Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits, after I had explained myself as a passing stranger they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion.  They told me the story of the “dead city”:  that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart, sheltering over twenty thousand persons; that they had waged war with its inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in the ruined suburb; after which, they had driven them forth at the point of the sword.  The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the third day’s bombardment.

They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured walls of the curious temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship.  They particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building, which, having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had as matter of duty sedulously defiled and defaced.  The reputed sites of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed, and various sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well constructed, they believed, with a dreadful design.  Besides these, they led me to see a large and deeply chiselled marble vase, or basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble and of life size, and of which they told some romantic stories.  They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their deity countenanced their reception here of a baptism of regeneration as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come:  that here parents “went into the water” for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers:  that thus the great vase came to be associated with all their most cherished memories, and was therefore the chief object of all others in the building, upon which they bestowed the greatest degree of their idolatrous affection.  On this account, the victors had so diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in.

They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple to see where it had been struck by lightning on the Sabbath before; and to look out, east and south, on wasted farms—­like those I had seen near the city—­extending till they were lost in the distance.  Close to the scar left by the thunderbolt were fragments of food, cruses of liquor and broken drinking-vessels, with a bass-drum and a steamboat signal-bell, of which, with pain, I learned the use.

It was after nightfall when I was ready to cross the river on my return.  The wind had freshened since sunset and, the water beating roughly into my little boat, I headed higher up the stream than the point I had left in the morning, and landed where a faint glimmering light invited me to steer.  Among the rushes—­sheltered only by the darkness, without roof between them and the sky—­I came upon a crowd of several hundred human creatures whom my movements roused from uneasy slumber.