is side! Come! Come!"

The echo repeats:

"Come! Come!"

He lets his arms fall down, quite dazed.

"What a shame! Ah! poor Antony!"

And immediately he hears a whisper:

"Poor Antony."

"Is that anyone? Answer!"

It is the wind passing through the spaces between the rocks that causes
these intonations, and in their confused sonorities he distinguishes
voices, as if the air were speaking. They are low and insinuating, a
kind of sibilant utterance:

_The first_--"Do you wish for women?"

_The second_--"Nay; rather great piles of money."

_The third_--"A shining sword."

_The others_--"All the people admire you."

"Go to sleep."

"You will cut their throats. Yes! you will cut their throats."

At the same time, visible objects undergo a transformation. On the edge
of the cliff, the old palm-tree, with its cluster of yellow leaves,
becomes the torso of a woman leaning over the abyss, and poised by her
mass of hair.

Antony re-enters his cell, and the stool which sustains the big book,
with its pages filled with black letters, seems to him a bush covered
with swallows.

"Without doubt, it is the torch that is making this play of light. Let
us put it out!"

He puts it out, and finds himself in profound darkness.

And, suddenly, through the midst of the air, passes first, a pool of
water, then a prostitute, the corner of a temple, a figure of a soldier,
and a chariot with two white horses prancing.

These images make their appearance abruptly, in successive shocks,
standing out from the darkness like pictures of scarlet above a
background of ebony.

Their motion becomes more rapid; they pass in a dizzy fashion. At other
times they stop, and, growing pale by degrees, dissolve--or, rather,
they fly away, and instantly others arrive in their stead.

Antony droops his eyelids.

They multiply, surround, besiege him. An unspeakable terror seizes hold
of him, and he no longer has any sensation but that of a burning
contraction in the epigastrium. In spite of the confusion of his brain,
he is conscious of a tremendous silence which separates him from all the
world. He tries to speak; impossible! It is as if the link that bound
him to existence was snapped; and, making no further resistance, Antony
falls upon the mat.

CHAPTER II.

THE TEMPTATION OF LOVE AND POWER.

Then, a great shadow--more subtle than an ordinary shadow, from whose
borders other shadows hang in festoons--traces itself upon