great cone was cut squarely off, and the levelled summit was capped by a
palace of marble, with round towers at the corners and flaring beacons
along the walls; and the glow of an immense fire, hidden in the central
court-yard, painted a false dawn in the eastern sky. All down the
clean-cut mountain slopes, on terraces and blind arcades, the lights
flashed from lesser pavilions and pleasure-houses.

It was the secret orchard of Herod and his friends, their
trysting-place with the spirits of mirth and madness. They called it the
Mountain of the Little Paradise. Rich gardens were there; and the cool
water from the Pools of Solomon plashed in the fountains; and trees of
the knowledge of good and evil fruited blood-red and ivory-white above
them; and smooth, curving, glistening shapes, whispering softly of
pleasure, lay among the flowers and glided behind the trees. All this
was now hidden in the dark. Only the strange bulk of the mountain, a
sharp black pyramid girdled and crowned with fire, loomed across the
night-a mountain once seen never to be forgotten.

The sad shepherd remembered it well. He looked at it with the eyes of a
child who has been in hell. It burned him from afar. Turning neither to
the right nor to the left, he walked without a path straight out upon
the plain of Bethlehem, still whitened in the hollows and on the
sheltered side of its rounded hillocks by the veil of snow.

He faced a wide and empty world. To the west in sleeping Bethlehem, to
the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away
from him. Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the
blue-black of the sky. They diminished and receded till they were like
pin-holes in the vault above him. The moon in mid-heaven shrank into a
bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote. The