She had lost all sense of time and of her immediate surroundings, and long-forgotten sorrows crowded on her memory:  The dreadful day when a young freedman—­a gifted astronomer and philosopher who had been appointed her tutor, and whom she had loved with all the passion of a vehement nature—­had been kicked out of her father’s house by slaves, for daring to aspire to her hand.  She had given him up—­she had been forced to do so; and after she was the wife of another and he had risen to fame, she had never given him any token that she had not forgotten him.  Two thirds of a century lay between that happy and terrible time, and the present.  He had been dead many a long year, and still she remembered him, and was thinking of him even now.  A singular effort of fancy showed her herself, as she had then been, and Gorgo—­whom she saw not with her bodily eyes, though the girl was standing in front of her—­two young creatures side by side.  The two were but one in her vision; the same anguish that embittered one life now threatened the other.  But after all she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades, like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo’s sorrow could not at any rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand—­it was coming slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer and nearer every hour.

When had a troop of enthusiastic students and hastily-collected peasant-soldiers ever been able to snake an effectual stand against the hosts of Rome?  Damia, who only a few minutes since had spoken with such determined encouragement to her son, had terrible visions of the Imperial legions putting Olympius to rout, with the Libyans under Barkas and the Biamite rabble under Pachomius; storming the Serapeum and reducing it to ruin:  Firebrands flying through its sacred halls, the roof giving way, the vaults falling in; the sublime image of the god—­the magnificent work of Bryaxis—­battered by a hail of stones, and sinking to mingle with the reeking dust.  Then a cry rose up from all nature, as though every star in heaven, every wave of ocean, every leaf of the forest, every blade in the meadow, every rock on the shore and every grain of sand in the measureless desert had found a voice; and this universal wail of “Woe, woe!” was drowned by rolling thunder such as the ear of man had never heard, and no mortal creature could hear and live.  The heavens opened, and out of the black gulf of death-bearing clouds poured streams of fire; consuming flaines rose to meet it from the riven womb of earth, rushing up to lick the sky.  What had been air turned to fire and ashes, the silver and gold stars fell crashing fronn the firmament, and the heavens themselves bowed and collapsed, burying the ruined earth.  Ashes, ashes, fine grey dusty ashes pervaded space, till presently a hurricane