And with a loud and deep chorus, the troop chanted forth along the wild horrors of the air, ‘Woe to the harlot of the sea!—­woe! woe!’

The Nazarenes paced slowly on, their torches still flickering in the storm, their voices still raised in menace and solemn warning, till, lost amid the windings in the streets, the darkness of the atmosphere and the silence of death again fell over the scene.

There was one of the frequent pauses in the showers, and Glaucus encouraged Ione once more to proceed.  Just as they stood, hesitating, on the last step of the portico, an old man, with a bag in his right hand and leaning upon a youth, tottered by.  The youth bore a torch.  Glaucus recognized the two as father and son—­miser and prodigal.

‘Father,’ said the youth, ’if you cannot move more swiftly, I must leave you, or we both perish!’

‘Fly, boy, then, and leave thy sire!’

‘But I cannot fly to starve; give me thy bag of gold!’ And the youth snatched at it.

‘Wretch! wouldst thou rob thy father?’

‘Ay! who can tell the tale in this hour?  Miser, perish!’

The boy struck the old man to the ground, plucked the bag from his relaxing hand, and fled onward with a shrill yell.

‘Ye gods!’ cried Glaucus:  ’are ye blind, then, even in the dark?  Such crimes may well confound the guiltless with the guilty in one common ruin.  Ione, on!—­on!’

Chapter VIII

Arbaces encounters Glaucus and Ione.

Advancing, as men grope for escape in a dungeon, Ione and her lover continued their uncertain way.  At the moments when the volcanic lightnings lingered over the streets, they were enabled, by that awful light, to steer and guide their progress:  yet, little did the view it presented to them cheer or encourage their path.  In parts, where the ashes lay dry and uncommixed with the boiling torrents, cast upward from the mountain at capricious intervals, the surface of the earth presented a leprous and ghastly white.  In other places, cinder and rock lay matted in heaps, from beneath which emerged the half-hid limbs of some crushed and mangled fugitive.  The groans of the dying were broken by wild shrieks of women’s terror—­now near, now distant—­which, when heard in the utter darkness, were rendered doubly appalling by the crushing sense of helplessness and the uncertainty of the perils around; and clear and distinct through all were the mighty and various noises from the Fatal Mountain; its rushing winds; its whirling torrents; and, from time to time, the burst and roar of some more fiery and fierce explosion.  And ever as the winds swept howling along the street, they bore sharp streams of burning dust, and such sickening and poisonous vapors, as took away, for the instant, breath and consciousness, followed by a rapid revulsion of the arrested blood, and a tingling sensation of agony trembling through every nerve and fibre of the frame.