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It was arranged then that a messenger should go at night to Thord's lodging-place with the four thousand sestertii. When they were done, the giant knocked at the front door; it opened to him; and, passing out of the atrium, he led Ben-Hur into a room adjoining, where the latter completed his attire from the coarse garments of the dead pugilist. They separated directly in the Omphalus.
The lad arose, and, with silent salute, departed. At midnight Ilderim took the road, having arranged to leave a horse and a guide for Ben-Hur, who was to follow him. Going next day to fill his appointment with Iras, Ben-Hur turned from the Omphalus, which was in the heart of the city, into the Colonnade of Herod, and came shortly to the palace of Idernee.
Evening was hardly come upon Antioch, when the Omphalus, nearly in the centre of the city, became a troubled fountain from which in every direction, but chiefly down to the Nymphaeum and east and west along the Colonnade of Herod, flowed currents of people, for the time given up to Bacchus and Apollo.
"Up the street; up to the Omphalus, and beyond who shall say how far? Rivers of people; never so many in the city before. They say we will see the whole world at the Circus to-morrow." Messala laughed scornfully. "The idiots! Perpol! They never beheld a Circensian with Caesar for editor. But, my Drusus, what found you?" "Nothing." "O ah! You forget," said Cecilius. "What?" asked Drusus.
Maxentius might come, and the city throng to receive him; the legion might descend from Mount Sulpius in glory of arms and armor; from Nymphaeum to Omphalus there might be ceremonial splendors to shame the most notable ever before seen or heard of in the gorgeous East; yet would the many continue to sleep ignominiously on the divan where they had fallen or been carelessly tumbled by the indifferent slaves; that they would be able to take part in the reception that day was about as possible as for the lay-figures in the studio of a modern artist to rise and go bonneted and plumed through the one, two, three of a waltz.
In Comte Goblet d'Alviella's work The Migration of Symbols there is an illustration of a coin of Cyzicus, on which is represented an Omphalus, flanked by two Doves, with a Fish beneath; and a whole section is devoted to the discussion of the representations of two Doves on either side of a Temple entrance, or of an Omphalus.
Arrived at the Omphalus a monument of four arches wide as the streets, superbly illustrated, and erected to himself by Epiphanes, the eighth of the Seleucidae he suddenly changed his mind. "I will not go to the citadel to-night," he said to the porters. "Take me to the khan nearest the bridge on the road to Seleucia."
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