“Of course I guessed what had happened. Hero had been to Olbasanus and had heard from the soothsayer’s lips the same thing the inscription had predicted. Nay, it seemed as if the manner of this confirmation had been far more terrible and demoniac than the first warning by the page from the book of the god Amun. I was utterly at a loss and, stammering my regret in incoherent words, left the house, begging the Sicilian to inform me when his daughter’s health was so far restored that I might repeat my visit without being intrusive. “On the next evening,” continued Rutilius,--“it was the very Friday we had chosen for the disclosure of our secret, but in my excitement I had entirely forgotten Heliodorus’ birthday--I received a few lines from Hero that almost drove me to despair. “‘We must part,’ she wrote, ‘part forever. I had hoped the cruel warning that terrified me at Tibur was only the expression of some hidden resentment which might be appeased. But now I know that the gods themselves bar our way with their destroying curse. I have visited Olbasanus twice: day before yesterday at the dinner hour and yesterday at the commencement of the first vigil. This man--do not doubt it--holds intercourse with the gods, demons, and the dead; he has been given power over all the realms of spirits! I have heard it with these ears, seen it with these eyes! When, after manifold proofs of his omnipotence, I still doubted--alas, only because I shrank from despair--at a sign from the terrible man the goddess of death, Hecate herself, appeared to me in the clouds of the night heavens, and in a voice like the roaring of the storm, repeated the awful words I had read on the page of Amun. We must part, Lucius, not for my sake--oh! how gladly would I bear the curse of blindness, if I might win in you a higher, purer light--but for yours, to whom cruel Hecate predicts death, and for love of my dear father, whose mind is threatened with darkness. Farewell, dear Lucius! May you learn to forget more easily than I!’ “These were the words engraved upon my heart in indelible, torturing characters, as if written by a red-hot stylus. I now learned from my slave Gaipor, that Olbasanus was really considered by thousands of people the most powerful conjurer among all the Chaldeans of the seven-hilled city. Gaipor himself, before I bought him, had been sent to the magician by his mistress, a lady from Neapolis, to enquire about the future, and had beheld with his own eyes, like Hero, the terrible apparition of Hecate, who, surrounded by flames, soared across the starry sky. You know, Caius, I am not very credulous. I’ve often laughed at our augurs[3] and soothsayers, and paid the homage of my sincere respect to that general in the time of the Republic, who when the sacred chickens would not eat, flung them into the sea. But here conviction pressed upon me with such power that I succumbed to its force....”