A single city arrests the triumphant march. Alexander besieges it, and himself mounts the first to the assault. His men are driven back. Then from the top of the ladder, instead of leaping back, he throws himself into the city, and alone encounters the foe. Surrounded, belabored, wounded, he is about to perish, when his men, learning his peril, redouble their efforts, burst open the gates, inundate the place, and massacre the inhabitants. After a painful operation, Alexander is restored to his army and to his great plans of conquest. The joy of the soldiers, succeeding sorrow, is likened to that of sailors, who, after seeing the pilot overboard, and ready to be ingulfed by the raging floods, as Boreas plays the Bacchanal, “Borea bacchante,”[358] at last behold him rescued from the abyss and again at the helm. But the army is disturbed by preparation for distant maritime expeditions. Alexander avows that the world is too small for him; that, when it is all conquered, he will push on to subjugate another universe; that he will lead them to the Antipodes, and to another Nature; and that, if they refuse to accompany him, he will go forth alone, and offer himself as chief to other people. The army is on fire with this answer, and vow again never to abandon their king.
The tenth book is the last. Nature, indignant that a mortal should venture to penetrate her hidden places, suspends unfinished works, and descends to the lower world for succor against the conqueror. Before the gates of Erebus, under the walls of the Stygian city,—
“Ante fores Erebi, Stygiæ sub mœnibus urbis,”[359]—
are sisters, monsters of the earth, representing every vice,—thirst of gold, drunkenness, gluttony, treachery, detraction, envy, hypocrisy, adulation. In a distant recess is a perpetual furnace, where crimes are punished, but not with equal flames, as some are tormented more lightly and others more severely. Leviathan is in the midst of his furnace; but he drops his serpent form, and assumes the divine aspect he had worn when wishing to share the high Olympus,—
“Cum sidere solis
Clarior intumuit, tantamque superbia mentem
Extulit, ut summum partiri vellet Olympum.”[360]
To him the stranger appeals against the projects of Alexander, which extend on one side to the unknown sources of the Nile and the Garden of Paradise, and on the other to the Antipodes and ancient Chaos. The infernal monarch convenes his assembly on the plains where agonize the souls of the wicked in undying torments,—
“quibus mors
Est non posse mori,”[361]—