THE PRISON AT CÆSAREA

It was but two hours after midnight, yet many were wakeful in Cæsarea on
the Syrian coast. Herod Agrippa, King of all Palestine--by grace of
the Romans--now at the very apex of his power, celebrated a festival in
honour of the Emperor Claudius, to which had flocked all the mightiest
in the land and tens of thousands of the people. The city was full of
them, their camps were set upon the sea-beach and for miles around;
there was no room at the inns or in the private houses, where guests
slept upon the roofs, the couches, the floors, and in the gardens. The
great town hummed like a hive of bees disturbed after sunset, and though
the louder sounds of revelling had died away, parties of feasters,
many of them still crowned with fading roses, passed along the
streets shouting and singing to their lodgings. As they went, they
discussed--those of them who were sufficiently sober--the incidents of
that day's games in the great circus, and offered or accepted odds upon
the more exciting events of the morrow.

The captives in the prison that was set upon a little hill, a frowning
building of brown stone, divided into courts and surrounded by a
high wall and a ditch, could hear the workmen at their labours in the
amphitheatre below. These sounds interested them, since many of those
who listened were doomed to take a leading part in the spectacle of this
new day. In the outer court, for instance, were a hundred men called
malefactors, for the most part Jews convicted of various political
offences. These were to fight against twice their number of savage Arabs
of the desert taken in a frontier raid, people whom to-day we should
know as Bedouins, mounted and armed with swords and lances, but wearing
no mail. The malefactor Jews, by way of compensation, were to be