the wall, though a goodly distance from the point at which the strange man had mounted, climbed it and beat off the sentries.

And the foremost who reached the top saw the Roman Tower directly opposite Seraiah shudder suddenly and sink in a roaring cloud of dust upon itself to the earth.

Instantly the maniac below broke the tense silence with a scream that was heard in the paralyzed Roman camp: 

“It is He, the Deliverer!  Come!”

Of the thousands of Jews that heard the madman’s cry, every heart credited it.  Hundreds melted away suddenly, as if stricken with terror at what they might see; other hundreds scrambled down from their places to run purposelessly, crying aimless things to the night over the city; yet others covered their faces with their arms and fell in their places, expecting the end of the world; and of the rest, the less imaginative, the more composed and the more curious, remained on the walls to see enacted a further miracle.  Uproar had broken out instantly among the four stolid legions of Titus on the Assyrian bivouac.  Lights flashed out everywhere; great running to and fro could be distinguished; rapid trumpet-calls and the prolonged roll of drums from company quarters to quarters were echoed back from Antonia and from Hippicus.  The startled shouts of commanders; the nervous dropping of arms; the sharp excited response to roll-call; the sound of sentries challenging, the curt response by countersign, showed everywhere irregularities and the symptoms of panic in the immovable ranks of Titus.

Seraiah meanwhile had disappeared from his place as mysteriously as he had come.

Many of the Jews who remained on the wall believed that he had passed into the Roman camp and was troubling it.  The fall of the tower, and the confusion it had wrought in the Roman camp, never occurred to them to have been fortuitous incidents with which Seraiah had nothing to do.  Of the thousands that witnessed that miracle, most of them were convinced that the hour had come.

Meanwhile Jerusalem was roaring with excitement.  The city was ready for a Messiah.  Seraiah had arisen at the psychological moment.  Earlier the Jews would have been too critical to accept him readily; later they would have reviled him for coming too late.  Whatever his advent lacked in thunders, in darkness, voices, and shaking of the earth, had been passed by his miraculous work against the Romans.

Philadelphus, who had seen the fall of the tower, and had dropped down from the wall as soon as he had explained it all to himself, came upon new disorders.  Great concourses of awakened Jews were hurrying to the walls to see what had happened, or to behold the Roman army wiped out by the Angel of Death as the army of Sennacherib had perished.  Others collected at the end of the Tyropean Bridge and watched the pinnacle of the Temple for the miracle which should restore the city.  But the burned ruin where the Herodian palace had stood was the center of the most characteristic frenzy.