Ch. 15 - The City and the Gods - Page 2

light faded,
contracted, vanished, and with it disappeared the sentinel and the line
of rampart on which he was posted. The rule of the darkness now became
universal. Densely and rapidly it overspread the whole city with
startling suddenness; as if the fearful destiny now working its
fulfilment in Rome had forced the external appearances of the night into
harmony with its own woe-boding nature.

Then, as the young Goth still lingered at his post of observation, the
long, low, tremulous, absorbing roll of thunder afar off became grandly
audible. It seemed to proceed from a distance almost incalculable; to
be sounding from its cradle in the frozen north; to be journeying about
its ice-girdled chambers in the lonely poles. It deepened rather than
interrupted the dreary, mysterious stillness of the atmosphere. The
lightning, too, had a summer softness in its noiseless and frequent
gleam. It was not the fierce lightning of winter, but a warm, fitful
brightness, almost fascinating in its light, rapid recurrence, tinged
with the glow of heaven, and not with the glare of hell.

There was no wind--no rain; and the air was as hushed as if it slept
over chaos in the infancy of a new creation.

Among the various objects displayed, instant by instant, by the rapid
lightning to the eyes of Hermanric, the most easily and most distinctly
visible was the broad surface of the rifted wall. The large, loose
stones, scattered here and there at its base, and the overhanging lid of
its broad rampart, became plainly though fitfully apparent in the brief
moments of their illumination. The lightning had played for some time
over that structure of the fortifications, and the bare ground that
stretched immediately beyond them, when the smooth prospect which it
thus gave by glimpses to view, was suddenly chequered by a flight of
birds appearing from one of the lower divisions of the wall, and
flitting uneasily to and fro at one spot before its surface.

As moment after moment the lightning continued to gleam, so the black
forms of the birds were visible to the practised eye of the Goth--
perceptible, yet evanescent, as sparks of fire or flakes of snow--
whirling confusedly and continually about the spot whence they had
evidently been startled by some unimaginable interruption. At length,
after a lapse of some time, they vanished as suddenly as they had
appeared, with shrill notes of affright which were audible even above
the continuous rolling of the thunder; and immediately afterwards, when
the lightning alternated with the darkness, there appeared to Hermanric,
in the part of the wall where the birds had been first disturbed, a
small red gleam, like a spark of fire lodged in the surface of the
structure. Then this was