y understood not, but in which were repeated from
moment to moment the words, "Behold the Judge cometh in the day of
wrath and disaster." Thus this deluge of restless and sleepless people
encircled the burning city, like a tempest-driven sea.

But neither despair nor blasphemy nor hymn helped in any way.
The destruction seemed as irresistible, perfect, and pitiless as
Predestination itself. Around Pompey's Amphitheatre stores of hemp
caught fire, and ropes used in circuses, arenas, and every kind of
machine at the games, and with them the adjoining buildings containing
barrels of pitch with which ropes were smeared. In a few hours all that
part of the city, beyond which lay the Campus Martius, was so lighted by
bright yellow flames that for a time it seemed to the spectators, only
half conscious from terror, that in the general ruin the order of night
and day had been lost, and that they were looking at sunshine. But later
a monstrous bloody gleam extinguished all other colors of flame. From
the sea of fire shot up to the heated sky gigantic fountains, and
pillars of flame spreading at their summits into fiery branches and
feathers; then the wind bore them away, turned them into golden threads,
into hair, into sparks, and swept them on over the Campania toward
the Alban Hills. The night became brighter; the air itself seemed
penetrated, not only with light, but with flame. The Tiber flowed on
as living fire. The hapless city was turned into one pandemonium. The
conflagration seized more and more space, took hills by storm, flooded
level places, drowned valleys, raged, roared, and thundered.

Chapter XLV

MACRINUS, a weaver, to whose house Vinicius was carried, washed him,
and gave him clothing and food. When the young tribune had recovered his
strength altogether, he declared that he would search further for
Linus that very night. Macrinus, who was a Christian, confirmed
Chilo's report, that Linus, with Clement the chief priest, had gone to
Ostrianum, where Peter was to baptize a whole company of confessors of
the new faith. In that division of the city it was known to Christians
that Linus had confided the care of his house two days before to a
certain Gaius. For Vinicius this was a proof that neither Lygia nor
Ursus had remained in the house, and that they also must have gone to
Ostrianum.

This thought gave him great comfort. Linus was an old man, for whom it
would be difficult to walk daily to the distan