In a conjuration addressed to the shade of the giant Nimrod, the wild huntsman who began the Tower of Babel, the adept of Honorius menaces that ancient reprobate with the riveting of his chains and with torture increased daily, should he fail in immediate obedience to the will of the operator. It is the sublimity of pride in delirium, and this anti-pope, who could only understand a high-priest as a ruler of hell, seems to yearn after the usurped and mournful right of tormenting the dead eternally, as if in revenge for the contempt and rejection of the living. CHAPTER II APPEARANCE OF THE BOHEMIAN NOMADS At the beginning of the fifteenth century hordes of unknown swarthy wanderers began to spread through Europe.[235] Sometimes denominated Bohemians, because they claimed to come from Bohemia, sometimes Egyptians, because their leader assumed the title of Duke of Egypt, they exercised the arts of divination, larceny and marauding. They were nomadic tribes, bivouacking in huts of their own construction; their religion was unknown; they gave themselves out to be Christians; but their orthodoxy was more than doubtful. Among themselves, they practised communism and promiscuity, and in their divinations they made use of a strange sequence of signs, allegorical in form, and depending from the virtues of numbers. Whence came they? Of what accursed and vanished world were they the surviving waifs? Were they, as superstitious people believed, the offspring of sorceresses and demons? What expiring and betrayed Saviour had condemned them to roam for ever? Was this the family at large of the Wandering Jew, or the remnants of the ten tribes of Israel, lost sight of in captivity and long enchained by Gog and Magog in unknown regions? Such were the doubting questions at the passage of these mysterious strangers, who seemed to retain only the superstitions and vices of a vanished civilisation. Enemies of toil, they respected neither property nor family; they dragged their women and children after them; they pestered the peace of honest house-dwellers with their pretended divinations. However all this may be, their first encampment in the vicinity of Paris is told by one writer as follows:—