more back at the old trade, and to be doing my share.

But there was no chivalry about the fellows who held me by my bonds.
They thrust me into a small temple near by, which once had been a fane
in much favour with travellers, who wished to show gratitude for the
safe journey to the capital, but which now was robbed and ruined, and
they swung to the stone entrance gate and barred it, leaving me to
commune with myself. Presently, they told me, I should be put to death
by torments. Well, this seemed to be the new custom of Atlantis, and I
should have to endure it as best I could. The High Gods, it appeared,
had no further use for my services in Atlantis, and I was not in the
mood then to bite very much at their decision. What I had seen of the
country since my return had not enamoured me very much with its new
conditions.

The little temple in which I was gaoled had been robbed and despoiled of
all its furnishments. But the light-slits, where at certain hours of the
day the rays of our Lord the Sun had fallen upon the image of the God,
before this had been taken away, gave me vantage places from which I
could see over the camp of these rebel besiegers, and a dreary prospect
it was. The people seemed to have shucked off the culture of centuries
in as many months, and to have gone back for the most part to sheer
brutishness. The majority harboured on the bare ground. Few owned
shelter, and these were merely bowers of mud and branches.

They fought and quarrelled amongst themselves for food, eating their
meat raw, and their grain (when they had it) unground. Many who passed
my vision I saw were even gnawing the soft inside of tree bark.

The dead lay where they fell. The sick and the wounded found no hand
to tend them. Great man-eating birds hovered about the camp or skulked
about, heavy with gorging, amongst the hovels, and no one had public
spirit enough to give them battle. The stink of the place rose up to
heaven as a foul incense inviting a pestilence. There was no order, no
trace of strong command anywhere. With three hundred well-disciplined
troops it seemed to me that I could have sent those poor desperate
hordes flying in panic to the forest.

However, there was no very lengthy space of time granted me for thinking
out the policy of this matter to any great depth. The attack on the gate
had been delivered with suddenness; the repulse was not slow. Of what
desperate fighting took place in the galleries, and in th