The sky had no wind; the earth no echoes--the
pervading desolation appalled the eye; the vast stillness weighed dull
on the ear--it was a scene as of the last-left city of an exhausted
world, decaying noiselessly into primeval chaos.
Through this atmosphere of darkness and death, along these paths of
pestilence and famine; unregarding and unregarded, the Pagan and his
prisoner passed slowly onward towards the quarter of the city opposite
the Pincian Mount. No ray of thought, even yet, brightened the dull
faculties of Ulpius; still he walked forward vacantly, and still he was
followed wearily by the fast-failing girl.
Sunk in her mingled stupor of bodily weakness and mental despair, she
never spoke, never raised her head, never looked forth on the one side
or the other. She had now ceased even to feel the strong, cold grasp of
the Pagan's hand. Shadowy visions of spheres beyond the world, arrayed
in enchanting beauty, and people with happy spirits in their old earthly
forms, where a long deathless existence moved smoothly and dreamily
onward, without mark of time or taint of woe, were opening before her
mind.
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