Julian dismounted, shaking his head.
"What a savage appetite this travel in the untaught wilds of Judea hath bred in you, my cousin! You, whom once a crust of bread and a cup of wine would satisfy!" But the Maccabee climbed out of the roadway and, finding a sheltered spot behind a boulder, kicked together some of the dead weeds and twigs and set fire to the heap with flint and steel.

Then he lost interest in the preparation of his comforts.

He turned to look up at the faint column of illumination in the little copse of cedars and presently, stealthily, went that way.
It was a poor encampment that he came upon.
From the low-growing limbs of a couple of gnarly cedars, old Momus had stretched the sheepskins which Joseph, the shepherd, had given them.
Three sides of the shelter were protected thus, and the fourth side opened down-hill, with a low fire screening them from the mountain wind.

Within this inclosure, wrapped in the coarse mantle of her servant, sat Laodice.

She had raised her veil and its misty texture flowed like a web of frost over her brilliant hair and framed her face in cold vapor.