over the house, and the temples and the palaces intervening, but no
one heeded it. They had grown callous, these townsfolk, to the
battering of rams, and the flight of fire-darts, and the other
emotions of a bombardment. Their nerves, their hunger, their
desperation, were strung to such a pitch that little short of an
actual storm could stir them into new excitement over the siege.

All were weaponed. The naked carried arms in the hopes of
meeting some one whom they could overcome and rob; those that had
a possession walked ready to do a battle for its ownership. There
was no security, no trust; the lesson of civilisation had dropped
away from these common people as mud is washed from the feet by
rain, and in their new habits and their thoughts they had gone back
to the grade from which savages like those of Europe have never yet
emerged. It was a grim commentary on the success of Phorenice's
rule.

The crowd merged me into their ranks without question, and
with them I pressed forward down the winding streets, once so clean
and trim, now so foul and mud-strewn. Men and women had died of
hunger in these streets these latter years, and rotted where they
lay, and we trod their bones underfoot as we walked. Yet rising
out of this squalor and this misery were great pyramids and
palaces, the like of which for splendour and magnificence had never
been seen before. It was a jarring admixture.

In time we came to the open space in the centre of the city,
which even Phorenice had not dared to encroach upon with her
ambitious building schemes, and stood on the secular ground which
surrounds the most ancient, the most grand, and the breast of all