the ashy blue spots forming beneath the eyes above his marble cheeks. His features were waxlike in their whiteness and delicacy except where blood from the wounds upon his forehead had streaked his features over. His lips were closed in the last fine compression of noble resolution which resisted while he lived and persisted while he died. The noble rounding of the head, the graceful touch of his hair upon his shoulders—all proclaimed the finest sculpture character has ever chiselled in the marble of exquisite flesh. That fine strength was gone. The light of the eye had ceased to burn. That luminous glow I had noted on his hair and features had disappeared. The hair upon his brow moved under the impulse of the wind—that was all. Once the breath of life had blown through his body and every nerve and organ had been responsive to its will, but not now! He had passed calmly out of life into the robing room of the universe.
The man—the noblest man mine eyes have ever seen was dead, and after the soldiers had, by my own order, searched his very heart with the spear, we placed him in the tomb, as complete a marring of a noble being as earth had ever seen. Vengeful hatred and cruel weakness had done their worst upon him. Malevolence could have but one step further—having made him dead, it could wish him to remain dead and so it placed a seal upon the tomb. The seal of Cæsar upon the tomb of death.
Good fortune be thine. Vale.
Written from the Antonian Tower, Jerusalem, in the eighteenth year of Tiberius Cæsar and the eighth year of Pontius Pilate, Governor of Syria.
