"In the belly! In her abominable belly!"
The great silver body rolled over mutilated; the blows rang pitiless,
leaving gaps bitten in the metal.
An old pagan stood by and veiled his face from the sacrilege. He was
secretly weeping at the thought that now the end of the world, the end
of everything, was come, for the earth would no longer bring forth a
blade of corn.
A hermit from the deserts of Mesopotamia, clothed in sheepskin,
wearing coarse sandals and an empty gourd slung from his shoulder,
stood over the statue, sheep-crook in hand--
"This forty years I have never washed, that I might not see my
nakedness, nor fall into temptation. And yet coming into cities,
straight one perceives these accursed gods without a rag upon them.
How long must we endure these devilish temptations! At the hearth, in
the street, on the roof, in the baths, these idols everywhere above
one's head?... Faugh! Faugh! Faugh! How can I spit enough disgust on
things like these?"
The old man spurned the prostrate woman's form with his sandal in
energetic horror; stamped on the bare breast as if it were alive, and
kept scoring it with the sharp nails of his sandals, stuttering with
rage--
"Take that, and that--and that, O foul immodesty!"
The lips of the goddess lay with their calm smile under the soles of
his feet.
The crowd began to haul the statue upright in order to tilt it into
the bonfire. Drunken garlic-smelling apprentices spat in the metal
face. An enormous blaze, built of the massed wreckage of
market-booths, quickly arose. The statue was dropped into the flames
to be melted into silver bullion.
"There are five talents' worth! think--thirty thousand pieces of
silver! We'll send half to the Emperor to pay the army, and take the
other half for famished folk here. Cybele will bring solace to mankind
at last, anyhow! Thirty thousand pieces of silver for the soldiers and
the poor!"
"Bring fuel, more wood!" The flame mounted still more fiercely; the
mob burst into laughter.
"We'll see whether the devil flies out of her! There's a demon in
every idol, you know, and two or three inside goddesses!"
"When she begins to melt it'll get too hot for the devil, and he'll
come wriggling out of her mouth like a red serpent!"
"No! you must make the sign of the cross beforehand. If you don't, he
can glide into the earth. Last year, when we pulled down the temple of
Aphrodite, someone sprinkled her with holy water and--can you believe
it?--a whole flight of devilets scampered away from underneath the
statue--I saw them myself--green and black and hairy all over! And
when the head was broken open the big devil came out of her neck, with
great horns and a tail as bald as a mangy dog!"
At this moment Iamblicus, half dead with terror, seized Julian by the
hand and dragged him away--
"Look! Do you see those two men? They are spies sent by Constantius.
Your brother Gallus has been taken under escort to Constantinople. Be
careful; this very day there will be a report sent in as to how you
bear yourself."
"But what is there to be done, Master? I am well accustomed to it; for
years they have kept spies about me."
"For years! Why have you said nothing of it to me?"
The hand of Iamblicus shook within that of Julian.
"Why are those two whispering together? Look at them--they must be
pagans.... Now then old man, hurry up, bring wood!" cried out a ragged
rascal in a triumphant tone.