Page:Ben-Hur a tale of the Christ.djvu/185

Rh &quot;To the citadel,&quot; he said; a direction which implied an official military connection.

Two great streets, cutting each other at right angles, divided the city into quarters. A curious and immense structure, called the Nymphæum, arose at the foot of the one running north and south. When the porters turned south there, the newcomer, though fresh from Rome, was amazed at the magnificence of the avenue. On the right and left there were palaces, and between them extended in definitely double colonnades of marble, leaving separate ways for footmen, beasts, and chariots; the whole under shade, and cooled by fountains of incessant flow.

Ben-Hur was not in mood to enjoy the spectacle. The story of Simonides haunted him. Arrived at the Omphalus—a monument of four arches wide as the streets, superbly illustrated, and erected to himself by Epiphanes, the eighth of the Seleucidæ—he suddenly changed his mind. &quot;I will not go to the citadel tonight,&quot; he said to the porters. &quot;Take me to the khan nearest the bridge on the road to Seleucia.&quot; The party faced about, and in good time he was deposited in a public house of primitive but ample construction, within stone’s-throw of the bridge under which old Simonides had his quarters, he lay upon the house-top through the night. In his inner mind lived the thought, &quot;Now—now I will hear of home—and mother—and the dear little Tirzah. If they are on earth, I will find them.&quot;

day early, to the neglect of the city, Ben-Hur sought the house of Simonides. Through an embattled gateway he passed to a continuity of wharves; thence up the river midst a busy press, to the Seleucian Bridge, under which he paused to take in the scene.

There, directly under the bridge, was the merchant’s house, a mass of gray stone, unhewn, referable to no style, looking, as the voyager had described it, like a buttress of the wall against which it leaned. Two immense doors in