"Cost what it might, the Queen must be warned. Treachery was certainly
at work here.

"But I came too late.

"O Dion! If I had only been informed a few minutes before, perhaps
something still more terrible might have happened, but the Queen would
have been spared what now threatens her. What can she expect from the
conqueror who, in order to seize her alive, condescends to outwit a
noble, defenceless woman, who has succumbed to superior power?

"Death would have released the unhappy Queen from sore trouble and
horrible shame. And she had already raised the dagger against her life.
Before my eyes she flung aloft her beautiful arm with the flashing steel,
which glittered in the light of the candles in the many-branched
candelabra beside the sarcophagi. But I will try to remain calm! You
shall hear what happened in regular order. My thoughts grow confused as
the terrible scene recurs to my memory. To describe it as I saw it, I
should need to be a poet, an artist in words; for what passed before me
happened on a stage--you know, it was a tomb. The walls were of dark
stone-dark, too, were the pillars and ceiling--all dark and glittering;
most portions were smoothly polished stone, shining like a mirror. Near
the sarcophagi, and around the candelabra as far as the vicinity of the
door, where the rascally trick was played, the light was brilliant as in
a festal hall. Every blood-stain on the hand, every scratch, every wound
which the desperate woman had torn with her own nails on her bosom, which
gleamed snow-white from her black robes, was distinctly visible. Farther
away, on the right and left, the light was dim, and near the side walls
the darkness was as intense as in a real tomb. On the smooth porphyry