embrace their knees; but the latter only
dash them aside, and the blood gushes up to the ceiling, falls back on
the linen clothes that line the walls, streams from the trunks of
decapitated corpses, fills the aqueducts, and rolls in great red pools
along the ground.

Antony is steeped in it up to his middle. He steps into it, sucks it up
with his lips, and quivers with joy at feeling it on his limbs and under
his hair, which is quite wet with it.

The night falls. The terrible clamour abates.

The Solitaries have disappeared.

Suddenly, on the outer galleries lining the nine stages of the Pharos,
Antony perceives thick black lines, as if a flock of crows had alighted
there. He hastens thither, and soon finds himself on the summit.

A huge copper mirror turned towards the sea reflects the ships in the
offing.

Antony amuses himself by looking at them; and as he continues looking at
them, their number increases.

They are gathered in a gulf formed like a crescent. Behind, upon a
promontory, stretches a new city built in the Roman style of
architecture, with cupolas of stone, conical roofs, marble work in red
and blue, and a profusion of bronze attached to the volutes of
capitals, to the tops of houses, and to the angles of cornices. A wood,
formed of cypress-trees, overhangs it. The colour of the sea is greener;
the air is colder. On the mountains at the horizon there is snow.

Antony is about to pursue his way when a man accosts him, and says:

"Come! they are waiting for you!"

He traverses a forum, enters a court-yard, stoops under a gate, and he
arrives before the front of the palace, adorned with a group in wax
representing the Emperor Constantine hurling the dragon to the earth. A
porphyry basin supports in its centre a golden conch filled with
pistachio-nuts. His guide informs him that he may take some of them. He
does so.

Then he loses himself, as it were, in a succession of apartments.

Along the walls may be seen, in mosaic, generals offering conquered
cities to the Emperor on the palms of their hands. And on every side are
columns of basalt, gratings of silver filigree, seats of ivory, and
tapestries embroidered with pearls. The light falls from the vaulted
roof, and Antony proceeds on his way. Tepid exhalations spread around;
occasionally he hears the modest patter of a sandal. Posted in the
ante-chambers, the custodians--who resemble automatons--bear on their
shoulders vermilion-coloured trun