"What do you mean, mother?" said Gorgo with growing alarm.

"No, she does not know, she does not understand," muttered the old woman
with a dreary smile. "And yet Melampus told me, only yesterday, that
you understood his lesson on conic sections better than many men. Aye,
aye, child; I, too, learnt mathematics once, and I still go through
various calculations every night in my observatory; but to this day I
find it difficult to conceive of a mathematical point. It is nothing and
yet it is something. But the great final nothingness!--And that even is
nonsense, for it can be neither great nor small, and come neither sooner
nor later. Is it not so, my sweet? Think of nothing--who cannot do
that; but it is very hard to imagine nothingness. We can neither of us
achieve that. Not even the One has a place in it. But what is the use
of racking our brains? Only wait till to-morrow or the day after;
something will happen then which will reduce our own precious persons and
this beautiful world to that nothingness which to-day is inconceivable.
It is coming; I can hear from afar the brazen tramp of the airy and
incorporeal monster. A queer sort of giant--smaller than the
mathematical point of which we were speaking, and yet vast beyond all
measurement. Aye, aye; our intelligence, polyp-like, has long arms and
can apprehend vast size and wide extent; but it can no more conceive of
nothingness than it can of infinite space or time.

"I was dreaming that this monstrous Nought had come to his kingdom and
was opening a yawning mouth and toothless jaws to swallow its all down
into the throat that it has not got--you, and me, and your young officer,
with this splendid, recreant city and the sky and the earth. Wait, only
wait! The glorious image of Serapis still stands radiant, but the cross
casts an ominous shadow that has already darkened the light over half the
earth! Our gods are an abomination to Caesar, and Cynegius only carries