Gorgo was startled out of these meditations by a wild tumult which came up from the slaves’ hall some distance off and reached her ears in the women’s sitting-room.  Could her grandmother have opened the wine stores all too freely; were the miserable wretches already drunk?

No, the noise was not that of a troop of slaves who have forgotten themselves, and given the rein to their wild revelry under the influence of Dionysus!  She listened and could distinctly hear lamentable howls and wild cries of grief.  Something frightful must have happened!  Had some evil befallen her father?  Greatly alarmed she flew across the courtyard to the slaves’ quarters and found the whole establishment, black and white alike, in a state of frenzy.  The women were rushing about with their hair unbound over their faces, beating their breasts and wailing, the men squatted in silence with their wine-cups before them untouched, softly sobbing and whining.

What had come upon them—­what blow had fallen on the house?

Gorgo called her old nurse and learnt from her that the Moschosphragist had just told them that the troops had been placed all round the Serapeum and that the Emperor had commanded the Prefect of the East to lay violent hands on the temple of the King of gods.  Today or to-morrow the crime was to be perpetrated.  They had been warned to pray and repent of their sins, for at the moment when the holiest sanctuary on earth should fall the whole world would crumble into nothingness.  The entrails of the beast sacrificed by Damia had been black as though scorched, and a terrific groan had been heard from the god himself in the great shrine; the pillars of the great hypostyle had trembled and the three heads of Cerberus, lying at the feet of Serapis; had opened their jaws.

Gorgo listened in silence to the old woman’s story; and all she said in reply was:  “Let them wail.”

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

Pretended to see nothing in the old woman’s taunts
Very hard to imagine nothingness

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