re unfortunates tore up
flat stones and half buried themselves in defence against the heat.
Hardly a family inhabiting the centre of the city survived in full;
hence along the walls, at the gates, on all roads were heard howls of
despairing women, calling on the dear names of those who had perished in
the throng or the fire.

And so, while some were imploring the gods, others blasphemed them
because of this awful catastrophe. Old men were seen coming from the
temple of Jupiter Liberator, stretching forth their hands and crying,
"If thou be a liberator, save thy altars and the city!" But despair
turned mainly against the old Roman gods, who, in the minds of the
populace, were bound to watch over the city more carefully than others.
They had proved themselves powerless; hence were insulted. On the other
hand, it happened on the Via Asinaria that when a company of Egyptian
priests appeared conducting a statue of Isis, which they had saved from
the temple near the Porta Caelimontana, a crowd of people rushed among
the priests, attached themselves to the chariot, which they drew to the
Appian gate, and seizing the statue placed it in the temple of Mars,
overwhelming the priests of that deity who dared to resist them.

In other places people invoked Serapis, Baal, or Jehovah, whose
adherents, swarming out of the alleys in the neighborhood of the Subura
and the Trans-Tiber, filled with shouts and uproar the fields near the
walls. In their cries were heard tones as if of triumph; when,
therefore, some of the citizens joined the chorus and glorified "the
Lord of the World," others, indignant at this glad shouting, strove to
repress it by violence. Here and there hymns were heard, sung by men in
the bloom of life, by old men, by women and children--hymns wonderful
and solemn, whose meaning they understood not, but in which were
repeated from moment to moment the words "Behold the Judge cometh in the
day of wrath and disaster." Thus this deluge of restless and sleepless
people encircled the burning city, like a tempest-driven sea. But
neither despair nor blasphemy nor hymn helped in any way.

The destruction seemed as irresistible, perfect, and pitiless as
Predestination itself. Around Pompey's Amphitheatre stores of hemp
caught fire, and ropes used in circuses, arenas, and every kind of
machine at the games, and with them the adjoining buildings containing
barrels of pitch with which ropes were smeared. In a few hours all that