news, and the watchword which followed it, passed outwards through
the crowd, they wheeled round as one man, and poured through street
after street towards Cyril's house; while Philammon, beside himself
with horror, rage, and pity, hurried onward with them.

A tumultuous hour, or more, was passed in the street before he could
gain entrance; and then he was swept, along with the mob in which he
had been fast wedged, through a dark low passage, and landed
breathless in a quadrangle of mean and new buildings, overhung by
the four hundred stately columns of the ruined Serapeium. The grass
was already growing on the ruined capitals and architraves ....
Little did even its destroyers dream then, that the day would come
when one only of that four hundred would be left, as 'Pompey's
Pillar,' to show what the men of old could think and do.

Philammon at last escaped from the crowd, and putting the letter
which he had carried in his bosom into the hands of one of the
priests who was mixing with the mob, was beckoned by him into a
corridor, and up a flight of stairs, and into a large, low, mean
room, and there, by virtue of the world-wide freemasonry which
Christianity had, for the first time on earth, established, found
himself in five minutes awaiting the summons of the most powerful
man south of the Mediterranean.

A curtain hung across the door of the inner chamber, through which
Philammon could hear plainly the steps of some one walking up and
down hurriedly and fiercely.

'They will drive me to it!' at last burst out a deep sonorous voice.
'They will drive me to it .... Their blood be on their own head!