Part 45 (2/2)

They went down the steep street, alongside a garden wall. In some places, bunches of century plants showed their hard spikes, sharp as daggers, over the low walls.

There was a great silence in this coming of night. Among the foliage of the trees they heard the piping of sparrows. From far away there came, from time to time, the puffing of a train.

_DESOLATION_

They walked without speaking, mastered by the melancholy of their surroundings. Now and again, a peasant, tanned by the sun, with his little sack full of gra.s.s, came home from the fields, singing.

Caesar and Susanna pa.s.sed alongside of the Jewish cemetery, and stopped to look in through a grill. The wall hid the burning zone of twilight; a greenish blue reigned in the zenith.

They went on again. A bell began to ring.

Caesar was depressed. Susanna was silent.

They crossed a street of new, dark houses; they pa.s.sed by a little square with a melancholy church. The street they took was named for Saint Theodore. To the left, down the Via del Velabro, they saw an arch with many niches on the sides of the single opening.

A band of black seminarians pa.s.sed.

”Poor creatures!” murmured Caesar.

”Are you very sympathetic?” said Susanna, mockingly.

”Yes, those chaps rouse my pity.”

Now, on the right, the furious ruins of the Palatine were piled up: brick walls, ruined arches, decrepit part.i.tions, and above, the terrace of a garden with a bal.u.s.trade. Over the terrace, against the sky, were the silhouettes of high cypresses almost black, of ilexes with their dense foliage, and a large palm with arching leaves.

From these so tragic ruins there seemed to exhale a great desolation, beneath the deep, green sky.

Susanna and Caesar drew near the Forum.

In the opaque light of dusk the Forum had the air of a cemetery. Two lighted windows were s.h.i.+ning in the high dark wall of the Tabularium, and sharp-toned bells were beginning to ring.

They went up the stairway that leads to the Capitol, and on a little terrace they stopped to look at the Forum.

”What terrible desolation!” exclaimed Susanna.

”All the stones look like tombs,” said Caesar. ”Yes, that is true.”

”What are those three high open vaults that give so strange an impression of immense size?” asked Caesar.

”That is what remains of Constantine's basilica.”

For a long while they gazed at that abandoned s.p.a.ce, with its melancholy columns and white stones.

In a street running into the Forum, there began to s.h.i.+ne two rows of gaslights of a greenish colour.

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