Ch. 20 - The Breach Repassed

Slowly and mournfully the sentinel at the rifted wall raised his eyes
towards the eastern clouds as they brightened before the advancing dawn.
Desolate as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet
the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on
which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind
him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to
look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the
dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of
hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the
rampart to meet a welcome death on the earth beneath. Famished and
despairing, the sentinel crouched on the fortifications which he had now
neither strength to pace nor care to defend, yearning for the food that
he had no hope to obtain, as he watched the grey daybreak from his
solitary post.

While he was thus occupied, the gloomy silence of the scene was suddenly
broken by the sound of falling brick-work at the inner base of the wall,
followed by faint entreaties for mercy and deliverance, which rose on
his ear, strangely mingled with disjointed expression of defiance and
exultation from a second voice. He slowly turned his head, and, looking
down, saw on the ground beneath a young girl struggling in the grasp of
an old man, who was hurrying her onward in the direction of the Pincian
Gate.

For one moment the girl's eye met the sentinel's vacant glance, and she
renewed, with a last effort of strength, and a greater vehemence of
supplication, her cries for help; but the soldier neither moved nor
answered. Exhausted as he was, no sight could affect him now but the
sight of food. Like the rest of the citizens, he was sunk in a heavy
stupor of starvation--selfish, reckless, brutalised. No disasters could
depress, no atrocities rouse him. Famine had torn asunder every social
tie, had withered every human sympathy among his besieged fellow-
citizens, and he was famishing like them.

At the moment when the dawn had first appeared, could he have looked
down by some mysterious agency to the interior foundations of the wall,
from the rampart on which he kept his weary watch, such a sight must
then have presented itself as would have aroused even his sluggish
observation to rigid attention and involuntary surprise.

Winding upward and downward among jagged masses of ruined brick-work,
now lost amid the shadows of dreary chasms, now prominent over the
elevations of rising arches, the dark irregular passages broken by
Ulpius in the rotten wall would then have presented themselves to his
eyes; not stretching forth in dismal solitude, not peopled only by the
reptiles