“Right; your next journey through this place may be afoot—­at the end of a chain,” Julian averred.

The Maccabee raised his brows.

“Losing courage at the last end of the journey?” he inquired.

“No!  I never have believed in this project,” Julian declared.

“Why?”

“Who believes in the prospects of a man determined to leap into Hades?”

But the Maccabee was already riding on with his head lifted, his eyes set upon the blue shadows on the western slopes of hills, lifted against the early morning sun.  Julian went on.

“You go, cousin, on a mission mad enough to measure up with the antics of the frantic citizens of Jerusalem.  It will not be even a glorious defeat.  You will be swallowed up in an immense calamity too tremendous to offer publicity to so infinitesimal a detail as the death of one Philadelphus Maccabaeus.  Agrippa has deserted the city and when a Herod lets go of his own, his own is not worth the holding.  The city is torn between factions as implacable as the sea and the land.  The conservatives are either dead or fled; pillage and disorder are the main motives of all that are left.  And Titus advances with four legions.  What can you hope for this mob of crazed Jews?”

Julian’s words had been more lively than the Maccabee had expected.  He was obliged to give attention before his kinsman made an end.

“You are fond of summaries, Julian,” he said, “dealt in your own coin.  Look you, now, at my hope.  You confess that these Jews lack a leader.  They have lacked him so long that they hunger and thirst for one.  Also they have suffered the distresses of disorder so intensely that peace in any form is most welcome to them.  Titus approacheth reluctantly.  He had rather deliver Jerusalem than besiege it.  I am of the loved and dethroned Maccabaean line—­acceptable to every faction of Jewry, from the Essenes to the Sicarii.  Titus is my friend, unless he suspects me as coming to undermine his better friend, the pretty Herod.  I shall help Jerusalem help herself; I shall make peace with Rome; I shall be King of the Jews!—­Behold, is not my summary as practical as yours?”

Julian laughed with an amusement that had a ring of contempt in it.

“There is naught to keep an astronomer from planning a rearrangement of the stars,” he said.

But the Maccabee rode on calmly.  Julian sighed.  After a while he spoke.

“Well, how do you proceed?  You tell me that these very visionaries whom you would succor have never laid eyes on you.  What marks you as royal—­as a sprig of the great, just and dead Maccabee?”

“I bear proofs, Roman documents of my family and of my birth.  Certain of my party are already organized in Jerusalem and are expecting me, and I wear the Maccabaean signet.  Is not that enough?”

“Nothing of it worth the security of private citizenship and a whole head!”

“No?  Not when there is a dowry of two hundred talents awaiting my courage to come and get it?”