The old captain's impatience turned to surprise, his surprise became wrath.
The messengers he sent down did not return and the great moving shed of the Romans was brought nearer and nearer to the southern side of the temple, screening the miners from the rare missiles which the few men remaining with him cast clown by his orders.
The enemy were evidently making a suitable foundation on which to place the storming engine--a beam with a ram's head of iron-to make a breach in the temple-wall.

Every minute's delay on the part of the besieged was an advantage to the enemy.

A hundred-two hundred more hands on the roof, and their tactics might yet be defeated.
Tears of rage, of the bitter sense of impotence, started to the old soldier's eyes; and when, at length, one of his messengers came back and told him that the men and women alike seemed quite demented, and all and each refused to come up on the roof, he uttered a wrathful curse and rushed down-stairs himself.
He stormed in on the trembling wretches; and when he beheld with his own eyes all that his volunteers had done dining that fateful night, he raved and thundered; asked them, rather confusedly perhaps, if they knew what it was to be expected to command and find no obedience; scolded the refractory, driving some on in front of him; and then, as he perceived that some of them were making off with the girls through the door leading to the secret passage, he placed himself on guard with his sword drawn, and threatened to cut down any who attempted to escape.
In the midst of all this Olympius and his party had come into the ball and seeing the commander struggling, sword in hand, with the recalcitrant fugitives, where the noise was loudest, he and his guests hastened to the rescue and defended the door against the hundreds who were crowding to fly.

The old man was grieved to turn the weapons they had seized in their sacred ardor, against the seceders from their own cause; but it had to be.

While the loyal party--among them Karnis and Orpheus--guarded the passage to the underground rooms with shield and lance, Olympius took council of the veteran captain, and they rapidly decided to allow all the women to depart at once and to divide the men into two parties-one to be sent to fight on the roof, and the other to defend the wall where the Roman battering-ram was by this time almost ready to attack.
The high-priest took his stand boldly between his adherents and the would-be runaways and appealed to them in loud and emphatic tones to do their duty.