Only thus far was any semblance of order distinguishable in the procession. The wave of uproar suddenly assumed overwhelming proportions; the aisle was inundated with frenzy.
Marsyas moved forward, Junia moving with him, and the tumult drawing its bulky length across the aisle swept in now by multitudes. He was caught; Junia clung to him determinedly for a moment, but was torn away; he permitted himself to be swallowed up and pitched along by the flood.
He attracted no consecutive attention. Mænads flung themselves upon him because his cheeks were crimson and his figure notable, but other youths with glowing cheeks drew the mænads away, now and again. Satyrs, fauns and bacchantes saluted him, tumbled him, buffeted him: one snatched off his scarlet fillet and crowned him with a wreath of grape-leaves, while a second thrust a thyrsus into his hand. Some clung about his shoulders and bawled into his ear; others reached him flagons of wine and did not notice that others snatched the drink away. These things were single events that stood up out of the daze of astonishment and shock that confounded him.
The noise roared louder at every step: the thousands about him augmented. The grove opened more; the lights became more scattering and presently he found that he had been swept through another circle of chariots and outpost of soldiery into the city again. Hurriedly glancing at the buildings on each side of the street into which the procession poured, he saw a sufficient number of familiar marks to inform him that he had been borne out on the Rhacotis side of the city. Then the blood within him chilled. This half-maddened, half-murderous multitude was upon the trail of Flora, and was driving toward the settlement of the Nazarenes!
An unshakable conviction possessed him, that Lydia stood between!
Meanwhile the army of rabble joined the procession of aristocrats. From every avenue fresh multitudes poured in and added to the thousands. Except for the bounding mimes about them the flamens kept the front of the horde, following with downcast eyes the trail of yellow roses which, Marsyas now knew, led the procession.
In the midst of the gigantic hurly-burly he saw with strained eyes and a laboring heart that the light-footed goddess had made a long, deviating flight: that over and over again she doubled on her tracks, but that the detours led with deadly sureness toward the Nazarenes. Impelled now by desperation, he began to work his way toward the front.
But he had not reckoned on the immense length of the procession, nor how far he had been absorbed into the heart of it. Only when he was rushed over a slight rise in the street did he know that ahead of him for a great distance was a sea of tossing heads and moving shoulders, and on either side a compact wave wholly filled the two hundred feet of street and washed up against the walls of the houses.
The street opened up into an immense square, the last stadium which marked the limit of the Roman influence in the Egyptian settlement. Beyond that, on the water-front, were the streets of the Nazarenes!
Praying and struggling, Marsyas hardly noticed the increase of noise beginning at the front and extending back to him and passing until the wild clamor resolved itself into a stunning shout that shook Alexandria and rippled the face of the bay.