Out of the Valley of Gardens, where a film of new-fallen snow lay
smooth as feathers on the breast of a dove, the ancient Pools of
Solomon looked up into the night sky with dark, tranquil eyes,
wide-open and passive, reflecting the crisp stars and the small, round
moon. The full springs, overflowing on the hillside, melted their way
through the field of white in winding channels, and along their course
the grass was green even in the dead of winter.
But the sad shepherd walked far above the friendly valley, in a region
where ridges of gray rock welted and scarred the back of the earth,
like wounds of half-forgotten strife and battles long ago. The
solitude was forbidding and disquieting; the keen air that searched
the wanderer had no pity in it; and the myriad glances of the night
were curiously cold.
His flock straggled after him. The sheep, weather beaten and dejected,
followed the path with low heads nodding from side to side, as if they
had travelled far and found little pasture. The black, lop-eared goats
leaped upon the rocks, restless and ravenous, tearing down the tender
branches and leaves of the dwarf oaks and wild olives. They reared up
against the twisted trunks and crawled and scrambled among the boughs.
It was like a company of gray downcast friends and a troop of merry
little black devils following the sad shepherd afar off.
He walked looking on the ground, paying small heed to them. Now and
again, when the sound of pattering feet and panting breath and the
rustling and rending among the copses fell too far behind, he drew out
his shepherd's pipe and blew a strain of music, shrill and plaintive,
quavering and lamenting through the hollow night. He waited while the
troops of gray and black scuffled and bounded and trotted near to him.
Then he dropped the pipe into its place again and strode forward,
looking on the ground.
The fitful, shivery wind that rasped the hill-top, fluttered the rags
of his long mantle of Tyrian blue, torn by thorns and stained by
travel. The rich tunic of striped silk beneath it was worn thin, and
the girdle about his loins had lost all its ornaments of silver and
jewels. His curling hair hung down dishevelled under a turban of fine
linen, in which the gilt threads were frayed and tarnished; and his
shoes of soft leather were broken by the road. On his brown fingers
the places of the vanished rings were still marked in white skin. He
carried not the long staff nor the heavy nail-studded rod of the
shepherd, but a slender stick of carved cedar battered and scratched
by hard usage, and the handle, which must once have been of precious
metal, was missing.
He was a strange figure for that lonely place and that humble
occupation--a branch of faded beauty from some royal garden tossed by
rude winds into the wilderness--a pleasure craft adrift, buffeted and
broken, on rough seas.
But he seemed to have passed beyond caring. His young face was as
frayed and threadbare as his garments. The splendour of the moonlight
flooding the wild world meant as little to him as the hardness of the
rugged track which he followed. He wrapped his tattered mantle closer
around him, and strode ahead, looking on the ground.
As the path dropped from the summit of the ridge toward the Valley of
Mills and passed among huge broken rocks, three men sprang at him from
the shadows. He lifted his stick, but let it fall again, and a strange
ghost of a smile twisted his face as they gripped him and threw him
down.
"You are rough beggars," he said. "Say what you want, you are welcome
to it."
"Your money, dog of a courtier," they muttered fiercely; "give us your
golden collar, Herod's hound, quick, or you die!"
"The quicker the better," he answered, closing his eyes.
The bewildered flock of sheep and goats, gathered in a silent ring,
stood at gaze while the robbers fumbled over their master.
"This is a stray dog," said one, "he has lost his collar, there is not
even the price of a mouthful of wine on him. Shall we kill him and
leave him for the vultures?"
"What have the vultures done for us," said another, "that we should
feed them? Let us take his cloak and drive off his flock, and leave
him to die in his own time."
With a kick and a curse they left him. He opened his eyes and lay
quiet for a moment, with his twisted smile, watching the stars.
"You creep like snails," he said. "I thought you had marked my time
to-night. But not even that is given to me for nothing. I must pay for
all, it seems."
Far away, slowly scattering and receding, he heard the rustling and
bleating of his frightened flock as the robbers, running and shouting,
tried to drive them over the hills. Then he stood up and took the
shepherd's pipe from the breast of his tunic. He blew again that
plaintive, piercing air, sounding it out over the ridges and distant
thickets. It seemed to have neither beginning nor end; a melancholy,
pleading tune that searched forever after something lost.
While he played, the sheep and the goats, slipping away from their
captors by roundabout ways, hiding behind the laurel bushes, following
the dark gullies, leaping down the broken cliffs, came circling back
to him, one after another; and as they came, he interrupted his
playing, now and then, to call them by name.
When they were nearly all assembled, he went down swiftly toward the
lower valley, and they followed him, panting. At the last crook of the
path on the steep hillside a straggler came after him along the cliff.
He looked up and saw it outlined against the sky. Then he saw it leap,
and slip, and fall beyond the path into a deep cleft.
"Little fool," he said, "fortune is kind to you! You have escaped from
the big trap of life. What? You are crying for help? You are still in
the trap? Then I must go down to you, little fool, for I am a fool
too. But why I must do it, I know no more than you know."
He lowered himself quickly and perilously into the cleft, and found
the creature with its leg broken and bleeding. It was not a sheep but
a young goat. He had no cloak to wrap it in, but he took off his
turban and unrolled it, and bound it around the trembling animal. Then
he climbed back to the path and strode on at the head of his flock,
carrying the little black kid in his arms.
There were houses in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them
lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women
were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of
drowsy bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the
flock, they wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house
where there was no mill but many lights, came to the door and looked
out laughing, her face and bosom bare.
But the sad shepherd did not stay. His long shadow and the confused
mass of lesser shadows behind him drifted down the white moonlight,
past the yellow bars of lamplight that gleamed from the doorways. It
seemed as if he were bound to go somewhere and would not delay.
Yet with all his haste to be gone, it was plain that he thought little
of where he was going. For when he came to the foot of the valley,
where the paths divided, he stood between them staring vacantly,
without a desire to turn him this way or that. The imperative of
choice halted him like a barrier. The balance of his mind hung even
because both scales were empty. He could act, he could go, for his
strength was untouched; but he could not choose, for his will was
broken within him.
The path to the left went up toward the little town of Bethlehem, with
huddled roofs and walls in silhouette along the double-crested hill.
It was dark and forbidding as a closed fortress. The sad shepherd
looked at it with indifferent eyes; there was nothing there to draw
him.
The path to the right wound through rock-strewn valleys toward the
Dead Sea. But rising out of that crumpled wilderness, a mile or two
away, the smooth white ribbon of a chariot-road lay upon the flank of
a cone-shaped mountain and curled in loops toward its peak. There the
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
ragged, inhospitable ridges of Tekoa lay stretched in mortal slumber
along the horizon, and between them he caught a glimpse of the sunken
Lake of Death, darkly gleaming in its deep bed. There was no movement,
no sound, on the plain where he walked, except the soft-padding feet
of his dumb, obsequious flock.
He felt an endless isolation strike cold to his heart, against which
he held the limp body of the wounded kid, wondering the while, with a
half-contempt for his own foolishness, why he took such trouble to
save a tiny scrap of the worthless tissue which is called life.
Even when a man does not know or care where he is going, if he steps
onward he will get there. In an hour or more of walking over the plain
the sad shepherd came to a sheep-fold of grey stones with a rude tower
beside it. The fold was full of sheep, and at the foot of the tower a
little fire of thorns was burning, around which four shepherds were
crouching, wrapped in their thick woollen cloaks.
As the stranger approached they looked up, and one of them rose
quickly to his feet, grasping his knotted club. But when they saw the
flock that followed the sad shepherd, they stared at each other and
said: "It is one of us, a keeper of sheep. But how comes he here in
this raiment? It is what men wear in kings' houses."
"No," said the one who was standing, "it is what they wear when they
have been thrown out of them. Look at the rags. He may be a thief and
a robber with his stolen flock."
"Salute him when he comes near," said the oldest shepherd. "Are we not
four to one? We have nothing to fear from a ragged traveller. Speak
him fair. It is the will of God--and it costs nothing."
"Peace be with you, brother," cried the youngest shepherd; "may your
mother and father be blessed."
"May your heart be enlarged," the stranger answered, "and may all your
families be more blessed than mine, for I have none."
"A homeless man," said the old shepherd, "has either been robbed by
his fellows, or punished by God."
"I do not know which it was," answered the stranger; "the end is the
same, as you see."
"By your speech you come from Galilee. Where are you going? What are
you seeking here?"
"I was going nowhere, my masters; but it was cold on the way there,
and my feet turned to your fire."
"Come then, if you are a peaceable man, and warm your feet with us.
Heat is a good gift; divide it and it is not less. But you shall have
bread and salt too, if you will."
"May your hospitality enrich you. I am your unworthy guest. But my
flock?"
"Let your flock shelter by the south wall of the fold: there is good
picking there and no wind. Come you and sit with us."
So they all sat down by the fire; and the sad shepherd ate of their
bread, but sparingly, like a man to whom hunger brings a need but no
joy in the satisfying of it; and the others were silent for a proper
time, out of courtesy. Then the oldest shepherd spoke:
"My name is Zadok the son of Eliezer, of Bethlehem. I am the chief
shepherd of the flocks of the Temple, which are before you in the
fold. These are my sister's sons, Jotham, and Shama, and Nathan: their
father Elkanah is dead; and but for these I am a childless man."
"My name," replied the stranger, "is Ammiel the son of Jochanan, of
the city of Bethsaida, by the Sea of Galilee, and I am a fatherless
man."
"It is better to be childless than fatherless," said Zadok, "yet it is
the will of God that children should bury their fathers. When did the
blessed Jochanan die?"
"I know not whether he be dead or alive. It is three years since I
looked upon his face or had word of him."
"You are an exile, then? he has cast you off?"
"It was the other way," said Ammiel, looking on the ground.
At this the shepherd Shama, who had listened with doubt in his face,
started up in anger. "Pig of a Galilean," he cried, "despiser of
parents! breaker of the law! When I saw you coming I knew you for
something vile. Why do you darken the night for us with your presence?
You have reviled him who begot you. Away, or we stone you!"
Ammiel did not answer or move. The twisted smile passed over his face
again as he waited to know the shepherds' will with him, even as he
had waited for the robbers. But Zadok lifted his hand.
"Not so hasty, Shama-ben-Elkanah. You also break the law by judging a
man unheard. The rabbis have told us that there is a tradition of the
elders--a rule as holy as the law itself--that a man may deny his
father in a certain way without sin. It is a strange rule, and it must
be very holy or it would not be so strange. But this is the teaching
of the elders: a son may say of anything for which his father asks
him--a sheep, or a measure of corn, or a field, or a purse of
silver--'it is Corban, a gift that I have vowed unto the Lord'; and so
his father shall have no more claim upon him. Have you said 'Corban'
to your father, Ammiel-ben-Jochanan? Have you made a vow unto the
Lord?"
"I have said 'Corban,'" answered Ammiel, lifting his face, still
shadowed by that strange smile, "but it was not the Lord who heard my
vow."
"Tell us what you have done," said the old man sternly, "for we will
neither judge you, nor shelter you, unless we hear your story."
"There is nothing in it," replied Ammiel indifferently. "It is an old
story. But if you are curious you shall hear it. Afterward you shall
deal with me as you will."
So the shepherds, wrapped in their warm cloaks, sat listening with
grave faces and watchful, unsearchable eyes, while Ammiel in his
tattered silk sat by the sinking fire of thorns and told his tale with
a voice that had no room for hope or fear--a cool, dead voice that
spoke only of things ended.