between the shiny leaves of the
ever-green oaks above him, and down below Rome lay dozing, overcome by
the great heat. Then he made up his mind to leave the garden, and went
stumbling over the rough pavement of the Clivus Victoriae, his mind still
haunted by blinding visions. To complete his day, he had resolved to
visit the old Appian Way during the afternoon, and, unwilling to return
to the Via Giulia, he lunched at a suburban tavern, in a large, dim room,
where, alone with the buzzing flies, he lingered for more than two hours,
awaiting the sinking of the sun.

Ah! that Appian Way, that ancient queen of the high roads, crossing the
Campagna in a long straight line with rows of proud tombs on either
hand--to Pierre it seemed like a triumphant prolongation of the Palatine.
He there found the same passion for splendour and domination, the same
craving to eternise the memory of Roman greatness in marble and daylight.
Oblivion was vanquished; the dead refused to rest, and remained for ever
erect among the living, on either side of that road which was traversed
by multitudes from the entire world. The deified images of those who were
now but dust still gazed on the passers-by with empty eyes; the
inscriptions still spoke, proclaiming names and titles. In former times
the rows of sepulchres must have extended without interruption along all
the straight, level miles between the tomb of Caecilia Metella and that
of Casale Rotondo, forming an elongated cemetery where the powerful and
wealthy competed as to who should leave the most colossal and lavishly
decorated mausoleum: such, indeed, was the craving for survival, the
passion for pompous immortality, the desire to deify death by lodging it
in temples; whereof the present-day monumental splendour of the Genoese
Campo Santo and the Roman Campo Verano is, so to say, a remote
inheritance. And what a vision it was to picture all the tremendous tombs
on the right and left of the glorious pavement which the legions trod on
their return from the conquest of the world! That tomb of Caecilia
Metella, with its bond-stones so huge, its walls so thick that the middle
ages transformed it into the battlemented keep of a fortress! And then
all the tombs which follow, the modern structures erected in order that
the marble fragments discovered might be set in place, the old blocks of
brick and concrete, despoiled of their sculptured-work and rising up like
seared rocks, yet still suggesting t