ity.
Achillas, he reported, had wantonly murdered Dioscorides and Serapion,
whom Caesar had sent as envoys to Pelusium, and was marching on the
city with his whole army of Italian renegades, Syrian banditti,
convicts, and runaway slaves, twenty thousand strong.

There was nothing to do but to prepare to weather the storm in the
palace enclosure, which, with its high walls, was practically a
fortress in itself. There were only four thousand Romans, and yet
there was a long circuit of defences to man. But Drusus never saw his
general putting forth greater energy. That night, instead of feasting,
the soldiers laboured, piling up the ramparts by the light of torches.
The city was surging and thundering without the palace gates. Caesar
had placed the king under guard, but Arsinoe--his younger sister--had
slipped out of the palace to join herself to the advancing host of
Achillas, and speedily that general would be at hand. Caesar as usual
was everywhere, with new schemes for the defences, new enthusiasm for
his officers, new inspiration for his men. No one slept nor cared to
sleep inside the palace walls. They toiled for dear life, for with
morning, at most, Achillas would be upon them; and by morning, if
Pothinus's plans had not failed, they would have been drugged and
helpless to a man, none able to draw sword from scabbard. It was a new
experience to one and all, for these Romans to stand on the defensive.
For once Caesar had made a false step--he ought to have taken on his
voyage more men. He stood with his handful, with the sea on one side
of him and a great city and a nation in arms against him on the other.
The struggle was not to be for empire, but for life. But the Romans
were too busy that night to realize anything save the need of untiring
exertion. If they had counted the odds against them, four thousand
against a nation, they might well have despaired, though their
chieftain were Caesar.

Two years earlier Drusus, as he hurried to and fro transmitting orders
for his general, might have been fain to draw aside and muse on the
strangeness of the night scene. The sky was clear, as almost always in
a land where a thunder-storm is often as rare as an eclipse; the stars
twinkled out of heavens of soft blackness; the crescent of a new moon
hung like a silvered bow out over the harbour, and made a thin pathway
of lustre across the moving, shimmering waters. Dimly the sky-line was
visible; by the Pharos and its mole lo