(_He leans over, and gazes into the abyss._)
"The man who should fall would be killed. Nothing easier: it were only necessary to roll over upon my left side:--only one movement--one!"
(_Then suddenly appears_--AN AGED WOMAN. _Anthony starts to his feet in affright. It seems to him that he beholds his mother arisen._
_But this woman is far older, and prodigiously thin._
_A shroud, knotted about her head, hangs down, together with her white hair, so as to cover her legs, slender as crutches. The brilliancy of her ivory-coloured teeth make her earthy skin darker still. The orbits of her eyes are full of shadow; and far back within them two flames vacillate, like the lamps of sepulchres._
"But King Saul killed himself! Razias, a just man, killed himself! Saint Pelagia of Antioch killed herself! Dommina of Aleppo and her two daughters--all three saints--killed themselves: and remember also how many confessors delivered themselves up to the executioner in their impatient longing for death! That they might enjoy death more speedily, the virgins of Miletus strangled themselves with their girdles. At Syracuse the philosopher Hegesias preached so eloquently upon death that men deserted the lupanars to go hang themselves in the fields. The patricians of Borne sought for death as a new form of debauch."
ANTHONY. "Aye! the love of death is strong; and many a anchorite has succumbed to it."
THE OLD WOMAN. "To do that which will make thee equal unto God--think! He created thee: thou wilt destroy his work--thou! and by thy courage,--of thy own free will! The enjoyment that Erostratus knew was not greater than this. And moreover thy body has so long mocked thy soul that it is full time thou shouldst take vengeance upon it. Thou wilt not suffer. It will soon be over. Of what art thou afraid?--a wide, black hole! Perhaps it is a void!"
[Illustration: The Old Woman: Of what art thou afraid?a wide, black hole! Perhaps it is a void!]
(_Anthony hearkens without replying; and upon the other side appears_--
ANOTHER WOMAN--_young and marvellously beautiful. At first he takes her to be Ammonaria. But she is taller, blond as honey, very plump, with paint upon her cheeks and roses upon her head. Her long robe, weighty with spangles, gleams with metallic lustre;--her fleshy lips are sanguinolent; and her somewhat heavy eyelids are so drowned with languor that one would almost take her to be blind._