"Oh! Come on! You have eaten too heavily or else departed from your stoical way and conscience has made you uneasy; else you could not attribute life to this foul shell, dead these three thousand years."
"I shall return alone tomorrow when the light is better and have a good look."
At noon the next day, when the sunlight rested on my slab, the youth returned and, bending over my black parchment face, peered into the hollow eye holes; and in some weird way I held communion with him. When he left, my soul seemed to go along, a companion of his own.
Lost in thought, he walked a long way into the poorer quarter of the city, where there was much squalor and suffering. He was aroused by the cries of women and children driven from their squalid homes by a band of Nero's condottieri, who then set fire to their deserted hovels.
He rushed to their rescue, remonstrating with the soldiers. They refused to desist, telling him that the people were of the new sect, the Christians; and their orders were to burn them out. He was assaulted by them, resisted, killed two and was himself slain.
His soul as a great white bird, with a brilliancy as of the sun, left his body and flew heavenward. My own returned to its mummied chamber. But the chamber had been reformed; it was of many hued crystal, of expansive wall and gave forth a light all its own. I settled upon a couch and drifted into a restful peace.
My own soul became as the tabernacle of God. All tears were wiped away by the conqueror of sorrow and pain and death. I had found the Father; the Father a son; and I entered into the place where God is the Light.
In the meantime Rome burned. The fire, started by Nero's soldiers near the Palatine Hill, spread from house to house and quarter to quarter until it reached my couch. The old shell parted and burned as tinder. Then the mortal put on immortality and the shackled darkness of the old soul gave place to light and liberty.
I awoke. It was near twilight; the world seemed new and fresh, but it was the old home place.
I bent over and examined my couch; it was the old slab shelf of the springhouse. Looking along its raised edge, which I had used as a pillow, I noticed for the first time crude strange characters or letters cut in the stone.