THE PASSAGE OF THE WALL.
'A fair night this, Balbus! All moonlight and no mist! I was posted
last evening at the Ostian Gate, and was half choked by the fog.'
'If you were posted last night at the Ostian Gate, you were better
placed than you are now. The ramparts here are as lonely as a ruin in
the provinces. Nothing behind us but the back of the Pincian Mount;
nothing before us but the empty suburbs; nothing at each side of us but
brick and stone; nothing at our posts but ourselves. May I be
crucified like St. Peter, if I believe that there is another place on
the whole round of the walls possessed of such solitary dulness as
this!'
'You are a man to find something to complain of, if you were lodged in
one of the palaces yonder. The place is solitary enough, it is true;
but whether it is dull or not depends on ourselves, its most honourable
occupants. I, for one, am determined to promote its joviality by the
very 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 of
all the barracks of Rome.'
'You may tell as many stories as you please, but do not imagine that I
will make one of your audience.'
'You are welcome to attend to me or not, as you choose. Though you do
not listen, I shall still relate my stories by way of practice. I will
address them to the walls, or to the air, or to the defunct gods and
goddesses of antiquity, should they happen at this moment to be
hovering over the city in a rage, as some of the unconverted would have
us believe; or to our neighbours the Goths, if they are seized with a
sudden desire to quite their encampments, and obtain a near view of the
fortifications that they are so discreetly unwilling to assault. Or,
these materials for a fit and decent auditory failing me, I will tell
my stories to the most attentive of all listeners--myself.'
And the sentinel, without further delay, opened his budget of
anecdotes, with the easy fluency of of a man who possessed a
well-placed confidence in the perfection of his capacities for
narration. Determined that his saturnine colleague should hear him,
though he would not give him his attention, he talked in a raised
voice, pacing briskly backwards and forwards over the space of his
allotted limits, and laughing with ludicrous regularity and complacency
at every jest that he happened to make in the course of his
ill-rewarded narrative. He little thought, as he continued to proceed
in his tale that its commencement had been welcomed by an unseen
hearer, with emotions widely different from those which had dictated
the observations of the unfriendly companion of his watch.
True to his determination, Ulpius, with part of the wages which he had
hoarded in Numerian's service, had procured a small lantern from a shop
in one of the distant quarters of Rome; and veiling its light in a
piece of coarse, thick cloth, had proceeded by the solitary pathway to
his second night's labour at the wall. He arrived at the breach, at
the commencement of the dialogue above related, and heard with delight
the sentinel's noisy resolution to amuse his companion in spite of
himself. The louder and the longer the man talked, the less probable
was the chance that the Pagan's labours in the interior of the wall
would be suspected or overheard.
Softly clearing away the brushwood at the entrance of the hole that he
had made the night before, Ulpius crept in as far as he had penetrated
on that occasion; and then, with mingled emotions of expectation and
apprehension which affected him so powerfully, that he was for the
moment hardly master of his actions, he slowly and cautiously uncovered
his light.
His first glance was intuitively directed to the cavity that opened
beneath him. He saw immediately that it was less important, both in
size and depth, than he had imagined it to be. The earth at this
particular place had given way beneath the foundations of the wall,
which had sunk down, deepening the chasm by their weight, into the
yielding ground beneath them. A small spring of water (probably the
first cause of the sinking in the earth) had bubbled up into the space
in the brick-work, which bit by bit, and year by year, it had gradually
undermined. Nor did it remain stagnant at this place. It trickled
merrily and quietly onward--a tiny rivulet, emancipated from one prison
in the ground only to enter another in the wall, bounded by no grassy
banks, brightened by no cheerful light, admired by no human eye,
followed in its small course through the inner fissures in the brick by
no living thing but a bloated toad, or a solitary lizard: yet wending
as happily on its way through darkness and ruin, as its sisters who
were basking in the sunlight of the meadows, or leaping in the fresh
breezes of the open mountain side.
Raising his eyes from the little spring, Ulpius next directed his
attention to the prospect above him.
Immediately over his head, the material of the interior of the wall
presented a smooth, flat, hard surface, which seemed capable of
resisting the most vigorous attempts at its destruction; but on looking
round, he perceived at one side of him and further inwards, an
appearance of dark, dimly-defined irregularity, which promised
encouragingly for his intended efforts. He descended into the chasm of
the rivulet, crawled up on a heap of crumbling brick-work, and gained a
hole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to admit of his
passage through. Inch by inch, he enlarged the rift, crept into it,
and found himself on a fragment of the bow of one of the foundation
arches, which, though partly destroyed, still supported itself,
isolated from all connection with the part of the upper wall which it
had once sustained, and which had gradually crumbled away into the
cavities below.
He looked up. An immense rift soared above him, stretching its
tortuous ramifications, at different points, into every part of the
wall that was immediately visible. The whole structure seemed, at this
place, to have received a sudden and tremendous wrench. But for the
support of the sounder fortifications at each side of it, it could not
have sustained itself after the shock. The Pagan gazed aloft, into the
fearful breaches which yawned above him, with ungovernable awe. His
small, fitful light was not sufficient to show him any of their
terminations. They looked, as he beheld them in dark relief against
the rest of the hollow part of the wall, like mighty serpents twining
their desolating path right upward to the ramparts above; and he,
himself, as he crouched on his pinnacle with his little light by his
side, was reduced by the wild grandeur, the vast, solemn gloom of the
obscure, dusky, and fantastic objects around him, to the stature of a
pigmy. Could he have been seen from the ramparts high overhead, as he
now peered down behind his lantern into the cavities and irregularities
below him, he would have looked, with his flickering light, like a mole
led 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 he
attained a great advantage by his present stillness: he could listen
undisturbed by the noises made by the bricks which crumbled from under
him, if he advanced.
Ere long, he heard a thin, winding, long-drawn sound, now louder, now
softer; now approaching, now retreating; now verging towards
shrillness, now quickly returning to a faint, gentle swell. Suddenly
this 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 that
the first of these noises was occasioned by the night wind winding
through the rents in the brick of the outer wall beyond him; and the
second, by the echoes produced in the irregular cavities above, by the
footfall of the sentries overhead--roused by the influence of the
place, and the mystery of his employment, to a pitch of fanatic
exaltation, which for the moment absolutely unsteadied his
reason--filled with the frantic enthusiasm of his designs, and the
fearful legends of invisible beings and worlds which made the
foundation of his worship, Ulpius conceived, as he listened to the
sounds around and above, that the gods of antiquity were now in
viewless congregation hovering about him, and calling to him in
unearthly voices and in an unknown tongue, to proceed upon his daring
enterprise, in the full assurance of its near and glorious success.
'Roar and mutter, and make your hurricane music in my ears!' exclaimed
the Pagan, raising his withered hands, and addressing in a savage
ecstacy his imagined deities. 'Your servant Ulpius stops not on the
journey that leads him to your repeopled shrines! Blood, crime,
danger, pain--pride and honour, joy and rest, have I strewn like
sacrifices at your altars' feet! Time has whirled past me; youth and
manhood have lain long since buried in the hidden Lethe which is the
portion of life; age has wreathed his coils over my body's strength,
but still I watch by your temples and serve your mighty cause! Your
vengeance is near! Monarchs of the world, your triumph is at hand!'
He remained for some time in the same position, looking fixedly up into
the trackless darkness above him, drinking in the sounds
which--alternately rising and sinking--still floated round him. The
trembling gleam of his lantern fell red and wild upon his livid
countenance. His shaggy hair floated in the cold breezes that blew by
him. At this moment he would have appeared from a distance, like a
phantom of fire perishing in a mist of darkness; like a Gnome in
adoration in the bowels of the earth; like a forsaken spirit in a
solitary purgatory, watching for the advent of a glimpse of beauty, or
a breath of air.
At length he aroused himself from his trance, trimmed with careful hand
his guiding lantern, and set forward to penetrate the breadth of the
great rift he had just entered.
He moved on in an oblique direction several feet, now creeping over the
tops of the foundation arches, now skirting the extremities of
protrusions in the ruined brick-work, now descending into dark slimy
rubbish-choked chasms, until the rift suddenly diminished in all
directions.
The atmosphere was warmer in the place he now occupied; he could
faintly distinguish patches of dark moss, dotted here and there over
the uneven surface of the wall; and once or twice, some blades of long
flat grass, that grew from a prominence immediately above his head,
were waved in his face by the wind, which he could now feel blowing
through the narrow fissure that he was preparing to enlarge. It was
evident that he had by this time advanced to within a few feet of the
outer extremity of the wall.
'Numerian wanders after his child through the streets,' muttered the
Pagan, as he deposited his lantern by his side, bared his trembling
arms, and raised his iron bar, 'the slaves of his neighbour the senator
are 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 to
my hiding-place, they must penetrate the walls of Rome! If they would
hunt me down in my lair, they must assail me to-night in the camp of
the Goths! Fools! let them look to themselves! I seal the doom of
their city, with the last brick that I tear from their defenceless
walls!'
He laughed to himself as he thrust his bar boldly into the crevice
before him. In some places the bricks yielded easily to his efforts;
in others, their resistance was only to be overcome by the exertion of
his utmost strength. Resolutely and unceasingly he continued his
labours; now wounding his hands against the jagged surfaces presented
by the widening fissure; now involuntarily dropping his instrument from
ungovernable exhaustion; but, still working bravely on, in defiance of
every hindrance that opposed him, until he gained the interior of the
new rift.
As he drew his lantern after him into the cavity that he had made, he
perceived that, unless it was heightened immediately over him, he could
proceed no further, even in a creeping position. Irritated at this
unexpected necessity for more violent exertion, desperate in his
determination to get through the wall at all hazards on that very
night, he recklessly struck his bar upwards with all his strength,
instead of gradually and softly loosening the material of the surface
that opposed him, as he had done before.
A few moments of this labour had scarcely elapsed, when a considerable
portion of the brick-work, consolidated into one firm mass, fell with
lightning suddenness from above. It hurled him under it, prostrate on
the foundation arch which had been his support; crushed and dislocated
his right shoulder; and shivered his lantern into fragments. A groan
of irrepressible anguish burst from his lips. He was left in
impenetrable darkness.
The mass of brick-work, after it had struck him, rolled a little to one
side. By a desperate exertion he extricated himself from under
it--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 their
severity, the fierce spasms, the dull gnawings, the throbbing torments,
that were the miserable consequences of the injury he received. His
arm lay motionless by his side--he had neither strength nor resolution
to move any one of the other sound limbs in his body. At one moment
his deep, sobbing, stifled respirations, syllabled horrible and
half-formed curses--at another, his panting breaths suddenly died away
within him; and then he could hear the blood dripping slowly from his
shoulder, with dismal regularity, into a little pool that it had formed
already by his side.
The shrill breezes which wound through the crevices in the wall before
him, were now felt only on his wounded limb. They touched its surface
like innumerable splinters of thin, sharp ice; they penetrated his
flesh like rushing sparks struck out of a sea of molten lead. There
were moments, during the first pangs of this agony, when if he had been
possessed of a weapon and of the strength to use it, he would have
sacrificed 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 stronger
distemper in his mind, and then the two agonies, physical and mental,
rioted over him together in fierce rivalry, divesting him of all
thoughts but such as were by their own agency created or aroused.
For some time he lay helpless in his misery, alternately venting by
stifled groans the unalleviated torment of his wounds, and lamenting
with curses the failure of his enterprise, at the very moment of its
apparent success. At length, the pangs that struck through him seemed
to grow gradually less frequent; he hardly knew now from what part of
his frame they more immediately proceeded. Insensibly, his faculties of
thinking and feeling grew blunted; then he remained a little while in a
mysterious unrefreshing repose of body and mind; and then his
disordered senses, left unguided and unrestrained, became the victims
of a sudden and terrible delusion.
The blank darkness around him appeared, after an interval, to be
gradually dawning into a dull light, thick and misty, like the
reflections on clouds which threaten a thunderstorm at the close of
evening. Soon, this atmosphere seemed to be crossed and streaked with
a fantastic trellis-work of white, seething vapour. Then the mass of
brick-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 depressed
itself, without quitting for a moment its position near him. And then,
from its dark and toiling surface there rose a long stream of dusky
shapes, which twined themselves about the misty trellis-work above, and
took the prominent and palpable form of human countenances, marked by
every difference of age and distorted by every variety of suffering.
There were infantine faces, wreathed about with grave-worms that hung
round them like locks of filthy hair; aged faces, dabbled with gore and
slashed with wounds; youthful faces, seamed with livid channels, along
which ran unceasing tears; lovely faces, distorted into fixed
expressions of raging pain, wild malignity, and despairing gloom. Not
one of these countenances exactly resembled the other. Each was
distinguished by a revolting character of its own. Yet, however
deformed might be their other features, the eyes of all were preserved
unimpaired. Speechless and bodiless, they floated in unceasing myriads
up to the fantastic trellis-work, which seemed to swell its wild
proportions to receive them. There they clustered, in their goblin
amphitheatre, and fixed and silently they all glared down, without one
exception, on the Pagan's face!
Meanwhile, the walls at the side began to gleam out with a light of
their own, making jagged boundaries to the midway scene of phantom
faces. Then the rifts in their surfaces widened, and disgorged
misshapen figures of priests and idols of the old time, which came
forth in every hideous deformity of aspect, mocking at the faces on the
trellis-work; while behind and over the whole, soared shapes of
gigantic darkness, robed in grim cloudy resemblances of skins such as
were worn by the Goths, and wielding through the quivering vapour,
mighty and shadow-like weapons of war. From the whole of this ghastly
assemblage there rose not the slightest sound. A stillness, as of a
dead and ruined world, possessed in all its quarters the appalling
scene. The deep echoes of the sentries' footsteps and the faint
dirging of the melancholy winds were no more. The blood that had as
yet dripped from his wound, made no sound now in the Pagan's ear; even
his own agony of terror was as silent as were the visionary demons who
had aroused it. Days, years, centuries, seemed to pass, as he lay
gazing up, in a trance of horror, into his realm of peopled and ghostly
darkness. At last nature yielded under the trial; the phantom prospect
suddenly whirled round him with fearful velocity, and his senses sought
refuge from the thraldom of their own creation in a deep and welcome
swoon.
Time had moved wearily onward, the chiding winds had many times waved
the dry locks of his hair to and fro about his brow, as if to bid him
awaken and arise, ere he again recovered his consciousness. Once more
aroused to the knowledge of his position and the sensation of his
wound, he slowly raised himself upon his uninjured arm, and looked
wildly around for the faintest appearance of a gleam of light. But the
winding and uneven nature of the track which he had formed to lead him
through the wall, effectually prevented the moonbeams, then floating
into the outermost of the cavities that he had made, from reaching the
place where he now lay. Not a single object was even faintly
distinguishable around him. Darkness hemmed him in, in rayless and
triumphant obscurity, on every side.
The first agonies of the injury he had received had resolved themselves
into one dull, heavy, unchanging sensation of pain. The vision that
had overwhelmed his senses was now, in a vast and shadowy form, present
only to his memory, filling the darkness with fearful recollections,
and not with dismal forms; and urging on him a restless, headlong
yearning to effect his escape from the lonely and unhallowed sepulchre,
the prison of solitude and death, that his own fatal exertions
threatened him with, should he linger much longer in the caverns of the
wall.
'I must pass from this darkness into light--I must breathe the air of
the sky, or I shall perish in the damps of this vault,' he exclaimed in
a hoarse, moaning voice, as he raised himself gradually and painfully
into a creeping position; and turning round slowly, commenced his
meditated retreat.
His brain still whirled with the emotions that had so lately
overwhelmed his mind; his right hand hung helplessly by his side,
dragged after him like a prisoner's chain, and lacerated by the uneven
surface of the ground over which it was slowly drawn, as--supporting
himself on his left arm, and creeping forward a few inches at a
time--he set forth on his toilsome journey.
Here, he paused bewildered in the darkness; there, he either checked
himself by a convulsive effort from falling headlong into the unknown
deeps beneath him, or lost the little ground he had gained in labour
and agony, by retracing his way at the bidding of some unexpected
obstacle. Now he gnashed his teeth in anguish, now he cursed in
despair, now he was breathless with exhaustion; but still, with an
obstinacy that had in it something of the heroic, he never failed in
his fierce resolution to effect his escape.
Slowly and painfully, moving with the pace and the perseverance of the
tortoise, hopeless yet determined as a navigator in a strange sea, he
writhed onward and onward upon his unguided course, until he reaped at
length the reward of his long suffering, by the sudden discovery of a
thin ray of moonlight toiling through a crevice in the murky brickwork
before him. Hardly did the hearts of the Magi when the vision of 'the
star in the East' first dawned on their eyes, leap within them with a
more vivid transport, than that which animated the heart of Ulpius at
the moment when he beheld the inspiring and guiding light.
Yet a little more exertion, a little more patience, a little more
anguish; and he stood once again, a ghastly and crippled figure, before
the 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; the
waning night showed bleak and cheerless to the earth, but cast no
mournful or reproving influence over the Pagan's mind. He looked round
on his solitary lurking place, and beheld no human figure in its lonely
recesses. He looked up at the ramparts, and saw that the sentinels
stood silent and apart, wrapped in their heavy watch-cloaks, and
supported on their trusty weapons. It was perfectly apparent that the
events of his night of suffering and despair had passed unheeded by the
outer world.
He glanced back with a shudder upon his wounded and helpless limb; then
his eyes fixed themselves upon the wall. After surveying it with an
earnest 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 mines
I have borne lashes without a murmur--I have felt my chains widening,
with each succeeding day, the ulcers that their teeth of iron first
gnawed in my flesh, and have yet lived to loosen my fetters, and to
close my sores! Shall this new agony have a power to conquer me
greater than the others that are past? I will even yet return in time
to overcome the resistance of the wall! My arm is crushed, but my
purpose is whole!'