VIII.

From a cavern wide In the rent cloud's side, In sulphurous showers The red flame pours. The palaces fall In the lurid light, Which casts a red pall O'er their facades white!

Oh, Sodom! Gomorrah! What a dome of horror Rests now on your walls! On you the cloud falls, Nation perverse! On your fated heads, From its fell jaws, a curse Its lightning fierce spreads!

The people awaken Which godlessly slept; Their palaces shaken, Their offences unwept! Their rolling cars all Meet and crash in the street; And the crowds, for a pall, Find flames round their feet!

Numberless dead, Round these high towers spread, Still sleep in the shade By their rugged heights made; Colossi of rocks In ill-steadied blocks! So hang on a wall Black ants, like a pall!

To escape is in vain From this horrible rain! Alas! all things die; In the lightning's red flash The bridges all crash; 'Neath the tiles the flame creeps; From the fire-struck steeps Falls on the pavements below, All lurid in glow, Rolling down from on high!

Beneath every spark, The red, tyrannous fire Mounts up in the dark Ever redder and higher; More swiftly than steed Uncontrolled, see it pass! Horrid idols all twist, By the crumbling flame kissed In their infamous dread, Shrivelled members of brass!

It grows angry, flows on, Silver towers fall down Unforeseen, like a dream In its green and red stream, Which lights up the walls Ere one crashes and falls, Like the changeable scale Of a lizard's bright mail. Agate, porphyry, cracks And is melted to wax! Bend low to their doom These stones of the tomb! E'en the great marble giant Called Nabo, sways pliant Like a tree; whilst the flare Seemed each column to scorch As it blazed like a torch Round and round in the air.

The magi, in vain, From the heights to the plain Their gods' images carry In white tunic: they quake-- No idol can make The blue sulphur tarry; The temple e'en where they meet, Swept under their feet In the folds of its sheet! Turns a palace to coal! Whence the straitened cries roll From its terrified flock; With incendiary grips It loosens a block, Which smokes and then slips From its place by the shock; To the surface first sheers, Then melts, disappears, Like the glacier, the rock! The high priest, full of years, On the burnt site appears, Whence the others have fled. Lo! his tiara's caught fire As the furnace burns higher, And pale, full of dread, See, the hand he would raise To tear his crown from the blaze Is flaming instead!

Men, women, in crowds Hurry on--the fire shrouds And blinds all their eyes As, besieging each gate Of these cities of fate To the conscience-struck crowd, In each fiery cloud, Hell appears in the skies!