not stay. His long shadow and the confused
mass of lesser shadows behind him drifted down the white moonlight,
past the yellow bars of lamplight that gleamed from the doorways. It
seemed as if he were bound to go somewhere and would not delay.

Yet with all his haste to be gone, it was plain that he thought little
of where he was going. For when he came to the foot of the valley,
where the paths divided, he stood between them staring vacantly,
without a desire to turn him this way or that. The imperative of
choice halted him like a barrier. The balance of his mind hung even
because both scales were empty. He could act, he could go, for his
strength was untouched; but he could not choose, for his will was
broken within him.

The path to the left went up toward the little town of Bethlehem, with
huddled roofs and walls in silhouette along the double-crested hill.
It was dark and forbidding as a closed fortress. The sad shepherd
looked at it with indifferent eyes; there was nothing there to draw
him.

The path to the right wound through rock-strewn valleys toward the
Dead Sea. But rising out of that crumpled wilderness, a mile or two
away, the smooth white ribbon of a chariot-road lay upon the flank of
a cone-shaped mountain and curled in loops toward its peak. There the
great cone was cut squarely off, and the levelled summit was capped
by a palace of marble, with round towers at the corners and flaring
beacons along the walls; and the glow of an immense fire, hidden in
the central court-yard, painted a false dawn in the eastern sky. All
down the clean-cut mountain slopes, on terraces and blind arcades, the
lights flashed from lesser pavilions and pleasure-houses.

It was the secret orchard of Herod and his friends, their
trysting-place with the spirits of mirth and madness. They called it
the Mountain of the Little Paradise. Rich gardens were there; and the
cool water from the Pools of Solomon plashed in the fountains; and
trees of the knowledge of good and evil fruited blood-red and
ivory-white above them; and smooth, curving, glistening shapes,
whispering softly of pleasure, lay among the flowers and glided behind
the trees. All this was now hidden in the dark. Only the strange bulk
of the mountain, a sharp black pyramid girdled and crowned with fire,
loomed across the night--a mountain once seen never to be forgotten.

The sad shepherd remembered it well. He looked at it with the eyes of
a child who has been in