--building her power on the brute animal appetites of her dupes and
slaves: but she had duped herself even more than them. She was finding
out by bitter lessons that it was 'to the beast', and not to her, that
her vassal kings of the earth had been giving their power and strength;
and the ferocity and lust which she had pampered so cunningly in them,
had become her curse and her destruction.... Drunk with the blood of the
saints; blinded by her own conceit and jealousy to the fact that she had
been crushing and extirpating out of her empire for centuries past all
which was noble, purifying, regenerative, divine, she sat impotent
and doting, the prey of every fresh adventurer, the slave of her own
slaves.... 'And the kings of the earth, who had sinned with her, hated
the harlot, and made her desolate and naked, and devoured her flesh, and
burned her with fire. For God had put into their hearts to fulfil His
will, and to agree, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the
words of God should be fulfilled.'.... Everywhere sensuality, division,
hatred, treachery, cruelty, uncertainty, terror; the vials of God's
wrath poured out. Where was to be the end of it all? asked every man
of his neighbour, generation after generation; and received for answer
only, 'It is better to die than to live.'

And yet in one ship out of that sad fleet, there was peace; peace amid
shame and terror; amid the groans of the wounded, and the sighs of
the starving; amid all but blank despair. The great triremes and
quinqueremes rushed onward past the lagging transports, careless, in the
mad race for safety, that they were leaving the greater number of their
comrades defenceless in the rear of the flight; but from one little
fishing-craft alone no base entreaties, no bitter execrations greeted
the passing flash and roll of their mighty oars. One after another, day
by day, they came rushing up out of the northern offing, each like a
huge hundred-footed dragon, panting and quivering, as if with terror, at
every loud pulse of its oars, hurling the wild water right and left
with the mighty share of its beak, while from the bows some gorgon or
chimaera, elephant or boar, stared out with brazen eyes toward the coast
of Africa, as if it, too, like the human beings which it carried, was
dead to every care but that of dastard flight. Past they rushed, one
after another; and off the poop some shouting voice chilled all hearts
for a moment, with the fearful