Herodias | Page 4

distant voice, seeming to come from
the very depths of the earth. His cheek paled. After an instant's
hesitation, he leaned far over the balcony railing, listening intently, but
the voice had died away. Presently it rose again upon the quiet air;
Antipas clapped his hands together loudly, crying: "Mannaeus!
Mannaeus!"
Instantly a man appeared, naked to the waist, after the fashion of a
masseur at the bath. Although emaciated, and somewhat advanced in
years, he was a giant in stature, and on his hip he wore a cutlass in a
bronze scabbard. His bushy hair, gathered up and held in place by a
kind of comb, exaggerated the apparent size of his massive head. His
eyes were heavy with sleep, but his white teeth shone, his step was
light on the flagstones, and his body had the suppleness of an ape,
although his countenance was as impassive as that of a mummy.
"Where is he?" demanded the tetrarch of this strange being.
Mannaeus made a movement over his shoulder with his thumb, saying:
"Over there--still there!"
"I thought I heard him cry out."
And Antipas, after drawing a deep breath, asked for news of Iaokanann,

afterwards known as St. John the Baptist. Had he been allowed to see
the two men who had asked permission to visit his dungeon a few days
before, and since that time, had any one discovered for what purpose
the men desired to see him?
"They exchanged some strange words with him," Mannaeus replied,
"with the mysterious air of robbers conspiring at the cross-roads. Then
they departed towards Upper Galilee, saying that they were the bearers
of great tidings."
Antipas bent his head for a moment; then raising it quickly, said in a
tone full of alarm:
"Guard him! watch him well! Do not allow any one else to see him.
Keep the gates shut and the entrance to the dungeon closed fast. It must
not even be suspected that he still lives!"
Mannaeus had already attended to all these details, because Iaokanann
was a Jew, and, like all the Samaritans, Mannaeus hated the Jews.
Their temple on the Mount of Gerizim, which Moses had designed to
be the centre of Israel, had been destroyed since the reign of King
Hyrcanus; and the temple at Jerusalem made the Samaritans furious;
they regarded its presence as an outrage against themselves, and a
permanent injustice. Mannaeus, indeed, had forcibly entered it, for the
purpose of defiling its altar with the bones of corpses. Several of his
companions, less agile than he, had been caught and beheaded.
From the tetrarch's balcony, the temple was visible through an opening
between two hills. The sun, now fully risen, shed a dazzling splendour
on its walls of snowy marble and the plates of purest gold that formed
its roof. The structure shone like a luminous mountain, and its radiant
purity indicated something almost superhuman, eclipsing even its
suggestion of opulence and pride.
Mannaeus stretched out his powerful arm towards Zion, and, with
clenched fist and his great body drawn to its full height, he launched a
bitter anathema at the city, with perfect faith that eventually his curse

must be effective.
Antipas listened, without appearing to be shocked at the strength of the
invectives.
When the Samaritan had become somewhat calmer, he returned to the
subject of the prisoner.
"Sometimes he grows excited," said he, "then he longs to escape or
talks about a speedy deliverance. At other times he is as quiet as a sick
animal, although I often find him pacing to and fro in his gloomy
dungeon, murmuring, 'In order that His glory may increase, mine must
diminish.'"
Antipas and Mannaeus looked at each other a moment in silence. But
the tetrarch was weary of pondering on this troublesome matter.
The mountain peaks surrounding the palace, looking like great petrified
waves, the black depths among the cliffs, the immensity of the blue sky,
the rising sun, and the gloomy valley of the abyss, filled the soul of
Antipas with a vague unrest; he felt an overwhelming sense of
oppression at the sight of the desert, whose uneven piles of sand
suggested crumbling ampitheatres or ruined palaces. The hot wind
brought an odour of sulphur, as if it had rolled up from cities accursed
and buried deeper than the river-bed of the slow-running Jordan.
These aspects of nature, which seemed to his troubled fancy signs of
the wrath of the gods, terrified him, and he leaned heavily against the
balcony railing, his eyes fixed, his head resting upon his hands.
Presently he felt a light touch upon his shoulder. He turned, and saw
Herodias standing beside him. A purple robe enveloped her, falling to
her sandaled feet. Having left her chamber hurriedly, she wore no
jewels nor other ornaments. A