and stood like a shadow, for ever watching
the white walls of the besieged city.

The Romans were now within the city. Only Zion and the Temple held
against them. A wall built with the thoroughness of David, the
ancient, and solidified by the mortising of Time, ran directly from
Hippicus to the Tyropean Valley, joining the tremendous fortifications
of Moriah and so cut off Zion from the advance of the army. Securely
intrenched within that quarter and the Temple, Simon and John began
the last resistance which should tax Roman endurance and Roman
patience as it had not been taxed before.

Titus no longer lagged. Famine had long since become a powerful ally
and the honor of the Flavian house rested upon his immediate
subjugation of the rebellious city. He no longer expected
capitulation; yet he did not neglect to be prepared for it and to
encourage it. Though the heart of the historian Josephus broke, he did
not fail to serve his patron as mediator, though without hope. Titus
himself, as from time to time the horror of his work impressed itself
upon him, made overtures to the factionists, neglecting no art or
inducement which should convince the seditious that their resistance
was foolhardy, even mad. At such times, Nicanor's face became
contemptuous and Carus himself frowned at the young general's
attitude. But the spirit of a Roman and the traditions of a soldier
even could not prevent the young man from weakening at times before
the charnel pit in Tophet where countless thousands of vultures
fattened with roaring of wings and hissing of combat.

But under an ever-thickening veil of horrid airs, the struggle went
on.

The Roman Ides of July arrived.

Titus had erected banks upon which his engines were raised to batter
the walls of the Temple.

From Titus' camp, the Romans on sick leave, the commissaries, those
attached to the army who were not fighting-men, and old Momus, saw
first, before the attack on the Temple began, a soft increasing
dun-colored vapor rise between the Temple and Antonia. It issued from
the cloister at the northwest which joined the Roman tower. As they
watched, they saw that vapor grow into a pale but intensely luminous
smoke, as if fine woods and burning metals were consumed together. In
a moment the whole north-west section was embraced in a sublime pall
of fire.

John was burning away the connection between the Temple and the tower
and was making the sacred edifice four-square.

As so