r his magnificence--of that Herod in fact, his own father, who gave
to Jerusalem her masterpiece of marble and gold, and meanwhile, drunk with
the dream of empire, had made himself successor of Solomon, Sultan of
Israel, King of the Jews, and who, even as he died, had vomited death and
crowns, diadems and crucifixions.

It was through his legacy that Antipas ruled. The kingdom had been sliced
into three parts, of one of which Augustus had made a province; over
another a brother whom he hated ruled; and he had but this third part, the
smallest yet surely the most fair. Its unparalleled garden surrounded him,
and its eye, the lake, was just beyond. In the amphitheatre the hills
formed was a city of pink and blue marble, of cupolas, porticoes, volutes,
bronze doors, and copper roofs. Along the fringe of the shore were
Choraizin and Bethsaida, purple with pomegranates, Capharnahum, beloved
for its honey, and Magdala, scented with spice. The slopes and intervales
were very green where they were not yellow, and there were terraces of
grape, glittering cliffs, and a sky of troubled blue, wadded with little
gold-edged clouds.

Yes, it was paradise, but it was not monarchy. It was to that he aspired.
As he mused, a rancid-faced woman decked with paint and ostrich-plumes
snarled in his ear:

"What have you heard of Iohanan?"

And as with a gesture he signified that he had heard nothing, she snarled
again.

Antipas turned to her reflectively, but it was of another that he
thought--the brown-eyed bride that Arabia had given him, the lithe-limbed
princess of the desert whose heart had beaten on his own, whom he had
loved with all the strength of youth and weakness, and whom he had
deserted while at Rome for his brother's wife, his own niece, Herodias,
who snarled at his side.

Behind her were her women, and among them was one who, as the cars swept
by, turned her head with that movement a flower has which a breeze has
stirred. Her eyes were sultry, darkened with stibium; on her cheek was the
pink of the sea-shell, and her lips made one vermilion rhyme. The face was
oval and rather small; and though it was beautiful as victory, the wonder
of her eyes, which looked the haunts of hope fulfilled, the wonder of her
mouth, which seemed to promise more than any mortal mouth could give, were
forgotten in her hair, which was not orange nor flame, but a blending of
both. And now, as the cars passed, her thin nostrils quivered, her hand