“They will not eat such as he,” observed old Julius Paulinus, and Caesar nodded approvingly.  The Egyptian shuddered, for this imperial nod showed him by how slender a thread his life hung.

In a flash he reflected whither he might fly if he should fail to find this hated couple.  If, after all, he should discover Melissa alive, so much the better.  Then, he might have been mistaken in identifying the body; some slave girl might have stolen the bracelet and put it on before the house was burned down.  He knew for a fact that the charred corpse of which he had spoken was that of a street wench who had rushed among the foremost into the house of the much-envied imperial favorite—­the traitress—­and had met her death in the spreading flames.

Zminis had but a moment to rack his inventive and prudent brain, but he already had thought of something which might perhaps influence Caesar in his favor.  Of all the Alexandrians, the members of the Museum were those whom Caracalla hated most.  He had been particularly enjoined not to spare one of them; and in the course of the ride which Caesar, attended by the armed troopers of Arsinoe, had taken through the streets streaming with blood, he had stayed longest gazing at the heap of corpses in the court-yard of the Museum.  In the portico, a colonnade copied from the Stoa at Athens, whither a dozen or so of the philosophers had fled when attacked, he had even stabbed several with his own hand.  The blood on the sword which Caracalla had dedicated to Serapis had been shed at the Museum.

The Egyptian had himself led the massacre here, and had seen that it was thoroughly effectual.  The mention of those slaughtered hair-splitters must, if anything, be likely to mitigate Caesar’s wrath; so no sooner had the applause died away with which the proconsul’s jest at his expense had been received, than Zminis began to give his report of the great massacre in the Museum.  He could boast of having spared scarcely one of the empty word-pickers with whom the epigrams against Caesar and his mother had originated.  Teachers and pupils, even the domestic officials, had been overtaken by the insulted sovereign’s vengeance.  Nothing was left but the stones of that great institution, which had indeed long outlived its fame.  The Numidians who had helped in the work had been drunk with blood, and had forced their way even into the physician’s lecture-rooms and the hospital adjoining.  There, too, they had given no quarter; and among the sufferers who had been carried thither to be healed they had found Tarautas, the wounded gladiator.  A Numidian, the youngest of the legion, a beardless youth, had pinned the terrible conqueror of lions and men to the bed with his spear, and then, with the same weapon, had released at least a dozen of his fellow-sufferers from their pain.

As he told his story the Egyptian stood staring into vacancy, as though he saw it all, and the whites of his eyeballs gleamed more hideously than ever out of his swarthy face.  The lean, sallow wretch stood before Caesar like a talking corpse, and did not observe the effect his narrative of the gladiator’s death was producing.  But he soon found out.  While he was yet speaking, Caracalla, leaning on the table by his couch with both hands, fixed his eyes on his face, without a word.