In the midst of all this Olympius and his party had come into the ball and seeing the commander struggling, sword in hand, with the recalcitrant fugitives, where the noise was loudest, he and his guests hastened to the rescue and defended the door against the hundreds who were crowding to fly.  The old man was grieved to turn the weapons they had seized in their sacred ardor, against the seceders from their own cause; but it had to be.  While the loyal party—­among them Karnis and Orpheus—­guarded the passage to the underground rooms with shield and lance, Olympius took council of the veteran captain, and they rapidly decided to allow all the women to depart at once and to divide the men into two parties-one to be sent to fight on the roof, and the other to defend the wall where the Roman battering-ram was by this time almost ready to attack.

The high-priest took his stand boldly between his adherents and the would-be runaways and appealed to them in loud and emphatic tones to do their duty.  They listened to him silently and respectfully; but when he ended by stating that the women were commanded to withdraw, a terrific outcry was raised, some of the girls clung to their lovers, while others urged the men to fight their way out.

Several, however, and among them the fair Glycera who a few hours since had smiled down triumphantly on her worshippers as Aphrodite, availed themselves at once of the permission to quit this scene of horrors, and made their way without delay to the subterranean passages.  They had adorers in plenty in the city.  But they did not get far; they were met by a temple-servant flying towards the great hall, who warned them to return thither at once:  the Imperial soldiers had discovered the entrance to the aqueduct and posted sentries in the timber-yard.  They turned and followed him with loud lamentations, and hardly had they got back into the temple when a new terror came upon them:  the iron battering-ram came with a first heavy shock, thundering against the southern wall.

The Imperial troops were in fact masters of the secret passage; and they had begun the attack on the Serapeum in earnest.  It was serious—­but all was not yet lost; and in this fateful hour Olympius and Memnon proved their mettle.  The high-priest commanded that the great stone trap-doors should be dropped into their places, and that the bridges across the gulfs, in the underground rooms reserved for the initiated, should be destroyed; and this there was yet time to do, for the soldiers had not yet ventured into those mysterious corridors, where there could not fail to be traps and men in ambush.  Memnon meanwhile had hurried to the spot where the battering-ram had by this time dealt a second blow, shouting as he went to every man who was not a coward to follow him.

Karnis, Orpheus and the rest of the high-priest’s guests obeyed his call and gathered round him; he commanded that everything portable should be brought out of the temple to be built into a barricade behind the point of attack, and that neither the most precious and beautiful statues, nor the brass and marble stelae and altar-slabs should be spared.  Screened by this barricade, and armed with lances and bows—­of which there were plenty at hand—­he proposed, when the breach was made, to check the further advance of the foe.