As a curtain rises before an audience, the spell holding him in its sleep-awake rose, and he saw with a clear understanding.
There was a space upon the top of a low knoll rounded like a skull, and dry, dusty, and without vegetation, except some scrubby hyssop.
The boundary of the space was a living wall of men, with men behind struggling, some to look over, others to look through it.

An inner wall of Roman soldiery held the dense outer wall rigidly to its place.

A centurion kept eye upon the soldiers.
Up to the very line so vigilantly guarded Ben-Hur had been led; at the line he now stood, his face to the northwest.

The knoll was the old Aramaic Golgotha--in Latin, Calvaria; anglicized, Calvary; translated, The Skull.
On its slopes, in the low places, on the swells and higher hills, the earth sparkled with a strange enamelling.

Look where he would outside the walled space, he saw no patch of brown soil, no rock, no green thing; he saw only thousands of eyes in ruddy faces; off a little way in the perspective only ruddy faces without eyes; off a little farther only a broad, broad circle, which the nearer view instructed him was also of faces.