CHAPTER XXXV.

A week later Caracalla quitted Alexandria to make war on the Parthians.
What finally drove the unhappy man to hurry from the hated place was the
torturing fear of sharing his lion's fate, and of being sent after the
murdered Tarautas by the friends who had heard his appeal to fate.

Quite mad he was not, for the illusions which haunted him were often
absent for several hours, when he spoke with perfect lucidity, received
reports, and gave orders. It was with peculiar terror that his soul
avoided every recollection of his mother, of Theokritus, and all those
whose opinion he had formerly valued and whose judgment was not
indifferent to him.

In constant terror of the dagger of an avenger--a dread which, with many
other peculiarities, the leech could hardly ascribe to the diseased
phenomena of his mental state--he only showed himself to his soldiers,
and he might often be seen making a meal off a pottage he himself had
cooked to escape the poison which had been fatal to his lion. He was
never for an instant free from the horrible sense of being hated,
shunned, and persecuted by the whole world.

Sometimes he would remember that once a fair girl had prayed for him; but
when he tried to recall her features he could only see the charred arm
with the golden snake held up before him as he had pictured it that night
after the most hideous of his massacres; and every time, at the sight of
it, that word came back to him which still tortured his soul above all
else--"The deed." But his attendants, who heard him repeating it day and
night, never knew what he meant by it.