The old wrong remains, rooted like tombs, and moves not:
All may be done through Time; yet Time does naught.
Let kings look well to that.”
The end is on him. Though “maimed, and tamed, and shamed,” he is resolute still, but impotent, and the empire lacks completion, he confesses, while
“The years, the months,
The hours, like ravening wolves that hunt a stag,
Come up upon my haunches.”
Fighting time to the last, he succumbs; but he will not even die as other men. In his half-delirium he tells Ptolemy:
“I have a secret—one for thee alone:
'Twas not the mists from that morass disastrous