After long admiration of this display of the wealth dearest to the soldier, I was retiring, when a slave approached, and prostrating himself, told me that a hall remained, still more singular, “the hall in which the great Herod received his death-warning.”
I gazed round the armory; there was no door but the one by which we had entered——
“Not here,” said the Ethiopian, “yet it is beside us. The foot of a Roman has never entered it. The secret remains with me alone. Does my lord command that it shall be revealed?”
The order was given. The slave took down one of the coats of mail, pushed back a valve, and we entered a winding stair which led us downward for some minutes. The narrow passage and heavy air reminded me of the subterranean. Our torches burned dimly, and the visages of my attendants showed how little their gallantry was to be relied on, if we were to be brought into contact with magic and ghosts.
“Here,” said the Ethiopian, “it was the custom of the great king in his declining years, when his heart was broken by the loss of the most beloved of wives, and maddened by the conspiracies of the princes, his sons, to come and consult others than the God of Jerusalem. Here the Chaldee men of wisdom came to summon the spirits of the departed and show the fates of kingdoms. We are now in the bowels of the mountain.”
He loosed a chain, which disappeared into the ground with a hollow noise. A huge mass of rock slowly rolled back, and showed a depth of darkness through which our twinkling torches scarcely made way.
“Stop,” said the slave; “I should have first lighted the shrine.”
He left us, and we shortly saw a blaze of many colors on a tripod in the center. As the blaze strengthened, a scene of wonder awoke before the eye. A host of armed statues grew upon the darkness. The immense vault was peopled with groups of warriors, all the great military leaders of the world in their native arms, and surrounded by a cluster of their captains; the disturbers of the earth, from Sesostris down to Cæsar and Antony, brandishing the lance or reining the charger, each in his known attitude of command. There rushed Cyrus in the scythed chariot, surrounded by his horsemen, barbed from head to foot. There was to be seen Alexander, with the banner of Macedon waving above his head, and armed as when he leaped into the Granicus; there Hannibal, upon the elephant that he rode at Cannæ; there Cæsar, with the head of Pompey at his feet. Those, and a long succession of the masters of victory, each in the moment of supreme fortune, made the vault a representative palace of human glory. But the view from the entrance told but half the tale. It was when I advanced and lifted the torch to the countenance of the first group that the moral was visible. All the visages were those of skeletons. The costly armor was hung upon bones. The spears and scepters were brandished by the thin fingers of the grave. The vault was the representative sepulcher of human vanity. This was one of the fantastic fits of a mind which felt too late the emptiness of earthly honors. Half pagan, the powerful intellect of the man gave way to the sullen superstitions of the murderer. Egypt was still the mystic tyrant of Palestine, and Herod, in his despair, sank into the slave of a credulity at once weak and terrible.