was risen, he understood
the death was necessary to faith in the resurrection, without which
Christianity would be an empty husk. The confusion, as has been said,
left him without the faculty of decision; he stood helpless--wordless
even. Covering his face with his hand, he shook with the conflict
between his wish, which was what he would have ordered, and the
power that was upon him.

"Come; we are waiting for you," said Simonides, the fourth time.

Thereupon he walked mechanically after the chair and the litter.
Esther walked with him. Like Balthasar and his friends, the Wise
Men, the day they went to the meeting in the desert, he was being
led along the way.

CHAPTER X

When the party--Balthasar, Simonides, Ben-Hur, Esther, and the two
faithful Galileans--reached the place of crucifixion, Ben-Hur was
in advance leading them. How they had been able to make way through
the great press of excited people, he never knew; no more did he know
the road by which they came or the time it took them to come. He had
walked in total unconsciousness, neither hearing nor seeing anybody
or anything, and without a thought of where he was going, or the
ghostliest semblance of a purpose in his mind. In such condition
a little child could have done as much as he to prevent the awful
crime he was about to witness. The intentions of God are always
strange to us; but not more so than the means by which they are
wrought out, and at last made plain to our belief.

Ben-Hur came to a stop; those following him also stopped. As a
curtain rises before an audience, the spell holding him in
its sleep-awake rose, and he saw with a clear understanding.

There was a space upon the top of a low knoll rounded like a skull,
and dry, dusty, and without vegetation, except some scrubby hyssop.
The boundary of the space was a living wall of men, with men
behind struggling, some to look over, others to look through
it. An inner wall of Roman soldiery held the dense outer wall
rigidly to its place. A centurion kept eye upon the soldiers.
Up to the very line so vigilantly guarded Ben-Hur had been led;
at the line he now stood, his face to the northwest. The knoll
was the old Aramaic Golgotha--in Latin, Calvaria; anglicized,
Calvary; translated, The Skull.

On its slopes, in the low places, on the swells and higher hills,
the earth sparkled with a strange enamelling. Look where he would
outside the walled space, he saw no patch of brown soil, no