IX

Nathan the Prophet did not fail to enlarge upon the miraculous

prediction of his Master, and through all the lands of the Exile a

tremor ran.

It reached that hospitable table in Cairo where each noon half a

hundred learned Cabalists dined at the palace of the Saraph-Bashi, the

Jewish Master of the Mint, himself given to penances and visions, and

swathed in sackcloth below the purple robes with which he drove abroad

in his chariot of state.

"He who is sent thee," wrote Nathan to Raphael Joseph Chelebi, this

pious and open-handed Prince in Israel, "is the first man in the

world--I may say no more. Honor him, then, and thou shalt have thy

reward in his lifetime, wherein thou wilt witness miracles beyond

belief. Whatever thou shouldst see, be not astonied. It is a divine

mystery. When the time shall come I will give up all to serve him.

Would it were granted me to follow him now!"

Chelebi was prepared to follow Sabbataï forthwith; he went to meet

Sabbataï's vessel, and escorted him to his palace with great honor.

But Sabbataï would not lodge therein.

"The time is not yet," he said, and sought shelter with a humble

vendor of holy books, whose stall stood among the money-changers'

booths, that led to the chief synagogue, and his followers distributed

themselves among the quaint high houses of the Jewry, and walked

prophetic in its winding alleys, amid the fantastic chaos of buyers

and sellers and donkeys, under the radiant blue strip of Egyptian sky.

Only at mid-day did they repair to the table of the Saraph-Bashi.

"Hadst any perils at sea?" asked the host on the first day. "Men say

the Barbary Corsairs are astir again."

Sabbataï remained silent, but Samuel Primo, his secretary, took up the

reply.

"Perils!" quoth he. "My Master will not speak of them, but the Captain

will tell thee a tale. We never thought to pass Rhodes!"

"Ay," chimed in Abraham Rubio, "we were pursued all night by two

pirates, one on either side of us like beggars."

"And the Captain," said Isaac Silvera, "despairing of escape, planned

to take to the boats with his crew, leaving the passengers to their

fate."

"But he did not?" quoth a breathless Cabalist.

"Alas, no," said Abraham Rubio, with a comical grimace. "Would he had

done so! For then we should have owned a goodly vessel, and the Master

would have saved us all the same."

"But righteousness must needs be rewarded," protested Samuel Primo.

"And inasmuch as the Captain wished to save the Master in the boats--"

"The Master was reading," put in Solomon Lagnado. "The Captain cries

out, 'The Corsairs are upon us!' 'Where?' says the Master. 'There!'

says the Captain. The Master stretches out his hands, one towards

each vessel, and raises his eyes to heaven, and in a moment the ships

tack and sail away on the high sea."

Sabbataï sat eating his meagre meal in silence.

But when the rumor of his miracle spread, the sick and the crippled

hastened to him, and, protesting he could do naught, he laid his hands

on them, and many declared themselves healed. Also he touched the lids

of the sore-eyed and they said his fingers were as ointment. But

Sabbataï said nothing, made no pretensions, walking ever the path of

piety with meek and humble tread. Howbeit he could not linger in

Egypt. The Millennial Year was drawing nigh--the mystic 1666.

Sabbataï Zevi girded up his loins, and, regardless of the rumors of

Arab robbers, nay, wearing his phylacteries on his forehead as though

to mark himself out as a Jew, and therefore rich, joined a caravan for

Jerusalem, by way of Damascus.

X

O the ecstasy with which he prostrated himself to kiss for the first

time the soil of the sacred city! Tears rolled from his eyes, half of

rapture, half of passionate sorrow for the lost glories of Zion, given

over to the Moslem, its gates guarded by Turkish sentries, and even

the beauty of his first view of it--domes, towers, and bastions bathed

in morning sunlight--fading away in the squalor of its steep alleys.

Nathan the Prophet had apprised the Jews of the coming of their King,

and the believers welcomed him with every mark of homage, even

substituting Sabbataï Zevi for Sultan Mehemet in the Sabbath prayer

for the Sovereign, and at the Wailing Place the despairing sobs of the

Sons of the Law were tempered by a great hope.

Poor, squeezed to famishing point by the Turkish officials, deprived

of their wonted subsidies from the pious Jews of Poland, who were

decimated by Cossack massacres, they had had their long expectation of

the Messiah intensified by the report which Baruch Gad had brought

back to them from Persia--how the Sons of Moses, living beyond the

river Sambatyon (that ceased to run on the Sabbath), were but

awaiting, amid daily miracles, the word of the Messiah to march back

to Jerusalem. The lost Ten Tribes would reassemble: at the blast of

the celestial horn the dispersed of Israel would be gathered together

from the four corners of the Earth. But Sabbataï deprecated the

homage; of Redemption he spake no word.

And verily his coming seemed to bode destruction rather than

salvation. For a greedy Pacha, getting wind of the disloyalty of the

synagogue to the Sultan, made it a pretext for an impossible fine.

The wretched community was dashed back to despair. Already reduced to

starvation, whence were they to raise this mighty sum? But,

recovering, all hearts turned at once to the strange sorrowful figure

that went humbly to and fro among them.

"Money?" said he. "Whence should I take so much money?"

"But thou art Messiah?"

"I Messiah?" He looked at them wistfully.

"Forgive us--we know the hour of thy revelation hath not yet struck.

But wilt thou not save us by thy human might?"

"How so?"

"Go for us, we pray thee, on a mission to the friendly Saraph-Bashi of

Cairo. His wealth alone can ransom us."

"All that man can do I will do," said Sabbataï.

"May thy strength increase!" came the grateful ejaculation, and

white-bearded sages stooped to kiss the hem of his garment.

So Sabbataï journeyed back to Cairo by caravan through the desert,

preceded, men said, by a pillar of fire, and accompanied when he

travelled at night by myriads of armed men that disappeared in the

morning, and wheresoever he passed all the Jewish inhabitants flocked

to gaze upon him. In Hebron they kept watch all night around his

house.

From his casement Sabbataï looked up at the silent stars and down at

the swaying sea of faces.

"What if the miracle be not wrought!" he murmured. "If Chelebi refuses

to sacrifice so much of his substance! But they believe on me. It must

be that Jerusalem will be saved, and that I am the Messiah indeed."

At Cairo the pious Master of the Mint received him with ecstasy, and

granted his request ere he had made an end of speaking.

That night Sabbataï wandered away from all his followers, beyond the

moonlit Nile, towards the Great Pyramid, on, on, unto the white

desert, his eyes seeing only inward visions.

"Yea, I am Messiah," he cried at length to the vast night, "I am G--!"

The sudden shelving of the sand made him stumble, and in that instant

he became aware of the Sphinx towering over him, its great granite

Face solemn in the moonlight. His voice died away in an awed whisper.

Long, long he gazed into the great stone eyes.

"Speak!" he whispered. "Thou, _Abou-el-Hol_, Father of Terror, thou

who broodedst over the silences ere Moses ben Amram led my people from

this land of bondage, shall I not lead them from their dispersal to

their ancient unity in the day when God shall be One, and His Name

One?"

The Sphinx was silent. The white sea of sand stretched away endlessly

with noiseless billows. The Pyramids threw funereal shadows over the

arid waste.

"Yea," he cried, passionately. "My Father hath not deceived me.

Through me, through me flow the streams of grace to recreate and

rekindle. Hath He not revealed it to me, even ere this day of

Salvation for Jerusalem, by the date of my birth, by the ancient

parchment, by the homage of Nathan, by the faith of my brethren and

the rumor of the nations, by my sufferings, by my self-appointed

martyrdoms, by my long, weary years of forced wanderings to and fro

upon the earth, by my loneliness--ah, God--my loneliness!"

The Sphinx brooded solemnly under the brooding stars. Sabbataï's voice

was as the wail of a wind.

"Yea, I will save Israel, I will save the world. Through my holiness

the world shall be a Temple. Sin and evil and pain shall pass. Peace

shall sit under her fig-tree, and swords shall be turned into

pruning-hooks, and gladness and brotherhood shall run through all the

earth, even as my Father declared unto Israel by the mouth of his

prophet Hosea. Yea, I, even I, will allure her and bring her into the

desert, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her vineyards

from thence, and the Valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she shall

sing there as in the days of her youth and as in the days when she

came up out of the land of Egypt. And I will say to them which were

not my people, 'Thou art my people'; and they shall say, 'Thou art my

God.'"

The Sphinx was silent. And in that silence there was the voice of dead

generations that had bustled and dreamed and passed away, countless as

the grains of desert sand.

Sabbataï ceased and surveyed the Face in answering silence, his own

face growing as inscrutable.

"We are strong and lonely--thou and I," he whispered at last. But the

Sphinx was silent.

(_Here endeth the First Scroll._)