After a moment's waiting until the light airs cleared the daze that enmeshed his brain, the alabarch took Lydia under his cloak and fled with his people toward their refuge. As he went, doorways about them were giving up households, bazaars and booths were emptying of their patrons and proprietors; workshops, their artisans and apprentices; schools, their readers and pupils; the counting-room, the rich men and the borrowers; the squalid angles, the outcast and the beggar. The oppression of terror and the instinct for silence weighted the darkening air; the twilight covered them, and hostile attention was yet far behind them. So they came: the slaves with marks of perpetual servitude in their ears, and ladies of the Sadducees that had rarely set foot upon the harsh earth; figures in Indian silks and figures in sackcloth; fugitives to whom fear lent wings and fugitives to whom flight was bitterer than death; families and guilds by the hundreds, hurrying together; companies of diverse people separated from their own; sons carrying parents and neighbors bearing the sick; friends forgetting attachments and foes forgetting feuds--until the streets became veritable rivers of running people. And so they went, crowding, pressing, contending, but passing as silently as forty thousand may pass, toward the Synagogue, which was sanctuary and stronghold for them all. The keepers of the great gates were there, and the huge valves stood wide. The alabarch's old composure reasserted itself, as, amid the panic of his people, he realized their want of leadership. He stepped to one side of the nearest gate, and stood while he watched each and every Jew rush into the darkness and disappear under the great pylons of the Synagogue. Lydia, whom he would have sent in at once, clung to him, and together they stood without. Meanwhile, out of the distant Brucheum, there came a snarl of monstrous and terrifying proportions. The mob was gaining strength. The last of the Jews fled praying through the giant gates and pressed themselves into the shelter of the Synagogue. The keeper looked at the alabarch. He lifted his arm, and Lydia and the keeper and he, shutting away, as best they might, the noise of the threatening city, listened, if any belated fugitive came through the dark. The sound of footsteps approached; a body of people, strangers to the alabarch, appeared; Lydia made a little sound, and moved toward them. "We also are beset," the foremost said, "can we enter into the protection of the Synagogue?" "Haste ye, and enter!" the alabarch answered. And after the hindmost, he and Lydia passed into the sanctuary. The keepers swung the great valves shut, and the last sound they admitted was a ravening howl, as Alexandria hurled itself into the empty streets of the Regio Judaeorum.