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roof, which hardly seemed fit to hold my weight. But in fact the late summer heat sent several of the children and a couple of the men of the household up there as well, though not Yeshua, who apparently had his own little closet to sleep in at a back corner of the compound.
    One of those who came up to the roof was Kephas’s brother Andreas, who had taken a strange liking to me at supper, leaving his own place to come sit at my feet like a dog in search of a scrap. It had taken me a moment to realize he was simple—as I later learned, he had suffered some accident as a child. The others seemed uncomfortable when he came to me but did not really try to stop him. So for the rest of the evening he stayed close by, and then that night came up to the roof, setting his mat close to mine and giving me a huge child’s grin. The truth was I took comfort in his attachment to me—it was such a guileless thing, and so undemanding, that it made me feel welcome there, among strangers though I was, in a way that the mere protocols of hospitality could never have done.
    It was not until the following morning, when I awoke there on Kephas’s rooftop, that I had a chance for a proper view of Kefar Nahum and its situation. My impulse then was to revise my original harsh judgement at Yeshua’s choosing it as his base. The town itself—a city, Yeshua’s men had called it, though it had the most makeshift of walls and no battlements of any sort—did not amount to much, just a straggle of compounds similar to Kephas’s stretching along its few streets, all in the coarse black stone of the area and eachlooking as forbidding and cramped as the next; and then to the south the harbour, which was large enough but built with a confusing disarray of jetties and quays and crammed with every sort of ramshackle craft. It was the prospect, however, that struck me, the view out over the whole of the Sea of Kinneret, which seen from there—unlike from Tiberias, where it seemed merely a backdrop laid out for the king’s amusement—appeared truly to merit the name of sea, not from its size, perhaps, but from the sense of being in some way on a distant shore. Jerusalem felt very far from here, in another world; Rome, non-existent. Of course, all this was perhaps no more than the feeling one often got in the provinces, the illusory sense that nothing beyond the immediate was important or real.
    I was surprised, however, to make out just a couple of miles east of town what looked like a military camp, with Roman eagles flying. I had not heard of the place and wondered how it had come to be there, and that Antipas allowed it. Since the household had not yet come fully to life, I took the chance to slip away and make my way out to it, imagining I might learn something of use that I could then bring back to Jerusalem to show my superiors I had not been idle.
    The camp lay right at the Jordan, which fed into the lake there and formed the frontier of Herod Philip’s territory. It looked large enough to house perhaps a hundred men, and stood watch over a sizeable customs house that controlled the border crossing. A sleepy-eyed guard, a young Cilician, told me the Romans had set the place up a number of years before to deal with the brigands in the hills—freedom fighters, I took him to mean, though it was true that many of themwere no better than thieves—after Antipas and Philip had shown themselves unable to. The so-called brigands had been more or less eradicated, but the camp had remained; no doubt the Romans were happy to use it to keep an eye on their client kings, and on the revenues coming in from the customs house. At the moment only a meagre twenty-five men were stationed there, commanded by a captain who was apparently quite well liked by the local population and who in fact had recently married a girl from Kefar Nahum.
    I made my way back to Kephas’s house. It was still not an hour past daybreak and so I was surprised to find a small crowd