The whole party had sat during some long and anxious minutes, listening to the appalling thunder-claps, when Orpheus rushed into the banqueting-room, with the same frenzied and terror-stricken haste as before, among the revellers, crying:  “It is the end-all is over!  The world is falling asunder!  Fire is come down from heaven!  The earth is in flames already —­I saw it with my own eyes!  I have come down from the roof. . . .

“Father!  Where is my father?”

At this news the company started up in fresh alarm, Pappus, the mathematician, cried out:  “The conflagration has begun!  Flame and fire are falling from the skies!”

“Lost-lost!” wailed Eunapius; while Porphyrius hastily felt in the folds of his purple garment, took out a small crystal phial and went, pale but calm, up to the high-priest.  He laid his hand on the arm of the friend whom he had looked up to all his life with affectionate admiration, and said with an expression of tender regret: 

“Farewell.  We have often disputed over the death of Cato—­you disapproving and I approving it.  Now I follow his example.  Look—­there is enough for us both.”

He hastily put the phial to his mouth, and part of the liquid had passed his lips before Olympius understood the situation and seized his arm.  The effect of the deadly fluid was instantly manifest; but Porphyrius had hardly lost consciousness when Apuleius had rushed to his side.  The physician had succumbed to the universal panic and resigned himself doggedly to Fate; but as soon as an appeal was made to his medical skill and he heard a cry for help, he had thrown off the wrapper from his head and hastened to the merchant’s side to combat the effects of the poison, as clear-headed and decisive as in his best hours by the bed of sickness or in the lecture-room.

When the very backbone of the soul seems to be broken, a sense of duty is the one and last thing that holds it together and keeps it upright; and nature has implanted in us such a strong and instinctive regard for life —­which we are so apt to contemn—­that even within a few paces of the grave we cherish and foster it as carefully as in its prime, when the end seems still remote.

The merchant’s desperate deed had been done under the very eyes of Orpheus, and the newer horror so completely overshadowed the older, that he hastened unbidden to help the physician lay the unconscious man on the nearest couch; but then he went off again in search of his parents.  Olympius, however, who at the sight of his friend’s weakness had suddenly comprehended how much depended, in these last hours, on his own resolute demeanor, detained the youth, and sternly desired him to give an exact and clear account of what had happened on the roof.  The young musician obeyed; and his report was certainly far from reassuring.

A ball of fire had fallen with a terrific noise on the cupola, mingling with flames that seemed to rise like streams of fire from the earth.  Then, again the heavens had opened with a blinding flash and Orpheus had seen—­with his own eyes seen—­a gigantic monster—­an uprooted mountain perhaps—­which had slowly moved towards the back-wall of the Serapeum with an appalling clatter; and not rain, but rivers, rushing torrents of water, had poured down on the men on guard.