Great Lion of God Read Online Free

disliked effete litters, and though he owned a large car and a smaller chariot he disliked them little less than he did the litters. A man was made for walking. He would not have rejected a humble ass, but this Deborah would not endure, and Hillel was a man of peace. Men might talk of the unbending patriarchs but husbands were not so valorous.
    Hillel looked about in the calm and luminous early evening. His house, in the suburbs of Tarsus, was held in constant quietude, a tranquil hush, even when the slaves and other servants were working busily or laughing or singing—for it was a happy household. Even the discordant cries of peacocks and swans and birds of prey sounded musically here, part of the murmurous background of palms and citrons and karobs and sycamores and fragrant shrubs, and a gentle benignity appeared to pervade during the hot spring storms, and the roaring summer thunder. The house and its extensive and beautiful grounds appeared protected, and this was remarked on by Greek and Roman friends who laughingly vowed that Hillel was under the loving guardianship of woodland deities and fawns and nymphs. Certainly the house was in a hollow section of land, verdant, fed by springs and little rills even during the driest seasons, and in the fertile and luxurious valley of Issus, that fruitful vast area in Cilicia Pedias, which had been joined to Syria and Phoenicia by Julius Caesar.
    The country estate rolled in the softest green waves about the house, crowned by copses of thick dark emerald trees which made cool hollows of refuge during the hottest days, throwing their shadows on dense grass and formal beds of flowers and small red paths or graveled footways. Here fountains, bright amber in sunlight, hissed and gurgled, the illuminated waters pouring from gleeful marble hands or from horns of plenty or even from the mouths of exotic little beasts. (There had been a small statue of a little boy in one of the fountains from which the water arched, but Hillel had decided, in his Pharisee sense of what was obscene, to have it removed, to Deborah’s annoyance.) Hillel, in keeping with the Ten Commandments, would have had the “graven images” removed from the fountains and grounds—images erected by the former Roman owner—but here Deborah tearfully and vehemently prevailed, and became so agitated that Hillel, always the compromiser, yielded. He also compromised by not looking at the graceful statues in grottos and arbors and fountains, and avoiding direct confrontation with their classic and beautiful faces, but sometimes his naturally perceptive and appreciative eye wandered involuntarily. When sternly reproached by his more rigidly religious friends, he would laughingly change the subject. Unlike the gentle men, he could infuse a tone of quiet authority and character into his voice, which silenced even the most choleric or rebellious, and his brown eye would glow with a fixed and steady coldness. Once halted by this, the quarreler would never again contend for his own views or rebuke or criticize his host or master, but forever afterwards would hold Hillel not only in respect but in some fear.
    A great natural pond lay in the very center of the grounds, flashing blue and purple under the sun, and becoming a shield of silver under the moon. Here floated the arrogant black and white swans, and the curious and highly colored ducks from China, seemingly made of angular painted wood, who occasionally disputed lordship with the swans over the water. During the migration periods of red-legged white storks flying to Africa or returning, these fowls would often halt at the pond to devour the fish with which it was sedulously stocked, and the singing frogs, and the clouds of insects. The regal peacocks drank here, and jeered at the swans, and so did the small denizens of the land. Fed by clear springs, and released into tiny brooks and rivulets—which freshened the earth—the pool was always clear and pure, with its rocky