of children of all colours and sizes,
playing in the dust. Many curs sunned themselves among heaps of
rubbish, and took not the trouble to growl at me. Then I came out upon
a highroad, and turned my face towards the city lying under a crude
sunshine, and in a ring of metallic vibrations.

Better houses with plastered fronts washed yellow or blue, and even
pinky red, alternated with tumble-down wooden structures. A crenellated
squat gateway faced me with a carved shield of stone above the open
gloom. A young smooth-faced mulatto, in some sort of dirty uniform, but
wearing new straw slippers with blue silk rosettes over his naked feet,
lounged cross-legged at the door of a kind of guardroom. He held a big
cigar tilted up between his teeth, and ogled me, like a woman, out of
the corners of his languishing eyes. He said not a word.

Fortunately my face had tanned to a dark hue. Enrico's clothes would
not attract attention to me, of course. The light colour of my hair was
concealed by the handkerchief bound under my hat; my footsteps echoed
loudly under the vault, and I penetrated into the heart of the city.

And directly, it seemed to me, I had stepped back three hundred years. I
had never seen anything so old; this was the abandoned inheritance of
an adventurous race, that seemed to have thrown all its might, all its
vigour, and all its enthusiasm into one supreme effort of valour and
greed. I had read the history of the Spanish Conquest; and, looking at
these great walls of stone, I felt my heart moved by the same wonder,
and by the same sadness. With what a fury of heroism and faith had this
whole people flung itself upon the opulent mystery of the New World.
Never had a nation clasped closer to its heart its dream of greatness,
of glory, and of romance. There had been a moment in its destiny, when
it could believe that Heaven itself smiled upon its massacres. I walked
slowly, awed by the solitude. They had conquered and were no more, and
these wrought stones remained to testify gloomily to the death of their
success. Heavy houses, immense walls, pointed arches of the doorways,
cages of iron bars projecting balcony wise around each square window.
And not a soul in sight, not a head looking out from these dwellings,
these houses of men, these ancient abodes of hate, of base rivalries,
of avarice, of ambitions--these old nests of love, these witnesses of
a great romance now past and gone below the horizon. They seemed to