“Why does she come from her cave tonight?” they whispered. “What does she foretell for the Emperor and the Empire?”
She stood there as if she had gone up on the hillside that she might see what was happening far away, and the night was so dark, so dark!
Then Augustus and his retinue remarked how profound was the stillness. They could not hear even Tiber’s hollow murmur, and they feared some disaster was impending. But no one cared to show that he was afraid. They told Augustus it was a good omen, and counseled him to hurry with the sacrifice.
The sibyl seemed not to notice the Emperor’s train moving up to the Capitol. In fact, she did not see them. She was in a distant land making her way over something higher than grass tufts. She was walking among great flocks of sleeping sheep.
Then she saw a shepherd’s fire. It burned in the middle of the field, and she groped her way to it. The shepherds lay asleep in its glow, and beside them were the long, spiked sticks with which they defended their flocks from wild beasts. Jackals with glittering eyes and bushy tails stole up toward the blaze, but the men did not hurl the sticks at them. The dogs continued to sleep, the sheep did not flee, and the beasts of prey lay down to rest beside human beings.
Only this the sibyl saw. She did not know that a sacrificial fire was being kindled behind her. She did not see the Roman Emperor take a dove from the cage to use as an offering. She was in the far hills of Galilee, among slumbering shepherds and sheep.
Then, wonderful sight, a company of angels singing gloriously flew back and forth above the wide plain. They moved in long, swaying lines like migratory birds. Some held lutes in their hands, some zithers and harps, and their songs rang out as merry as child laughter, as carefree as lark trills. The shepherds wakened, marveling at what they heard and saw, then rose up to go to the mountain city to tell of the miracle.
Behind the sibyl, on the summit of Capitol Hill, still stood the train of Augustus. But he did not make the sacrifice. Although he exerted his full strength to hold the dove’s frail body, it flung itself free and disappeared into the night.
They groped their way forward on a narrow, winding path. Suddenly, in the light up there on the mountain, a great heavenly body kindled, and the city beneath it glittered like silver in the starlight.