CHAPTER V.
BY THE WAYSIDE By sunset, the Maccabee and Julian of Ephesus had taken the road to Jerusalem again.
As they reached the crest of a series of ridges there lay before them a long gentle slope smooth and dun-colored as some soft pelt, dropping down into a tender vale with levels of purple vapor hanging over it.
At the end of this declivity, leagues in length, was a faint blue shape, cloudlike and almost merged with the cold color of the eastern horizon, but suddenly developing at its summit a delicate white peak.
The sunset reaching it as they rode changed the point to a pinnacle of ruby before their eyes.

Their shadows that had ridden before them merged with the shade over the world.

Then with a soft, whispery, ghost-like intaking of the breath, a quantity of sand on the straight road before them got up under their horses' feet and moved away to another spot and dropped again with a peppering sound and was dead moveless earth again.

The little breath of wind from under the edge of the sky had fallen.
In the silence between the muffled beat of hooves the Maccabee heard at his ears the quick lively throb of a busy pump.

With it went the firm rush of a subdued stream.