Before him, how serenely slept the starlight on that lovely city! how breathlessly its pillared streets reposed in their security!—­how softly rippled the dark-green waves beyond!—­how cloudless spread, aloft and blue, the dreaming Campanian skies!  Yet this was the last night for the gay Pompeii! the colony of the hoar Chaldean! the fabled city of Hercules! the delight of the voluptuous Roman!  Age after age had rolled, indestructive, unheeded, over its head; and now the last ray quivered on the dial-plate of its doom!  The gladiator heard some light steps behind—­a group of females were wending homeward from their visit to the amphitheatre.  As he turned, his eye was arrested by a strange and sudden apparition.  From the summit of Vesuvius, darkly visible at the distance, there shot a pale, meteoric, livid light—­it trembled an instant and was gone.  And at the same moment that his eye caught it, the voice of one of the youngest of the women broke out hilariously and shrill:—­

       Tramp!  Tramp!  How gaily they go! 
        Ho, ho!  For the morrow’s merry show!

BOOK THE FIFTH

Chapter I

The dream of Arbaces.  A visitor and A warning to the Egyptian.  The awful night preceding the fierce joy of the amphitheatre rolled drearily away, and greyly broke forth the dawn of the last day of Pompeii!  The air was uncommonly calm and sultry—­a thin and dull mist gathered over the valleys and hollows of the broad Campanian fields.  But yet it was remarked in surprise by the early fishermen, that, despite the exceeding stillness of the atmosphere, the waves of the sea were agitated, and seemed, as it were, to run disturbedly back from the shore; while along the blue and stately Sarnus, whose ancient breadth of channel the traveler now vainly seeks to discover, there crept a hoarse and sullen murmur, as it glided by the laughing plains and the gaudy villas of the wealthy citizens.  Clear above the low mist rose the time-worn towers of the immemorial town, the red-tiled roofs of the bright streets, the solemn columns of many temples, and the statue-crowned portals of the Forum and the Arch of Triumph.  Far in the distance, the outline of the circling hills soared above the vapors, and mingled with the changeful hues of the morning sky.  The cloud that had so long rested over the crest of Vesuvius had suddenly vanished, and its rugged and haughty brow looked without a frown over the beautiful scenes below.

Despite the earliness of the hour, the gates of the city were already opened.  Horsemen upon horsemen, vehicle after vehicle, poured rapidly in; and the voices of numerous pedestrian groups, clad in holiday attire, rose high in joyous and excited merriment; the streets were crowded with citizens and strangers from the populous neighborhood of Pompeii; and noisily—­fast—­confusedly swept the many streams of life towards the fatal show.