William Vollmann - The Atlas

25 And the Elders said: We must go to the temple to pray.

7Now Eleazar mustered all the people together, to see how many had survived. 2And he counted nine hundred and sixty souls at Masada, but many were wounded and defiled with blood. 3And some were fearful and others remained as steadfast as stone; and they all prostrated themselves through the Dry Hours of that last evening. 4And they became very faint. 5And they abased themselves in the inner chamber, and the Rabbis led them in entreaties for God's mercy upon themselves and their inheritance. 6Their hearts were as deep and dank as the Western Wall's great cistern, whose stairs went interminably down into a slit of darkness; and in the slit one saw other stairs descending into an immense bubble of golden dirt bearing black and white stain-continents. 7The pigeons which nested in the ceiling cooed, and their echoings seemed demonic and far away. 8In their prison of fear the people were shut away from the stars. 9Their sorrow scorched them with darkness, and their prayers were appalled. 10Then at last Eleazar stood up, and put his hand upon the shoulder of the Chief Rabbi. 11And most wearily he spoke to the people the words of Judith the daughter of Merari the son of Ox: Do not try to bind the purposes of the Lord our God, for God is not like man, to be threatened, nor like a human being, to be won over by pleading.

12 Then the people were silent, but the Elders said: What would you have us do?

13 And Eleazar prayed to the Lord. 14Then he rose and said: We must kill ourselves, so that the Romans cannot work their will upon us. 15And we must do it quickly, for at dawn they come.

16 The Elders had grown accustomed to walk in his ways, and so they said: You speak from a true heart.

17 But the people cried out then, because they saw the approach

of their deaths.* 18Yet the other way, of awaiting the Roman legions in their terrifying armor, that they likewise dared not take. 19So they bowed down and were pale. 20But at last they said: Behold, we are your flesh, and the bones of your flesh. 21We do as you will.

8 Then said Eleazar: I am glad. 2The Lord called my death from the womb; behold, it is born; it is here. 3He pulled your deaths from His quiver, my brothers and sisters; behold, they come speeding hither. 4We are rebels to the Romans, but we cannot rebel against the grave. 5We shall not be confounded; and this night we'll find respite from our sighs.

6 Now they kindled tall flames to burn their houses and treasures, and the women made their hearts as pale blue as the Dead Sea. 7But the children said: Mother, why do you throw my pretty things in the fire? 8Father, why do you set our house alight? 9But their parents would not answer. 10Thus they destroyed the toil of their hands, and all that had been handed down to them, in order to baffle the Romans' greed. 11But their stores of food, oil and wine they piled in the middle of the square, so that the Romans would see that their siege had failed to starve them. 12Then they went into the night to slay themselves.

13 Weeping, the men of Masada embraced their wives and children, stabbing them one by one; and thus they made of their dear ones offerings to the Lord. 14Then these self-made widowers formed themselves in squads often, as was their wont when they went down to fight with the Romans. 15And they cast lots, thereby choosing one man out of each ten to slay the others. 16Thus they died, all on the same night together. 17And at last there was but one man left upon Masada the Hill of Gold. 18And he passed through the smoking houses, and he searched the rooms of the ruined palace to make certain that all were dead. 19Then he set the palace on fire and leaped onto his sword. 20And when the Romans breached the charred walls at dawn and came upon the Jews, and when they saw that they were dead by their own hand, all expressed admiration for their defiance, even their governor, Flavius Silva.

9 But it must be told that two women and five children were still alive. .

[The Hebrew text breaks off here.]

* Some modem commentators have suggested that they specifically feared the intentions of Eleazar, who was known to have killed so many persons, Romans and Jews alike, including even Menachem ben Judah, the hero who'd slaughtered the Roman garrison at Masada seven years past, at the very beginning of the Rebellion. The tale goes that shortly before Jerusalem fell, Menachem ben Judah found Eleazar's father, Ananias the High Priest, in a state of terror at the impending Roman victory, for which he killed him — an act which Eleazar avenged.

And all this I entombed in my heart, burying it deep in my heart's four chambers. And the chambers of my heart are called Courage, Fortitude, Righteousness and Sacrifice . But although I have applied my mind to have these things, although they are engraved in the doorways of my heart, I do not possess them. In defiance of God I seek most vainly to prolong my life. And when righteousness calls me to ascend the Serpentine Path, my fear whispers that I shall never come down living from the Hill of Gold. And when courage bids me rise up against tyrants, my fear speaks in a soft low voice, bidding me bow down to wickedness, that I might accept the bribe of my life. And when fortitude commands me to offer my throat to the blade of pain, my fear shows me the way of hiding, there in the manmade wells and bubbles in the rock of the tanner's shop. And when sacrifice summons me away from the sweetness of the light, then my fear pains me like the stinging salts of the Dead Sea.

I am a woman with child, and I do not want to die.

God listened, and said to her: Go, and eat the bread of your life, my sad young maid. Lift up your heart, and await the coming of the enemy. They will be easy with you, on account of the others who have died. They will weep tears of pity, and your slavery will be light.

And I myself, neither man nor woman, but only scribe long dead, my flesh long turned to crackly old leaves, imagine how if this woman could have chosen her own Hill of Gold there would have been no Eleazar whom she feared (although the Hebrew sources report that she was his kinswoman), no Serpentine Path, just an empty white walk studded with light, and trees at regular intervals, then a road roofed with branches, a giant palm, then lights set into the steep coast of night, the sound of a girl singing eerily to herself, silence, and then people calling far away, a barking dog, the smell of the cold sea. The girl sang again, two notes; perhaps she was only calling to the other woman, who it is written was old, or to one of the five children who hid and feared. Her echo rose into the black heavens.

Let the Hill of Gold become some sunny rock of trees and white houses.

Two girls (let them both be that; nobody likes to be old), one in a sweater, one in a jacket, arms linked at the elbow, promenaded back and forth along the terraced way until a school of other shouting girls swept them up. They all ran down to the sea, where the cacti had legs like crossbreeds of spiders and artichokes. There was a shimmering wall of pines between cliff-stairs and the sea. They had never seen death and wanted to go dancing. That night their lovers would come on the ferry. They'd go with them hand in hand between tree-swellings and turquoise water and white cliffs to the tree-haired Arco Naturel, which has several shining sea-holes where some of them would make love; others would descend as far as the Grotta Matrimonia, that gigantic hollow in the earth like a drained boil; and as the boys they'd chosen gripped their breasts, they'd lie looking upward at the chalky ceiling studded with pale stones like jewels of baseness; perhaps for a moment they'd feel uneasy, almost remembering the cisterns of Masada where they'd hid while above them the ones they loved died praying and bleeding; they'd gasp in the boys' arms, then afterwards grow shy and run ahead up the trail into a steep thicket from which the narrow white crags burst up. All the girls met here every morning to dream of boys together amidst the leafy reaches of golden buds and lilies. The boys came running after them, pounding up the old Roman road. A gull rose and fell in the shade of the steep bay. The boys were searching, but they couldn't find them; the girls knew this secret place so well. They watched the boys coming from far down the treepacked cliff where grottos spat out ocean from their crusted lips; and they giggled. It was almost dawn. They almost didn't want the boys to find them. It was their last night together. Tomorrow morning they would leave this thicket of rosemary, emerging from their wall of white boulders bulging with cacti in whose crotches were birds' nests and balls of pine needles; and they would go down to the sea to get married. After that they would never meet again. Some would go with their husbands to live in Rome. Others would set up house in Napoli or Firenze or even far Catania. They'd never again gaze together at those rocks like icebergs in the dark sea, those ocean-stones whirl-kissed by eddies and fan-shaped waves. That is why, succumbing to the promptings of history, I now introduce to these pages the apostate Josephus Flavius, who was not a Zealot, and held out in a cave with many other men when the Romans came. The Jews in that cave had proposed to stab themselves, but Josephus convinced them it would be less of a sin if they killed each other. Better yet, he contrived to be at the end of the line. Ah, Josephus, how I love you, for you loved life! You were good to yourself; you despised that monstrosity called High Principle. When all but he and one other man were dead, he persuaded his companion to surrender at his side. What happened to Josephus's friend I don't know, but Josephus (who wrote our best extant account of the Jewish War, always glorifying himself and the Romans) was dragged before Vespasian in heavy chains. Because he prophesied with a sycophant's urgency that Vespasian would soon be Emperor, he kept his life and in due time even became rich and free. His first two wives had abandoned him. He married a nice girl in Rome and later left her for a Cretan belle… So I wonder: Would the two young women who hid from their fate have played the same game that Josephus did (excluding from their hearts, of course, his own reptilian selfishness)? I can almost hear them laughingly urging their sisters down the hill, gently coaxing and swaying them ahead, until they were the only two left; and then they slipped away to be virgins together forever. — No, I don't think so. — Now the heads of the boys rose above the heads of pine trees, gazing down from the crags. From the shade of a white crag, boys came running, bearing their sweethearts a glorious hellfire of blue flowers. They pulled their true loves away from the other girls, took them swimming in green water with reddish stones underneath, white gulls overhead like whitecaps. The girls whispered: I love you so. . — Why did they weep when they said it? Did they truly long to flee the empty sea-horizon, running back up the tree-frizzed slopes their bare feet knew so well, meeting other girls above the white cliffs? Now it was dawn, the low white wall of windows and arches at the water's edge cliffs not white yet, but purplish-gray, the other ferries white, whitest of all the hydrofoil's wake. The boys took them by the hand. The girls kissed their mothers and fathers goodbye forever. Their husbands had already bought them ferry tickets. And the island quickly became a lump of rocky cloud in the sky, stretching its coast off long and low until it fell off the edge of the world.