loth, and strewing ashes upon the floor and upon themselves.
Nehushta's face grew thin and very pale and her lips white in that time,
and she let her heavy hair hang neglected about her. Many of the men
shaved their heads and went barefooted, and the fortress and the palaces
were filled with the sound of weeping and grief. The Hebrews who were
there mourned their chief, and the two Levites sat beside the dead man
and read long chapters from their scriptures. The Medes mourned their
great and just governor, under the Assyrian name of Belteshazzar, given
first to Daniel by Nebuchadnezzar; and from all the town the noise of
their weeping and mourning came up, like the mighty groan of a nation,
to the ears of those that dwelt in the fortress and the palace.

On the eighth day they buried him, with pomp and state, in a tomb in the
garden which they had built during the week of mourning. The two Levites
and a young Hebrew and Zoroaster himself, clad in sackcloth and
barefooted, raised up the prophet's body upon a bier and bore him upon
their shoulders down the broad staircase of the tower and out into the
garden to his tomb. The mourners went before, many hundreds of Median
women with dishevelled hair, rending their dresses of sackcloth and
scattering ashes upon their path and upon their heads, crying aloud in
wild voices of grief and piercing the air with their screams, till they
came to the tomb and stood round about it while the four men laid their
master in his great coffin of black marble beneath the pines and the
rhododendrons. And the pipers followed after, making shrill and dreadful
music that sounded as though some supernatural beings added their voices
to the universal wail of woe. And on either side of the body walked the
women, the prophet's kinsfolk; but Nehushta walked by Zoroaster, and
ever and anon, as the funeral procession wound through the myrtle walks
of the deep gardens, her dark and heavy eyes stole a glance sidelong at
her strong fair lover. His face was white as death and set sternly
before him, and his dishevelled hair and golden beard flowed wildly
over the rough coarseness of his long sackcloth garments. But his step
never faltered, though he walked barefooted upon the hard gravel, and
from the upper chamber of the tower whence they bore the corpse to the
very moment when they laid it in the tomb, his face never changed,
neither looked he to the right nor to the left. And then, at last, when
they had