CHAPTER 12.
THE PASSAGE OF THE WALL.
'A fair night this, Balbus! All moonlight and no mist! I was postedlast evening at the Ostian Gate, and was half choked by the fog.'
'If you were posted last night at the Ostian Gate, you were betterplaced than you are now. The ramparts here are as lonely as a ruin inthe provinces. Nothing behind us but the back of the Pincian Mount;nothing before us but the empty suburbs; nothing at each side of us butbrick and stone; nothing at our posts but ourselves. May I becrucified like St. Peter, if I believe that there is another place onthe whole round of the walls possessed of such solitary dulness asthis!'
'You are a man to find something to complain of, if you were lodged inone of the palaces yonder. The place is solitary enough, it is true;but whether it is dull or not depends on ourselves, its most honourableoccupants. I, for one, am determined to promote its joviality by thevery praiseworthy exertion of obliging you, my discontented friend,with an inexhaustible series of those stories for which, I may say,without arrogance, I am celebrated throughout the length and breadth ofall the barracks of Rome.'
'You may tell as many stories as you please, but do not imagine that Iwill make one of your audience.'
'You are welcome to attend to me or not, as you choose. Though you donot listen, I shall still relate my stories by way of practice. I willaddress them to the walls, or to the air, or to the defunct gods andgoddesses of antiquity, should they happen at this moment to behovering over the city in a rage, as some of the unconverted would haveus believe; or to our neighbours the Goths, if they are seized with asudden desire to quite their encampments, and obtain a near view of thefortifications that they are so discreetly unwilling to assault. Or,these materials for a fit and decent auditory failing me, I will tellmy stories to the most attentive of all listeners--myself.'
And the sentinel, without further delay, opened his budget ofanecdotes, with the easy fluency of of a man who possessed awell-placed confidence in the perfection of his capacities fornarration. Determined that his saturnine colleague should hear him,though he would not give him his attention, he talked in a raisedvoice, pacing briskly backwards and forwards over the space of hisallotted limits, and laughing with ludicrous regularity and complacencyat every jest that he happened to make in the course of hisill-rewarded narrative. He little thought, as he continued to proceedin his tale that its commencement had been welcomed by an unseenhearer, with emotions widely different from those which had dictatedthe observations of the unfriendly companion of his watch.
True to his determination, Ulpius, with part of the wages which he hadhoarded in Numerian's service, had procured a small lantern from a shopin one of the distant quarters of Rome; and veiling its light in apiece of coarse, thick cloth, had proceeded by the solitary pathway tohis second night's labour at the wall. He arrived at the breach, atthe commencement of the dialogue above related, and heard with delightthe sentinel's noisy resolution to amuse his companion in spite ofhimself. The louder and the longer the man talked, the less probablewas the chance that the Pagan's labours in the interior of the wallwould be suspected or overheard.
Softly clearing away the brushwood at the entrance of the hole that hehad made the night before, Ulpius crept in as far as he had penetratedon that occasion; and then, with mingled emotions of expectation andapprehension which affected him so powerfully, that he was for themoment hardly master of his actions, he slowly and cautiously uncoveredhis light.
His first glance was intuitively directed to the cavity that openedbeneath him. He saw immediately that it was less important, both insize and depth, than he had imagined it to be. The earth at thisparticular place had given way beneath the foundations of the wall,which had sunk down, deepening the chasm by their weight, into theyielding ground beneath them. A small spring of water (probably thefirst cause of the sinking in the earth) had bubbled up into the spacein the brick-work, which bit by bit, and year by year, it had graduallyundermined. Nor did it remain stagnant at this place. It trickledmerrily and quietly onward--a tiny rivulet, emancipated from one prisonin the ground only to enter another in the wall, bounded by no grassybanks, brightened by no cheerful light, admired by no human eye,followed in its small course through the inner fissures in the brick byno living thing but a bloated toad, or a solitary lizard: yet wendingas happily on its way through darkness and ruin, as its sisters whowere basking in the sunlight of the meadows, or leaping in the freshbreezes of the open mountain side.
Raising his eyes from the little spring, Ulpius next directed hisattention to the prospect above him.
Immediately over his head, the material of the interior of the wallpresented a smooth, flat, hard surface, which seemed capable ofresisting the most vigorous attempts at its destruction; but on lookinground, he perceived at one side of him and further inwards, anappearance of dark, dimly-defined irregularity, which promisedencouragingly for his intended efforts. He descended into the chasm ofthe rivulet, crawled up on a heap of crumbling brick-work, and gained ahole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to admit of hispassage through. Inch by inch, he enlarged the rift, crept into it,and found himself on a fragment of the bow of one of the foundationarches, which, though partly destroyed, still supported itself,isolated from all connection with the part of the upper wall which ithad once sustained, and which had gradually crumbled away into thecavities below.
He looked up. An immense rift soared above him, stretching itstortuous ramifications, at different points, into every part of thewall that was immediately visible. The whole structure seemed, at thisplace, to have received a sudden and tremendous wrench. But for thesupport of the sounder fortifications at each side of it, it could nothave sustained itself after the shock. The Pagan gazed aloft, into thefearful breaches which yawned above him, with ungovernable awe. Hissmall, fitful light was not sufficient to show him any of theirterminations. They looked, as he beheld them in dark relief againstthe rest of the hollow part of the wall, like mighty serpents twiningtheir desolating path right upward to the ramparts above; and he,himself, as he crouched on his pinnacle with his little light by hisside, was reduced by the wild grandeur, the vast, solemn gloom of theobscure, dusky, and fantastic objects around him, to the stature of apigmy. Could he have been seen from the ramparts high overhead, as henow peered down behind his lantern into the cavities and irregularitiesbelow him, he would have looked, with his flickering light, like a moleled by a glow-worm.
He paused to consider his next movements. In a stationary position,the damp coldness of the atmosphere was almost insupportable, but heattained a great advantage by his present stillness: he could listenundisturbed by the noises made by the bricks which crumbled from underhim, if he advanced.
Ere long, he heard a thin, winding, long-drawn sound, now louder, nowsofter; now approaching, now retreating; now verging towardsshrillness, now quickly returning to a faint, gentle swell. Suddenlythis strange unearthly music was interrupted by a succession of long,deep, rolling sounds, which travelled grandly about the fissures above,like prisoned thunderbolts striving to escape. Utterly ignorant thatthe first of these noises was occasioned by the night wind windingthrough the rents in the brick of the outer wall beyond him; and thesecond, by the echoes produced in the irregular cavities above, by thefootfall of the sentries overhead--roused by the influence of theplace, and the mystery of his employment, to a pitch of fanaticexaltation, which for the moment absolutely unsteadied hisreason--filled with the frantic enthusiasm of his designs, and thefearful legends of invisible beings and worlds which made thefoundation of his worship, Ulpius conceived, as he listened to thesounds around and above, that the gods of antiquity were now inviewless congregation hovering about him, and calling to him inunearthly voices and in an unknown tongue, to proceed upon his daringenterprise, in the full assurance of its near and glorious success.
'Roar and mutter, and make your hurricane music in my ears!' exclaimedthe Pagan, raising his withered hands, and add
ressing in a savageecstacy his imagined deities. 'Your servant Ulpius stops not on thejourney that leads him to your repeopled shrines! Blood, crime,danger, pain--pride and honour, joy and rest, have I strewn likesacrifices at your altars' feet! Time has whirled past me; youth andmanhood have lain long since buried in the hidden Lethe which is theportion of life; age has wreathed his coils over my body's strength,but still I watch by your temples and serve your mighty cause! Yourvengeance is near! Monarchs of the world, your triumph is at hand!'
He remained for some time in the same position, looking fixedly up intothe trackless darkness above him, drinking in the soundswhich--alternately rising and sinking--still floated round him. Thetrembling gleam of his lantern fell red and wild upon his lividcountenance. His shaggy hair floated in the cold breezes that blew byhim. At this moment he would have appeared from a distance, like aphantom of fire perishing in a mist of darkness; like a Gnome inadoration in the bowels of the earth; like a forsaken spirit in asolitary purgatory, watching for the advent of a glimpse of beauty, ora breath of air.
At length he aroused himself from his trance, trimmed with careful handhis guiding lantern, and set forward to penetrate the breadth of thegreat rift he had just entered.
He moved on in an oblique direction several feet, now creeping over thetops of the foundation arches, now skirting the extremities ofprotrusions in the ruined brick-work, now descending into dark slimyrubbish-choked chasms, until the rift suddenly diminished in alldirections.
The atmosphere was warmer in the place he now occupied; he couldfaintly distinguish patches of dark moss, dotted here and there overthe uneven surface of the wall; and once or twice, some blades of longflat grass, that grew from a prominence immediately above his head,were waved in his face by the wind, which he could now feel blowingthrough the narrow fissure that he was preparing to enlarge. It wasevident that he had by this time advanced to within a few feet of theouter extremity of the wall.
'Numerian wanders after his child through the streets,' muttered thePagan, as he deposited his lantern by his side, bared his tremblingarms, and raised his iron bar, 'the slaves of his neighbour the senatorare forth to pursue me. On all sides my enemies are out after me; but,posted here, I mock their strictest search! If they would track me tomy hiding-place, they must penetrate the walls of Rome! If they wouldhunt me down in my lair, they must assail me to-night in the camp ofthe Goths! Fools! let them look to themselves! I seal the doom oftheir city, with the last brick that I tear from their defencelesswalls!'
He laughed to himself as he thrust his bar boldly into the crevicebefore him. In some places the bricks yielded easily to his efforts;in others, their resistance was only to be overcome by the exertion ofhis utmost strength. Resolutely and unceasingly he continued hislabours; now wounding his hands against the jagged surfaces presentedby the widening fissure; now involuntarily dropping his instrument fromungovernable exhaustion; but, still working bravely on, in defiance ofevery hindrance that opposed him, until he gained the interior of thenew rift.
As he drew his lantern after him into the cavity that he had made, heperceived that, unless it was heightened immediately over him, he couldproceed no further, even in a creeping position. Irritated at thisunexpected necessity for more violent exertion, desperate in hisdetermination to get through the wall at all hazards on that verynight, he recklessly struck his bar upwards with all his strength,instead of gradually and softly loosening the material of the surfacethat opposed him, as he had done before.
A few moments of this labour had scarcely elapsed, when a considerableportion of the brick-work, consolidated into one firm mass, fell withlightning suddenness from above. It hurled him under it, prostrate onthe foundation arch which had been his support; crushed and dislocatedhis right shoulder; and shivered his lantern into fragments. A groanof irrepressible anguish burst from his lips. He was left inimpenetrable darkness.
The mass of brick-work, after it had struck him, rolled a little to oneside. By a desperate exertion he extricated himself from underit--only to swoon from the fresh anguish caused to him by the effort.
For a short time he lay insensible in his cold dark solitude. Then,reviving after this first shock, he began to experience in all theirseverity, the fierce spasms, the dull gnawings, the throbbing torments,that were the miserable consequences of the injury he received. Hisarm lay motionless by his side--he had neither strength nor resolutionto move any one of the other sound limbs in his body. At one momenthis deep, sobbing, stifled respirations, syllabled horrible andhalf-formed curses--at another, his panting breaths suddenly died awaywithin him; and then he could hear the blood dripping slowly from hisshoulder, with dismal regularity, into a little pool that it had formedalready by his side.
The shrill breezes which wound through the crevices in the wall beforehim, were now felt only on his wounded limb. They touched its surfacelike innumerable splinters of thin, sharp ice; they penetrated hisflesh like rushing sparks struck out of a sea of molten lead. Therewere moments, during the first pangs of this agony, when if he had beenpossessed of a weapon and of the strength to use it, he would havesacrificed his ambition for ever by depriving himself of life.
But this desire to end his torments with his existence lasted not long.Gradually, the anguish in his body awakened a wilder and strongerdistemper in his mind, and then the two agonies, physical and mental,rioted over him together in fierce rivalry, divesting him of allthoughts but such as were by their own agency created or aroused.
For some time he lay helpless in his misery, alternately venting bystifled groans the unalleviated torment of his wounds, and lamentingwith curses the failure of his enterprise, at the very moment of itsapparent success. At length, the pangs that struck through him seemedto grow gradually less frequent; he hardly knew now from what part ofhis frame they more immediately proceeded. Insensibly, his faculties ofthinking and feeling grew blunted; then he remained a little while in amysterious unrefreshing repose of body and mind; and then hisdisordered senses, left unguided and unrestrained, became the victimsof a sudden and terrible delusion.
The blank darkness around him appeared, after an interval, to begradually dawning into a dull light, thick and misty, like thereflections on clouds which threaten a thunderstorm at the close ofevening. Soon, this atmosphere seemed to be crossed and streaked witha fantastic trellis-work of white, seething vapour. Then the mass ofbrick-work which had struck him down, grew visible at his side,enlarged to an enormous bulk, and endued with a power of self-motion,by which it mysteriously swelled and shrank, and raised and depresseditself, without quitting for a moment its position near him. And then,from its dark and toiling surface there rose a long stream of duskyshapes, which twined themselves about the misty trellis-work above, andtook the prominent and palpable form of human countenances, marked byevery difference of age and distorted by every variety of suffering.
There were infantine faces, wreathed about with grave-worms that hunground them like locks of filthy hair; aged faces, dabbled with gore andslashed with wounds; youthful faces, seamed with livid channels, alongwhich ran unceasing tears; lovely faces, distorted into fixedexpressions of raging pain, wild malignity, and despairing gloom. Notone of these countenances exactly resembled the other. Each wasdistinguished by a revolting character of its own. Yet, howeverdeformed might be their other features, the eyes of all were preservedunimpaired. Speechless and bodiless, they floated in unceasing myriadsup to the fantastic trellis-work, which seemed to swell its wildproportions to receive them. There they clustered, in their goblinamphitheatre, and fixed and silently they all glared down, without oneexception, on the Pagan's face!
Meanwhile, the walls at the side began to gleam out with a light oftheir own, making jagged boundaries to the midway scene of phantomfaces. Then the rifts in their surfaces widened, and disgorgedmisshapen figures of priests and idols of the old time, which cameforth in every hideous deformity of aspect, mocking at the faces on thetrellis-work; while behind
and over the whole, soared shapes ofgigantic darkness, robed in grim cloudy resemblances of skins such aswere worn by the Goths, and wielding through the quivering vapour,mighty and shadow-like weapons of war. From the whole of this ghastlyassemblage there rose not the slightest sound. A stillness, as of adead and ruined world, possessed in all its quarters the appallingscene. The deep echoes of the sentries' footsteps and the faintdirging of the melancholy winds were no more. The blood that had asyet dripped from his wound, made no sound now in the Pagan's ear; evenhis own agony of terror was as silent as were the visionary demons whohad aroused it. Days, years, centuries, seemed to pass, as he laygazing up, in a trance of horror, into his realm of peopled and ghostlydarkness. At last nature yielded under the trial; the phantom prospectsuddenly whirled round him with fearful velocity, and his senses soughtrefuge from the thraldom of their own creation in a deep and welcomeswoon.
Time had moved wearily onward, the chiding winds had many times wavedthe dry locks of his hair to and fro about his brow, as if to bid himawaken and arise, ere he again recovered his consciousness. Once morearoused to the knowledge of his position and the sensation of hiswound, he slowly raised himself upon his uninjured arm, and lookedwildly around for the faintest appearance of a gleam of light. But thewinding and uneven nature of the track which he had formed to lead himthrough the wall, effectually prevented the moonbeams, then floatinginto the outermost of the cavities that he had made, from reaching theplace where he now lay. Not a single object was even faintlydistinguishable around him. Darkness hemmed him in, in rayless andtriumphant obscurity, on every side.
The first agonies of the injury he had received had resolved themselvesinto one dull, heavy, unchanging sensation of pain. The vision thathad overwhelmed his senses was now, in a vast and shadowy form, presentonly to his memory, filling the darkness with fearful recollections,and not with dismal forms; and urging on him a restless, headlongyearning to effect his escape from the lonely and unhallowed sepulchre,the prison of solitude and death, that his own fatal exertionsthreatened him with, should he linger much longer in the caverns of thewall.
'I must pass from this darkness into light--I must breathe the air ofthe sky, or I shall perish in the damps of this vault,' he exclaimed ina hoarse, moaning voice, as he raised himself gradually and painfullyinto a creeping position; and turning round slowly, commenced hismeditated retreat.
His brain still whirled with the emotions that had so latelyoverwhelmed his mind; his right hand hung helplessly by his side,dragged after him like a prisoner's chain, and lacerated by the unevensurface of the ground over which it was slowly drawn, as--supportinghimself on his left arm, and creeping forward a few inches at atime--he set forth on his toilsome journey.
Here, he paused bewildered in the darkness; there, he either checkedhimself by a convulsive effort from falling headlong into the unknowndeeps beneath him, or lost the little ground he had gained in labourand agony, by retracing his way at the bidding of some unexpectedobstacle. Now he gnashed his teeth in anguish, now he cursed indespair, now he was breathless with exhaustion; but still, with anobstinacy that had in it something of the heroic, he never failed inhis fierce resolution to effect his escape.
Slowly and painfully, moving with the pace and the perseverance of thetortoise, hopeless yet determined as a navigator in a strange sea, hewrithed onward and onward upon his unguided course, until he reaped atlength the reward of his long suffering, by the sudden discovery of athin ray of moonlight toiling through a crevice in the murky brickworkbefore him. Hardly did the hearts of the Magi when the vision of 'thestar in the East' first dawned on their eyes, leap within them with amore vivid transport, than that which animated the heart of Ulpius atthe moment when he beheld the inspiring and guiding light.
Yet a little more exertion, a little more patience, a little moreanguish; and he stood once again, a ghastly and crippled figure, beforethe outer cavity in the wall.
It was near daybreak; the moon shone faintly in the dull, grey heaven;a small, vaporous rain was sinking from the shapeless clouds; thewaning night showed bleak and cheerless to the earth, but cast nomournful or reproving influence over the Pagan's mind. He looked roundon his solitary lurking place, and beheld no human figure in its lonelyrecesses. He looked up at the ramparts, and saw that the sentinelsstood silent and apart, wrapped in their heavy watch-cloaks, andsupported on their trusty weapons. It was perfectly apparent that theevents of his night of suffering and despair had passed unheeded by theouter world.
He glanced back with a shudder upon his wounded and helpless limb; thenhis eyes fixed themselves upon the wall. After surveying it with anearnest and defiant gaze, he slowly moved the brushwood with his foot,against the small cavity in its outer surface.
'Days pass, wounds heal, chances change,' muttered the old man,departing from his haunt with slow and uncertain steps. 'In the minesI have borne lashes without a murmur--I have felt my chains widening,with each succeeding day, the ulcers that their teeth of iron firstgnawed in my flesh, and have yet lived to loosen my fetters, and toclose my sores! Shall this new agony have a power to conquer megreater than the others that are past? I will even yet return in timeto overcome the resistance of the wall! My arm is crushed, but mypurpose is whole!'