ection with the road
leading south to the village of Siloam and the pool of that name.
There he fell in with a herdsman driving some sheep to market.
He spoke to the man, and joined him, and in his company passed
by Gethsemane on into the city through the Fish Gate.

CHAPTER IV

It was dark when, parting with the drover inside the gate,
Ben-Hur turned into a narrow lane leading to the south. A few of
the people whom he met saluted him. The bouldering of the pavement
was rough. The houses on both sides were low, dark, and cheerless;
the doors all closed: from the roofs, occasionally, he heard women
crooning to children. The loneliness of his situation, the night,
the uncertainty cloaking the object of his coming, all affected
him cheerlessly. With feelings sinking lower and lower, he came
directly to the deep reservoir now known as the Pool of Bethesda,
in which the water reflected the over-pending sky. Looking up,
he beheld the northern wall of the Tower of Antonia, a black
frowning heap reared into the dim steel-gray sky. He halted as
if challenged by a threatening sentinel.

The Tower stood up so high, and seemed so vast, resting apparently
upon foundations so sure, that he was constrained to acknowledge its
strength. If his mother were there in living burial, what could he do
for her? By the strong hand, nothing. An army might beat the stony
face with ballista and ram, and be laughed at. Against him alone,
the gigantic southeast turret looked down in the self-containment
of a hill. And he thought, cunning is so easily baffled; and God,
always the last resort of the helpless--God is sometimes so slow
to act!

In doubt and misgiving, he turned into the street in front of the
Tower, and followed it slowly on to the west.

Over in Bezetha he knew there was a khan, where it was his intention
to seek lodging while in the city; but just now he could not resist
the impulse to go home. His heart drew him that way.

The old formal salutation which he received from the few people
who passed him had never sounded so pleasantly. Presently, all the
eastern sky began to silver and shine, and objects before invisible
in the west--chiefly the tall towers on Mount Zion--emerged as from
a shadowy depth, and put on spectral distinctness, floating, as it
were, above the yawning blackness of the valley below, very castles
in the air.

He came, at length, to his father's house.

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