masses all round the foremost palaces on the
hill, all favoured Taurus Antinor's plans. Emerging from behind a
monumental block of granite, looking in their dark clothes for all the
world like the scribes who had been seen running about here all the day,
the two men attracted little or no attention.

Their faces in the gloom could not easily be distinguished, nor did
anyone in that excited throng imagine for a moment that the Caesar would
leave the safe shelter of his palace and, dressed in slave's garb,
affront the multitude who clamoured for his death.

The audacity of this flight carried success along with it. Dragging the
quaking Caesar after him, Taurus Antinor soon plunged into the very thick
of the crowd.

The tumult here and the confusion were intense. Men running and
shouting, women shrieking and children crying, all in a tangled mass of
noisy humanity. Some of the men brandished sticks, shovels or rakes, any
instrument they had happened to possess; they shouted loudly for the
Caesar, demanding his death, urging the more pusillanimous to rush the
palace and drag the hiding princeps out into the open. Others carried
tall poles on which they had improvised rude banners made of bits of
purple-coloured rags: they were proclaiming the new Caesar of their
choice in voices rendered hoarse with lustiness.

The women clung to their men-folk, their shrill accents mingling with
the rougher ones. Some of them clutched small children to their breasts,
others dragged older ones at their skirts, and it was terrible to hear
the cries of frightened children through the shouts of vengeance and of
death.

Now as the gloom gathered in a few lighted torches appeared here and
there, held high above the sea of surrounding heads; they flickered
feebly in the damp air, throwing fitful lurid lights on the faces close
by: dark faces, flushed and excited, with sullen eyes and dishevelled
hair, above which the black smoke from the sizzling resin formed weird
and shifting haloes.

The crowd carried the fugitives along with it, pressed shoulder to
shoulder in a living, breathing, panting vice. Damp rising from
thousands of rain-sodden garments mingled with the mist and with the
rain and formed a grey, wet, clinging veil over this restless mass,
kneading it all together into a dark, swaying entity from which rose the
cries of the children and the hoarse shouts of the men.

Drifting with the throng, Taurus Antinor, still holding his tr