"
"Who is to try me?" Miriam asked.
"The Sanhedrim, or as much as is left of it," he answered. "Stir now, we
have no time for talking."
So Miriam rose and accompanied them across the corner of the vast court,
in the centre of which the Temple rose in all its glittering majesty.
As she walked she noticed that the pavement was dotted with corpses, and
that from the cloisters without went up flames and smoke. They seemed to
be fighting there, for the air was full of the sound of shouting,
above which echoed the dull, continuous thud of battering rams striking
against the massive walls.
They took her into a great chamber supported by pillars of white
marble, where many starving folk, some of them women who carried or led
hollow-cheeked children, sat silent on the floor, or wandered to and
fro, their eyes fixed upon the ground as though in aimless search
for they knew not what. On a dais at the end of the chamber twelve or
fourteen men sat in carved chairs; other chairs stretched to the right
and left of them, but these were empty. The men were clad in magnificent
robes, which seemed to hang ill upon their gaunt forms, and, like those
of the people in the hall, their eyes looked scared and their faces were
white and shrunken.
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