Dainia collected her scattered wits, shivered with cold and then said, dully at first, but with a growing cheerfulness that made Gorgo’s blood run cold:  “Did I say ‘nothingness’?  Did I speak of the great void, my child?  You are quick of hearing.  Nothingness—­well, you have learnt to think; are you capable of defining the meaning of the word—­a monster that has neither head nor tail, neither front nor back—­can you, I say, define the idea of nothingness?”

“What do you mean, mother?” said Gorgo with growing alarm.

“No, she does not know, she does not understand,” muttered the old woman with a dreary smile.  “And yet Melampus told me, only yesterday, that you understood his lesson on conic sections better than many men.  Aye, aye, child; I, too, learnt mathematics once, and I still go through various calculations every night in my observatory; but to this day I find it difficult to conceive of a mathematical point.  It is nothing and yet it is something.  But the great final nothingness!—­And that even is nonsense, for it can be neither great nor small, and come neither sooner nor later.  Is it not so, my sweet?  Think of nothing—­who cannot do that; but it is very hard to imagine nothingness.  We can neither of us achieve that.  Not even the One has a place in it.  But what is the use of racking our brains?  Only wait till to-morrow or the day after; something will happen then which will reduce our own precious persons and this beautiful world to that nothingness which to-day is inconceivable.  It is coming; I can hear from afar the brazen tramp of the airy and incorporeal monster.  A queer sort of giant—­smaller than the mathematical point of which we were speaking, and yet vast beyond all measurement.  Aye, aye; our intelligence, polyp-like, has long arms and can apprehend vast size and wide extent; but it can no more conceive of nothingness than it can of infinite space or time.

“I was dreaming that this monstrous Nought had come to his kingdom and was opening a yawning mouth and toothless jaws to swallow its all down into the throat that it has not got—­you, and me, and your young officer, with this splendid, recreant city and the sky and the earth.  Wait, only wait!  The glorious image of Serapis still stands radiant, but the cross casts an ominous shadow that has already darkened the light over half the earth!  Our gods are an abomination to Caesar, and Cynegius only carries out his wishes. . .”

Here Damia was interrupted by the steward, who rushed breathless into the room, exclaiming: 

“Lost!  All is lost!  An edict of Theodosius commands that every temple of the gods shall be closed, and the heavy cavalry have dispersed our force.”