has been stripped of its vegetation, the flora
which once made it like a virgin forest. And what an evocation when the
mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous
framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could
hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole
civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the
surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an
impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant
purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean
ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of
giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and
inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire
population; a _frigidarium_ where five hundred people could swim
together; a _tepidarium_ and a _calidarium_* on the same proportions,
born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of
the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no
feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which
makes passing visitors look like lost ants; such an extraordinary riot of
the great and the mighty that one wonders for what men, for what
multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared. To-day, you would say a
mass of rocks in the rough, thrown from some height for building the
abode of Titans.

* Tepidarium, warm bath; calidarium, vapour bath.--Trans.

And as Pierre gazed, he became more and more immersed in the limitless
past which encompassed him. On all sides history rose up like a surging
sea. Those bluey plains on the north and west were ancient Etruria; those
jagged crests on the east were the Sabine Mountains; while southward, the
Alban Mountains and Latium spread out in the streaming gold of the
sunshine. Alba Longa was there, and so was Monte Cavo, with its crown of
old trees, and the convent which has taken the place of the ancient
temple of Jupiter. Then beyond the Forum, beyond the Capitol, the greater
part of Rome stretched out, whilst behind Pierre, on the margin of the
Tiber, was the Janiculum. And a voice seemed to come from the whole city,
a voice which told him of Rome's eternal life, resplendent with past
greatness. He remembered just enough of what he had been taught at school
to realise where he was; he knew just what every one knows of Rome with
no