Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Last Days of Pompeii

BOOK THE FIFTH 1. Chapter I (continued)

'To the Unknown.'

'To happiness or to woe?'

'As thou hast sown, so shalt thou reap.'

'Dread thing, not so! If thou art the Ruler of Life, thine are my misdeeds, not mine.'

'I am but the breath of God!' answered the mighty WIND.

'Then is my wisdom vain!' groaned the dreamer.

'The husbandman accuses not fate, when, having sown thistles, he reaps not corn. Thou hast sown crime, accuse not fate if thou reapest not the harvest of virtue.'

The scene suddenly changed. Arbaces was in a place of human bones; and lo! in the midst of them was a skull, and the skull, still retaining its fleshless hollows, assumed slowly, and in the mysterious confusion of a dream, the face of Apaecides; and forth from the grinning jaws there crept a small worm, and it crawled to the feet of Arbaces. He attempted to stamp on it and crush it; but it became longer and larger with that attempt. It swelled and bloated till it grew into a vast serpent: it coiled itself round the limbs of Arbaces; it crunched his bones; it raised its glaring eyes and poisonous jaws to his face. He writhed in vain; he withered--he gasped--beneath the influence of the blighting breath--he felt himself blasted into death. And then a voice came from the reptile, which still bore the face of Apaecides and rang in his reeling ear:

'THY VICTIM IS THY JUDGE! THE WORM THOU WOULDST CRUSH BECOMES THE SERPENT THAT DEVOURS THEE!'

With a shriek of wrath, and woe, and despairing resistance, Arbaces awoke--his hair on end--his brow bathed in dew--his eyes glazed and staring--his mighty frame quivering as an infant's, beneath the agony of that dream. He awoke--he collected himself--he blessed the gods whom he disbelieved, that he was in a dream--he turned his eyes from side to side--he saw the dawning light break through his small but lofty window--he was in the Precincts of Day--he rejoiced--he smiled; his eyes fell, and opposite to him he beheld the ghastly features, the lifeless eye, the livid lip--of the hag of Vesuvius!