The room in which they were lay on one side of the hypostyle and behind the right-hand—­or western—­colonnade; more forward, therefore, than the veiled statue and to its left hand.  The noise of the toilers at the barricade and the crash of the blows of the battering-ram came up from just below, and at each thud of the engine the senseless man started convulsively and a look of intense pain crossed his face.  But, though it was indeed grievous to Gorgo to see her father suffering, though she told herself again and again that, ere long, the sanctuary must fall into the hands of the Christians, she felt safe, thankful and sheltered up here, in her old friend’s half-lighted and barely-furnished room, shut off, at any rate, from the frenzied wretches of whom she thought only with loathing and fear.

She was wearied out with her night of unrest, but the agitation and excitement she had gone through were still vividly present to her mind, and even on the comfortable couch in her own snug room at home her perturbed spirit would have prevented her sleeping.  Her brain was still in a ferment, and here, in comparative peace, she had time to think over all she had gone through during the last few hours, and the catastrophes that had befallen her grandmother and her father.  She had exchanged but few words with the physician, who was still unceasingly busy in trying to restore his patient to consciousness, and who had assured her that he had every hope of her father’s recovery.

But at length the girl looked up with an eager gaze and said, sadly enough:  “You said something about an antidote to poison, Apuleius?  Then my father tried to escape the final destruction by attempting to kill himself.—­Is it so?”

The leech looked at her keenly, and after confirming her suspicion and explaining to her exactly how the fateful deed had been accomplished, he went on: 

“The storm had completely unnerved him—­it unmanned us all—­and yet that was only the prelude to the tremendous doom which is hanging over the universe.  It is at hand; we can hear its approach; the stones are yielding! the Christian’s engines are opening the way for it to enter!”

Apuleius spoke in a tone of sinister foreboding, and the falling stones dislodged by the battering-ram thundered a solemn accompaniment to his prophecy.  Gorgo, turned pale; but it was not the physician’s ominous speech that alarmed her, but the quaking of the walls of the room.  Still, the Serapeum was built for eternity; the ram might bring down a wall, but it could not destroy or even shake the building itself.