Like the rest of the citizens, he was sunk in a heavy
stupor of starvation--selfish, reckless, brutalised. No disasters could
depress, no atrocities rouse him. Famine had torn asunder every social
tie, had withered every human sympathy among his besieged fellow-
citizens, and he was famishing like them.
At the moment when the dawn had first appeared, could he have looked
down by some mysterious agency to the interior foundations of the wall,
from the rampart on which he kept his weary watch, such a sight must
then have presented itself as would have aroused even his sluggish
observation to rigid attention and involuntary surprise.
Winding upward and downward among jagged masses of ruined brick-work,
now lost amid the shadows of dreary chasms, now prominent over the
elevations of rising arches, the dark irregular passages broken by
Ulpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves to his
eyes; not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by the
reptiles native to the place, but traced in all their mazes by human
forms.
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