At length Orestes reveals himself, and now the plot draws to its catastrophe. Clytemnestra is alone in her house, preparing a caldron for the burial; Electra and the chorus are on the stage; the son--the avenger, is within; suddenly the cries of Clytemnestra are heard. Again--again! Orestes re-enters a parricide! [367] He retires as Aegisthus is seen approaching; and the adulterous usurper is now presented to us for the first and last time--the crowning victim of the sacrifice. He comes flushed with joy and triumph. He has heard that the dreaded Orestes is no more. Electra entertains him a few moments with words darkly and exultingly ambiguous. He orders the doors to be thrown open, that all Argos and Mycenae may see the remains of his sole rival for the throne. The scene opens. On the threshold (where, with the Greeks, the corpse of the dead was usually set out to view) lies a body covered with a veil or pall. Orestes (the supposed Phocian) stands beside. "Aegisthus. Great Jove! a grateful spectacle!--if thus May it be said unsinning; yet if she, The awful Nemesis, be nigh and hear, I do recall the sentence! Raise the pall. The dead was kindred to me, and shall know A kinsman's sorrow. Orestes. Lift thyself the pall; Not mine, but thine, the office to survey That which lies mute beneath, and to salute, Lovingly sad, the dead one. Aegisthus. Be it so-- It is well said. Go thou and call the queen: Is she within? Orestes. Look not around for her-- She is beside thee!" Aegisthus lifts the pall, and beholds the body of Clytemnestra! He knows his fate at once. He knows that Orestes is before him. He attempts to speak. The fierce Electra cuts him short, and Orestes, with stern solemnity, conducts him from the stage to the spot on which Aegisthus had slain Agamemnon, so that the murderer might die by the son's hand in the place where the father fell. Thus artistically is the catastrophe not lessened in effect, but heightened, by removing the deed of death from the scene--the poetical justice, in the calm and premeditated selection of the place of slaughter, elevates what on the modern stage would be but a spectacle of physical horror into the deeper terror and sublimer gloom of a moral awe; and vindictive murder, losing its aspect, is idealized and hallowed into religious sacrifice.