t opened
beneath him. He saw immediately that it was less important, both in
size and depth, than he had imagined it to be. The earth at this
particular place had given way beneath the foundations of the wall,
which had sunk down, deepening the chasm by their weight, into the
yielding ground beneath them. A small spring of water (probably the
first cause of the sinking in the earth) had bubbled up into the space
in the brick-work, which bit by bit, and year by year, it had gradually
undermined. Nor did it remain stagnant at this place. It trickled
merrily and quietly onward--a tiny rivulet, emancipated from one prison
in the ground only to enter another in the wall, bounded by no grassy
banks, brightened by no cheerful light, admired by no human eye,
followed in its small course through the inner fissures in the brick by
no living thing but a bloated toad, or a solitary lizard: yet wending
as happily on its way through darkness and ruin, as its sisters who
were basking in the sunlight of the meadows, or leaping in the fresh
breezes of the open mountain side.

Raising his eyes from the little spring, Ulpius next directed his
attention to the prospect above him.

Immediately over his head, the material of the interior of the wall
presented a smooth, flat, hard surface, which seemed capable of
resisting the most vigorous attempts at its destruction; but on looking
round, he perceived at one side of him and further inwards, an
appearance of dark, dimly-defined irregularity, which promised
encouragingly for his intended efforts. He descended into the chasm of
the rivulet, crawled up on a heap of crumbling brick-work, and gained a
hole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to admit of his
passage through. Inch by inch, he enlarged the rift, crept into it,
and found himself on a fragment of the bow of one of the foundation
arches, which, though partly destroyed, still supported itself,
isolated from all connection with the part of the upper wall which it
had once sustained, and which had gradually crumbled away into the
cavities below.

He looked up. An immense rift soared above him, stretching its
tortuous ramifications, at different points, into every part of the
wall that was immediately visible. The whole structure seemed, at this
place, to have received a sudden and tremendous wrench. But for the
support of the sounder fortifications at each side of it, it could not
have sustained itself after the