--and the
sickening reek of hundreds of dying lamps filled the air, for in the
confusion they had been left to burn or die as they might.

And how wretched was the aspect of the sobered, terror-stricken,
worn-out men and women. An obscure consciousness of having insulted the
god and incurred his wrath lurked in every soul. To many a one prompt
death would have seemed most welcome, and one man--a promising pupil
of Helladius, had actually taken the leap from existence into the
non-existence which, as he believed, he should find beyond the grave;
he had run his had violently against a pillar, and lay at the foot of it
with a broken skull.

With reeling brains, aching brows, and dejected hearts, the unhappy
creatures had got so far as to curse the present; and those who dared to
contemplate the future thought of it only as a bottomless abyss, towards
which the flying hours were dragging them with unfelt but irresistible
force. Time was passing--each could feel and see that; night was gone,
it would soon be day; the storm had passed over, but instead of the
inexorable powers of nature a new terror now hung over them: the no
less inexorable power of Caesar. To the struggle of man against the gods
there was but one possible end: Annihilation. In the conflict of man
against man there might yet be, if not victory, at least escape. The
veteran Memnon, with his one arm, had kept watch on the temple-roof
during that night's orgy, planning measures for repulsing the enemy's
attack, till the storm had burst on him and his adherents with the
"artillery of heaven." Then the greater portion of the garrison had
taken refuge in the lower galleries of the Serapeum, and the old general
was left alone at his post, in the blinding and deafening tempest. He
threw his remaining arm round a statue that graced the parapet of the
roof to save himself from being swept or washed away; and he would still
have shouted his orders, but that the hurricane drowned his voice, and
none of his few remaining adherents could have heard him speak. He, too,
had heard the champing of horses and had seen the moving mountain
which Orpheus had described. It was in fact a Roman engine of war; and,
faithful though he was to the cause he had undertaken, something like a
feeling of joy stirred his warrior's soul, as he looked down on the fine
and well-drilled men who followed the Imperial standards under which
he had, ere now, shed his best blood. His old comrades in