so harmless
was Lydon's retaliation; he quickly sprang to his feet, and aimed his
cestus full on the broad chest of his antagonist. Tetraides
reeled--the populace shouted....

The people had been already rendered savage by the exhibition of
blood; they thirsted for more; their superstition was aided by their
ferocity. Aroused, inflamed by the spectacle of their victims, they
forgot the authority of their rulers. It was one of those dread
popular convulsions common to crowds wholly ignorant, half free and
half servile, and which the peculiar constitution of the Roman
provinces so frequently exhibited. The power of the praetor was a reed
beneath the whirlwind; still, at his word the guards had drawn
themselves along the lower benches, on which the upper classes sat
separate from the vulgar. They made but a feeble barrier; the waves of
the human sea halted for a moment, to enable Arbaces to count the
exact moment of his doom! In despair, and in a terror which beat down
even pride, he glanced his eye over the rolling and rushing crowd;
when, right above them, through the wide chasm which had been left in
the velaria, he beheld a strange and awful apparition; he beheld, and
his craft restored his courage!

He stretched his hand on high; over his lofty brow and royal features
there came an expression of unutterable solemnity and command.

"Behold!" he roared with a voice of thunder, which stilled the roar of
the crowd: "behold how the gods protect the guiltless! The fires of
the avenging Orcus burst forth against the false witness of my
accusers!"

The eyes of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld
with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the
form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness--the breaches
fire!--a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment,
now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed
terrifically forth with intolerable glare!

There was a dead, heart-sunken silence; through which there suddenly
broke the roar of the lion, which was echoed back from within the
building by the sharper and fiercer yells of its fellow beasts. Dread
seers were they of the Burden of the Atmosphere, and wild prophets of
the wrath to come!

Then there arose on high the universal shrieks of women; the men
stared at each other, but were dumb. At that moment they felt the
earth shake under their feet; the walls of the theater trembled; and
b