As these victims of famine lay expiring in the street, they
heard above them his raving voice cursing them for Christians,
triumphing over them as defeated enemies destroyed by his hand,
exhorting his imaginary adherents to fling the slain above on the dead
below, until the bodies of the besiegers of the temple were piled, as
barriers against their living comrades, round its walls. Sometimes his
frenzy gloried in the fancied revival of the foul and sanguinary
ceremonies of Pagan superstition. Then he bared his arms, and shouted
aloud for the sacrifice; he committed dark and nameless atrocities--for
now again the dead and the dying lay before him, to give substance to
the shadow of his evil thoughts; and Plague and Hunger were as creatures
of his will, and slew the victim for the altar ready to his hands.
At other times, when the raving fit had passed away, and he lay panting
in the darkest corner of the interior of the temple, his insanity
assumed another and a mournful form. His voice grew low and moaning;
the wreck of his memory--wandering and uncontrollable--floated back, far
back, on the dark waters of the past; and his tongue uttered fragments
of words and phrases that he had murmured at his father's knees--
farewell, childish wishes that he had breathed in his mother's ear--
innocent, anxious questions which he had addressed to Macrinus, the high
priest, when he first entered the service of the gods at Alexandria.
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