The man on the precipice appeared not to see or hear the people; he seemed preoccupied, fearful, oblivious of everything about him, and struggling with the burden of some monstrous inner distress. He raised his hands and held them before his face, and then it was that she saw they were red to the wrists with the color of blood freshly spilled; he rubbed them together, as though struggling fiercely to scrub the blood away; he lowered them as if to dip them in a basin, then lifted them again to study them, his bloodless face, in contrast to the hands, a shade of ashen horror.
But the frenzied washing had done no good; the hands shone fiery red. Despairing, Pilate dropped them to his sides and stepped to the very edge of the yawning gulf. “I didn’t know!” he cried. “By all the gods, I didn’t know.” He raised his cavernous face and with eyes wide looked into the void. “O God of the Jews”—his shrunken head swayed on the wrinkled neck—“had I but known. Had I but known....” His words whispered into silence, and he closed his eyes.
“Don’t! No! No!” she screamed. “No, don’t!”
Pilate’s lean frame was dropping, slowly turning and twisting, toward the angry waters; his bony arms and legs were thrust out stiffly from the shroud of his too large toga, which streamed above the plummeting body, flapping furiously in the wind. Rigid with horror, staring into the abyss, she saw the body strike, heard the sickening blob, and watched it gradually disappear.
But the waters would not grant oblivion. Angrily they flung the broken, thin body back to the surface, and to Claudia, watching in frozen fascination, it seemed to be twisting and eddying in continuous agitation above the seething waters. Looking more closely, her eyes rooted to the scene in morbid horror, she saw white arms thrust upward and hands still reddened, cleansed not one tint by their plunge into the watery depths. Now suddenly the hands seemed detached from the stiffening arms, and alive; like wounded rodents seeking haven in a dark fissure among the rocks, they were feeling their way along the ascending stony slope toward her, and in that dreadful instant there lifted to her also the babble of countless voices in many tongues blending once again into a swelling chorus. The light breaking slowly above the mountain showed the plain below and the steep rises teeming with a multitude drawn from all races and nations.