"The gates?" ... What gates? Removing his hand from his eyes Alwyn gazed around confusedly. He was standing on an open stretch of level road, dustily-white, and dry, with long-continued heat,--and right in front of him was an enormously high wall, topped with rows of bristling iron spikes, and guarded by the gates alluded to,--huge massive portals seemingly made of finely molded brass, and embellished on either side by thick, round, stone watch towers, from whose summits scarlet pennons drooped idly in the windless air. Amazed, and full of a vague, trembling terror, he fixed his wondering looks once more upon his strange companions, who in their turn regarded him with cool military indifference."
"I must be mad or dreaming," he thought,--then growing suddenly desperate he stretched out his hands with a wild appealing gesture: "I swear to you I know nothing of this place!" he cried--"I never saw it before! Some trick has been played on me ... who brought me here? Where is Elzear the hermit? ... the Ruins of Babylon? ... where is, ... Good God! ... what fearful freak of fate is this!"
The soldiers laughed again,--their commander looked at him a little curiously.
"Nay, art THOU one of the escaped of Lysia's lovers?" he asked, suspiciously--"And has the Silver Nectar failed of its usual action, and driven thy senses to the winds, that thou ravest thus? For if thou art a stranger and knowest naught of us, how speakest thou our language? ... Why wearest thou the garb of our citizens?"
Alwyn shrank and shivered as though he had received a deadening blow,--an awful, inexplicable chill horror froze his blood. It was true! ... he understood the language spoken! ... it was perfectly familiar to him,--more so than his own native tongue,--stop! what WAS his native tongue?
He tried to think--and, the sick fear at his heart grew stronger, --he could not remember a word of it! And his dress! ... he glanced at it dismayed and appalled,--he had not noticed it till now. It bore some resemblance to the costume of ancient Greece, and consisted of a white linen tunic and loose upper vest, both garments being kept in place by a belt of silver. From this belt depended a sheathed dagger, a square writing tablet, and a pencil- shaped implement which he immediately recognized as the antique form of stylus. His feet were shod with sandals--his arms were bare to the shoulder, and clasped at the upper part by two broad silver armlets richly chased.
Noting all these details, the fantastic awfulness of his position smote him with redoubled force,--and he felt as a madman may feel when his impending doom has not entirely asserted itself,--when only grotesque and leering suggestions of madness cloud his brain,--when hideous faces, dimly discerned, loom out of the chaos of his nightly visions,--and when all the air seems solid darkness, with one white line of fire cracking it asunder in the midst, and that the fire of his own approaching frenzy. Such a delirium of agony possessed Alwyn at that moment,--he could have shrieked, laughed, groaned, wept, and fallen down in the dust before these bearded armed men, praying them to slay him with their weapons there where he stood, and put him mercifully and at once out of his mysterious misery. But an invisible influence stronger than himself, prevented him from becoming altogether the victim of his own torturing emotions, and he remained erect and still as a marble figure, with a wondering, white piteous face of such unutterable affliction that the officer who watched him seemed touched, and, advancing, clapped his shoulder in a friendly manner.