he skull, still retaining its
fleshless hollows, assumed slowly, and in the mysterious confusion of a
dream, the face of Apaecides; and forth from the grinning jaws there
crept a small worm, and it crawled to the feet of Arbaces. He attempted
to stamp on it and crush it; but it became longer and larger with that
attempt. It swelled and bloated till it grew into a vast serpent: it
coiled itself round the limbs of Arbaces; it crunched his bones; it
raised its glaring eyes and poisonous jaws to his face. He writhed in
vain; he withered--he gasped--beneath the influence of the blighting
breath--he felt himself blasted into death. And then a voice came from
the reptile, which still bore the face of Apaecides and rang in his
reeling ear:

'THY VICTIM IS THY JUDGE! THE WORM THOU WOULDST CRUSH BECOMES THE
SERPENT THAT DEVOURS THEE!'

With a shriek of wrath, and woe, and despairing resistance, Arbaces
awoke--his hair on end--his brow bathed in dew--his eyes glazed and
staring--his mighty frame quivering as an infant's, beneath the agony of
that dream. He awoke--he collected himself--he blessed the gods whom he
disbelieved, that he was in a dream--he turned his eyes from side to
side--he saw the dawning light break through his small but lofty
window--he was in the Precincts of Day--he rejoiced--he smiled; his eyes
fell, and opposite to him he beheld the ghastly features, the lifeless
eye, the livid lip--of the hag of Vesuvius!

'Ha!' he cried, placing his hands before his eyes, as to shut out the
grisly vision, 'do I dream still?--Am I with the dead?'

'Mighty Hermes--no! Thou art with one death-like, but not dead.
Recognize thy friend and slave.'

There was a long silence. Slowly the shudders that passed over the
limbs of the Egyptian chased each other away, faintlier and faintlier
dying till he was himself again.

'It was a dream, then,' said he. 'Well--let me dream no more, or the
day cannot compensate for the pangs of night. Woman, how camest thou
here, and wherefore?'

'I came to warn thee,' answered the sepulchral voice of the saga.

'Warn me! The dream lied not, then? Of what peril?'

'Listen to me. Some evil hangs over this fated city. Fly while it be
time. Thou knowest that I hold my home on that mountain beneath which
old tradition saith there yet burn the fires of the river of Phlegethon;
and in my cavern is a vast abyss, and in that abyss I have of late
marked a red and dull stream creep slowly