retched over the ravaged valley at the foot of Monte Mario, where so
many brick-works were established during the building frenzy. The green
slopes are still ripped up, yellow trenches intersect them in all
directions, and the closed works and factories have become wretched ruins
with lofty, black, and smokeless chimneys. And at any other hour of the
day Leo XIII could not approach his window without beholding the
abandoned houses for which all those brick-fields had worked, those
houses which had died before they even lived, and where there was now
nought but the swarming misery of Rome, rotting there like some
decomposition of olden society.

However, Pierre more particularly thought of Leo XIII, forgetting the
rest of the city to let his thoughts dwell on the Palatine, now bereft of
its crown of palaces and rearing only its black cypresses towards the
blue heavens. Doubtless in his mind he rebuilt the palaces of the
Caesars, whilst before him rose great shadowy forms arrayed in purple,
visions of his real ancestors, those emperors and Supreme Pontiffs who
alone could tell him how one might reign over every nation and be the
absolute master of the world. Then, however, his glances strayed to the
Quirinal, and there he could contemplate the new and neighbouring
royalty. How strange the meeting of those two palaces, the Quirinal and
the Vatican, which rise up and gaze at one another across the Rome of the
middle ages and the Renascence, whose roofs, baked and gilded by the
burning sun, are jumbled in confusion alongside the Tiber. When the Pope
and the King go to their windows they can with a mere opera-glass see
each other quite distinctly. True, they are but specks in the boundless
immensity, and what a gulf there is between them--how many centuries of
history, how many generations that battled and suffered, how much
departed greatness, and how much new seed for the mysterious future!
Still, they can see one another, and they are yet waging the eternal
fight, the fight as to which of them--the pontiff and shepherd of the
soul or the monarch and master of the body--shall possess the people
whose stream rolls beneath them, and in the result remain the absolute
sovereign. And Pierre wondered also what might be the thoughts and dreams
of Leo XIII behind those window-panes where he still fancied he could
distinguish his pale, ghostly figure. On surveying new Rome, the ravaged
olden districts and the new ones laid waste by t