“Death would have released the unhappy Queen from sore trouble and horrible shame.  And she had already raised the dagger against her life.  Before my eyes she flung aloft her beautiful arm with the flashing steel, which glittered in the light of the candles in the many-branched candelabra beside the sarcophagi.  But I will try to remain calm!  You shall hear what happened in regular order.  My thoughts grow confused as the terrible scene recurs to my memory.  To describe it as I saw it, I should need to be a poet, an artist in words; for what passed before me happened on a stage—­you know, it was a tomb.  The walls were of dark stone-dark, too, were the pillars and ceiling—­all dark and glittering; most portions were smoothly polished stone, shining like a mirror.  Near the sarcophagi, and around the candelabra as far as the vicinity of the door, where the rascally trick was played, the light was brilliant as in a festal hall.  Every blood-stain on the hand, every scratch, every wound which the desperate woman had torn with her own nails on her bosom, which gleamed snow-white from her black robes, was distinctly visible.  Farther away, on the right and left, the light was dim, and near the side walls the darkness was as intense as in a real tomb.  On the smooth porphyry columns, the glittering black marble and serpentine—­here, there, and everywhere—­flickered the wavering reflection of the candlelight.  The draught kept it continually in motion, and it wavered to and fro in the hall, like the restless souls of the damned.  Wherever the eye turned it met darkness.  The end of the hall seemed black—­black as the anteroom of Hades—­yet through it pierced a brilliant moving bar; sunbeams which streamed from the stairway into the tomb and amid which danced tiny motes.  How the scene impressed the eye!  The home of gloomy Hecate!  And the Queen and her impending fate.  A picture flooded with light, standing forth in radiant relief against the darkness of the heavy, majestic forms surrounding it in a wide circle.  This tomb in this light would be a palace meet for the gloomy rule of the king of the troop of demons conjured up by the power of a magician—­if they have a ruler.  But where am I wandering?  ‘The artist!’ I hear you exclaim again, ’the artist!  Instead of rushing forward and interposing, he stands studying the light and its effects in the royal tomb.’  Yes, yes; I had come too late, too late—­far too late!  On the stairs leading to the lower story of the building I saw it, but I was not to blame for the delay—­not in the least!

“At first I had been unable to see the men—­or even a shadow; but I beheld plainly in the brightest glare of the light the body of Mark Antony on the couch and, in the dusk farther towards the right, Iras and Charmian trying to raise a trapdoor.  It was the one which closed the passage leading to the combustible materials stored in the cellar.  A sign from the Queen had commanded them to fire it.