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Thus, then, the portent which had come to the citizens of Antioch in the reign of Anastasius reached this final fulfilment for them. And finally in this capture the whole city, as has been said, was destroyed. Such, then, was the calamity which befell the men of Antioch. And among the Goths, Vittigis remained in Byzantium, but all the rest marched with Belisarius against Chosroes.
Such is the strange phenomenon, or rather portent, presented to us by the barbarian power which has been for centuries seated in the very heart of the old world; which has in its brute clutch the most famous countries of classical and religious antiquity, and many of the most fruitful and beautiful regions of the earth; which stretches along the course of the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Nile; which embraces the Pindus, the Taurus, the Caucasus, Mount Sinai, the Libyan mountains, and the Atlas, as far as the Pillars of Hercules; and which, having no history itself, is heir to the historical names of Constantinople and Nicæa, Nicomedia and Cæsarea, Jerusalem and Damascus, Nineveh and Babylon, Mecca and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding in possession one-half of the history of the whole world.
The sun was setting clear and red, a different portent from the veiled thing that had finally hidden itself in a huddle of purple and gray cloud the night before. I had seen it from my bedroom at the Hall as I dressed for dinner and had mildly regretted the threat of possible bad weather. I had been a little bored by the anticipations I had formed of my week-end.
In periods of stress these imperative signals register the rise and fall of anxiety's barometer. Now the quiet boards began to break into a sudden epidemic of appearing and vanishing numerals and men hurried to the booths where wires linked the central floor with outlying offices. Each line buzzed to the same portent. "Rumor credits Burton with plans for a bear raid. Watch him.
The tall and steady forest of fire must have been already a portent visible to the whole circle of land and sea. The red flush of it lit up the long sides of white ships far out in the German Ocean, and picked out like piercing rubies the windows in the villages on the distant heights.
"Minds all a prey to the wind. But this wind was a wind of miracle and portent. To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave of the ocean. And this was true of its greatest. The force of impulsion came from on high. There was in the Convention a will, which was the will of all, and yet was the will of no one.
The girl saw the stake in the village street and the piles of fagots about it and in terror she suddenly realized the portent of these grisly preparations. Oh, if she but only had some sort of a weapon that might give her even a faint hope, some slight advantage against the blacks.
Rodriguez knew that in carrying the hurt man there he helped at a Christian deed; and yet there was no putting the merits of the case against the omens that crowded the chamber, lurking along the edge of moonlight and darkness, disappearing and reappearing till the gloom was heavy with portent. The omens knew.
"Have you ever heard of Fay Larkin?" he asked, very low. "Yes." "Was there only one Fay Larkin?" "Only one." "Did you ever see her?" "Yes," came the faint reply. He was grateful. How she might be breaking faith with creed or duty! He had not dared to hope so much. All his inner being trembled at the portent of his next query.
The sense of an unmeasured calamity was present in the background of our thoughts from the very beginning. But it was not until later that the nature of the disaster grew clear and poignant. As month after month hammered swiftly by, the meaning and portent of the catastrophe emerged more sharply and penetrated our minds more deeply, stinging us awake.
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