to Jerusalem and was delighted at the opportunity to visit the Holy City before the start of the Persian campaign in the spring. The night before we were scheduled to depart, however, a Roman naval trireme pulled silently into the port outside Antioch and disembarked its sole passenger, Alypius of Antioch, the former governor of Britain whom Julian had assigned to overseeing the rebuilding of the temple. He had left Jerusalem only three days before, paying bribes amounting to half his estate in gold to secure a fast ship that would take him to Antioch before our departure, and practically flogging the captain the entire journey to push the rowers to move faster. As Alypius rushed into the palace, accompanied by two sturdy, barefoot sailors who looked about in wonder and awe, I noticed that his face was ashen and his manner almost panicky. Julian was summoned, and in the moments before he arrived, I quickly poured out a large draught of uncut wine and offered it to the trembling architect to calm him, which he drank down gratefully in a single gulp. He then explained the reason for his hurried journey from Jerusalem.
'Your Highness,' he stammered, until Julian ordered him to stand at ease. 'All was prepared for your arrival and for the reception in a few days — indeed, lengths of sailcloth had even been draped over the new gate, ready for you to give the tug on a string we had rigged, which would send the entire veil billowing to the ground to expose the loveliest temple entrance in the East-'
'What is it, man?' Julian barked impatiently. 'Get on with it!'
'There was a tremor.'
'What?' I said. 'An earthquake? We've heard nothing about one. Was there any damage?'
'Not to the city, no, my lord,' the poor man answered me, afraid to look anyone in the eye.
'What then?' Julian roared in exasperation.
'My lord,' the hapless architect moaned, 'the entire portico collapsed. Twenty workmen who were rigging the veil were buried in the rubble, and the remainder were only able to save themselves from the falling stones by taking refuge in a nearby…' He stopped, as if unable to go on.
Julian stared at him, motionless.
'A nearby what?' he asked, quietly and menacingly.
'A church,' Alypius whispered.
'A church,' Julian repeated, before spinning on his heels and storming out of the anteroom, muttering threateningly under his breath and gesturing with his arms, though there was no one nearby.
'What am I to do now?' the wretched Alypius asked me after a moment, staring around at the priests and guards who surrounded him, and at the malevolent Maximus, who had watched the entire exchange in silence. I had noticed, since my return to service, that Maximus' rash, if that was what you could call it, had spread several inches further and now engulfed most of the left side of his face and disappeared into the collar of his tunic, which he was constantly tugging and adjusting in his discomfort.
'I suggest you return to the trireme and await the Emperor's orders,' I told the man gently. He looked at me as if I had just passed his death sentence, as in fact I very well may have, for he was jailed that next morning and killed later in the week by a fellow prisoner, a madman, apparently, who had become enraged at the unfortunate architect for reasons I never learned.
'It doesn't matter,' Julian told me over breakfast two days later, in a calm after his earlier rage. 'I will order the cleanup and lay the cornerstone of the reconstructed temple myself.'
But the journey to lay the sacred stone was not to be. During the next several weeks, frightful reports filtered up to us from Jerusalem's temple district, which at first he dismissed in contempt, then noted in some disbelief. Finally, after summoning the Roman governor of Jerusalem himself to the palace at Antioch to give account for the strange happenings, he listened to them in utter astonishment. It appears that although at first the project to clear the temple site of the centuries-old accumulation of debris had been pursued with great vigor, not a workman in the entire city, Jewish, pagan, or Christian, could now be persuaded to set foot within a hundred yards of the site, for fear of divine punishment. During the first week after the initial collapse of the portico, as workmen had been in the process of removing the great stones and columns that lay in a chaotic heap, a series of terrible balls of flame had burst forth from the temple's ancient foundations, charring men into blackened skeletons. The fire had then disappeared without trace of an odor or a lingering flame.
The site foreman had at first attributed the phenomenon to some seepage of the black bitumen found in such abundance in the area of the Dead Sea, the ancient name of which, in fact, is the Lake of Asphalt because of the masses of that substance that periodically detach themselves from the bottom and float to the surface. A careless laborer, he concluded, might have ignited a pool of it when heating his supper in the shelter of the rocks, and thereby started the conflagration. He therefore sent a number of workers carefully into the underground vaulted cellars of the temple, some of which were still intact after the old Roman destruction, to investigate the matter further.
The second series of flames lit the evening sky like a lightning strike in a Dacian forest, and indeed many in the city of Jerusalem at first looked up to the heavens in surprise to see if they were about to be caught in the rain. They were even further surprised when the entire city was pelted with a barrage of dust, sand, and small pebbles. If only it had rained true water, it might have sooner ended the suffering of those poor ten or twelve souls among the cellar explorers who were still left alive after the explosion. They had rushed from the underground caverns shrieking and raving, their hair and extremities burned from their bodies. Most of them died hours or days later.
As I wrote earlier in this treatise, I have heard of fire issuing forth from dead bodies, and I myself have witnessed fire bursting from the storage of ice. Never, however, have I encountered fire emanating from cold, dressed stone, and I hope I may never live to see such a phenomenon myself. The rationalists among Julian's court speculated that terrible gases had somehow been released from where they had been building deep within the earth, perhaps from faults that had developed in the ground following the tremor that had first toppled the structure, and that these gases had, in turn, been ignited by the spark of a workman's chisel or the sputtering of an oil lamp. Others spoke more darkly of the wrath of the gods, be they the ancient ones of Greece jealous of Julian's favor to the Jews, or the mysterious bovine deities of Persia, infuriated at Rome's imminent march against the King of Kings. The Christians in the street claimed it as holy retribution against the Emperor for daring to question their Savior's divinity, while Maximus and the haruspices attributed it to still insufficient attention to placating Rome's guardian spirits through additional sacrifices.
I shall leave any final interpretation to you, Brother, for Julian wisely diverted his attention and energies elsewhere.
II
I have aged, Brother, faster even than the days that are passing me by, which tear the years off my life as does an infant the leaves of a book that has been left within its grasp. Over the past five years I fear I have aged ten, and over the next five years it will be twenty, and at this rate I shall soon catch up and pass you, and give even Father a good run for his money. Yet it is not in physical years that I am becoming elderly; by many standards I would still be considered a relatively young man, and indeed though my hair is thinning and growing gray at the temples, still my waist is trim, my bowels strong, my pace rapid, and my ability to turn a maiden's head now and then undiminished, though the desire to even tempt such a distraction is another matter indeed. No, of course it is not by fleshly standards that I am growing old, for all flesh must follow the laws of nature and only the steady passage of the days and nights can contribute to one's physical aging. I am growing old inside, for my spirit is tired, bone tired, if you will forgive the mixing of a spiritual metaphor with a carnal one, and this exhaustion, which does not leave me even now, began to be felt the day I arrived in Antioch and confirmed Julian's designs against the Persians. Despite the jauntiness of the soldiers, the cockiness and profanity of the sailors, the laughter and jests of Julian, and even the occasional excited grin from the pustulant mouth of Maximus, I felt a foreboding, a sadness about the expedition, perhaps as a result of the shallowness of its motives. As we prepared for the march, I felt like an old man with a very long way to travel.
The campaign against the Persians, let it be said, was entirely unnecessary. Even Sallustius had tried to dissuade Julian, to no avail.
'He believes it will resurrect Rome's ancient glory,' the adviser muttered, when I once cautiously asked him
