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You in the sanctuary! Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips will praise You, and thus will I bless You while I live. I will lift up my hands in Your Name!”
    He looked now at the fanged mountain shapes far beyond the valley, the fantastic monuments which acute imagination could distort into the likenesses of monsters, of lurking dragons, of bastions and towers and spires and temples, of pediments and columns standing alone, of twisted arches and carved walls—all hewn of scarlet stone seemingly burning in direful fire against a sky of the most intense incandescent blue. The setting sun thrust them into frightful relief so that they appeared to be marching on the rich valley land in menace and terror, striking the river Cydnus into the semblance of a wide highway of flame. Hillel had seen this a thousand times or more, but it never failed to fill him with a premonition, an amorphous fear, a heavy melancholy of soul.
    Now he heard Deborah chattering with her female Greek and Roman friends, and her voice was vivacious and trilling, the voice of a happy and complacent child. He shook his head a little as if in reproof, but in some way that trivial and lighthearted sound consoled him, and he knew not why he was consoled. He looked below the mountains now and saw Tarsus on the blazing river, a city of broken golden fragments struck with crimson. He had not been born in that city, but had come to it as a child with his parents. Yet he loved it as he did not love Jerusalem, the desecrated, the alien, the lost, the land not only occupied by military conquerors but, worse still, occupied by sons who had destroyed the heart of the holy city out of wantonness and casual cynicism and faithlessness and abandon. When a city was poor it was occupied by faith and industry and hope. When it became rich and affluent evil entered, and the city was lost.
    “How have I mourned thee, Jerusalem,” Hillel murmured and entered his house with his head bent and his sadness on him again.
    “I assured you, Deborah,” a young Roman matron was saying to her hostess in the calm of the brilliant evening, “that the medal from Delphi would cause you to conceive a son.”
    “I wear it next to my heart,” said Deborah bas Shebua. She hesitated. “Still, he could have been of a more comely countenance.”

Chapter 2
    H ILLEL BEN B OBUSH , was entertaining guests at dinner. There was his old severe and Pharisee friend, Rabbi Isaac ben Ezekiel, and his brother-in-law, brother of Deborah, the luxurious gentleman and aristocrat from Jerusalem, David ben Shebua. At the foot of the long golden draped table sat Deborah, the modern woman who would not be confined to the women’s quarters in spite of Rabbi Isaac’s overt disapproval—she thought him a dull somewhat dirty old man—and young Saul’s tutor, the Greek Aristo, and Saul, himself, now five years old. She knew that her presence, the pagan Greek’s presence, and even the presence of the child, were resented, deplored and despised by the old rabbi, and this gave her a sensation of childish malice and amusement. As for Aristo, he was a Greek of discernment, for all he was a freedman, and he appreciated her qualities of mind and her sensibility to Greek poetry, and her knowledge of the arts and sciences.
    The sun was setting, the dreadful and distorted fanged mountains rearing in scarlet beyond the open doors and windows of the dining room, the peacocks were screeching, and the hot air was heavy with the scent of flowers and dust and heated stone. Deborah could hear the newly loud pattering of the fountains, the mutter of stirring trees. She could see the green of lush grass beyond the portico, the dark pointed towers of cypresses and the purple blossoms of the myrtles. She was proud and content. Her house might not be the largest in this suburb, or the most splendid, but it was a work of art and taste. The dining room was spacious and square, of splendid proportions, with a floor of