might rue the time ; and the other Christians who were hidden there, when they heard of such miseries, lamented bitterly with weeping, and sorely bemoaned the souls of those who should have gone to the kingdom of heaven, in that they had fallen away from God so miserably. But those who steadfastly believed, when they were led thither, and had their faith firm in God, and would not deny their Lord for any man's threats, these the heathen respected not a whit, but punished them by every affliction, and sundered all their limbs one from the other, even as the blowing of the wind sweepeth dust from the earth, and they cut them up and mocked (?) them all, and, like a second deluge, so flowed their blood ; and they hung the headless on the town-walls, and set their heads, like those of others who were thieves, outside the town-walls upon head-stakes; and there immediately flew thither rooks and ravens and birds of many kinds, and hacked out the eyes of the holy martyrs, and flew again into the city over the town-walls, and rent in pieces the holy beloved ones of God, and in their bloody bills 80 bare the flesh of the martyrs, the entrails and inward parts, and devoured them all.
It was hard to find the man there who could not lament such [a sight], neither was there any man upon whom, in passing by, horror and awe did not come, for the great miseries which each one 84 there saw; wonderful was that martyr-army, and strong the strife with the devil; there was the fear of God manifest and evident in that foul deed.
Such a warfare would take place that men might there see, that they loved God from their inmost heart, since they endured affliction for the love of His name, and suffered death itself so severely ; and not only would they lament and compassionate their sufferings, but if we had been there we might have heard, (even as all those heard who were there present, that is, among the great crowd and in the awful throng, when they were torturing the martyrs), that it would seem on a sudden as if all the images that were set up as gods all about the town, all spoke together and cried with one voice, that they desired [to go] quite away thence, because of the
