displeasing and devoid of all romance. Two were wounded. One, with a
dent in the helmet that hung from his arm by the chin-strap, lay leaning
against a rock; refused food, and slowly bled to death, his white face
almost comically disappointed.

A military tribune, followed by a slave with tablets, and by a mounted
trooper for the sake of his official dignity, rode out from the city and
took the report from the guards' decurion, a half-breed Dacian-Italian,
black-bearded and taciturn, who dictated it to the slave in curt,
staccato sentences, grudging the very gesture that he made toward the
wounded men. The tribune glanced at the report, signed it, turned his
horse and rode into the city, disregarding the decurion's salute, his
military cloak a splash of very bright red, seen against the limestone
and above the predominant brown of the camels and coats of their owners.
He cantered his horse when he passed through the gate, and there went up
a clamor of newsy excitement behind him as group after group loosed
tongues in competition of exaggeration.

Being bad, the news spread swiftly. The quadruple lines of columns all
along the Corso, as the four-mile-long main thoroughfare was called,
began to look like pier-piles in a flowing tide of men. Yellow, blue,
red, striped and parti-colored costumes, restless as the flotsam on a
mill-race, swirled into patterns, and broke, and reblended. The long
portico of Caesar's baths resounded to the hollow hum of voices.
Streaming lines of slaves in the midst of the street were delayed by the
crowd, and abused for obstructing it. Gossip went up like the voice of
the sea to the cliffs and startled clouds of spray-white pigeons,
faintly edged with pink against an azure sky; then ceased as suddenly.
The news was known. Whatever Antioch knew, bored it. Nine days'
wonders were departed long ago into the limbo of the days of Xerxes.