the
russet roadsides, which resound with the crepitation of grasshoppers;
and, beyond, the Campagna stretches, vast and bare, as far as the eye can
see. A parasol pine, a eucalyptus, some olive or fig trees, white with
dust, alone rise up near the road at infrequent intervals. On the left
the ruddy arches of the Acqua Claudia show vigorously in the meadows, and
stretches of poorly cultivated land, vineyards, and little farms, extend
to the blue and lilac Sabine and Alban hills, where Frascati, Rocca di
Papa, and Albano set bright spots, which grow and whiten as one gets
nearer to them. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the houseless,
treeless plain grows and spreads with vast, broad ripples, extraordinary
ocean-like simplicity and grandeur, a long, straight line alone parting
it from the sky. At the height of summer all burns and flares on this
limitless prairie, then of a ruddy gold; but in September a green tinge
begins to suffuse the ocean of herbage, which dies away in the pink and
mauve and vivid blue of the fine sunsets.

As Pierre, quite alone and in a dreary mood, slowly paced the endless,
flat highway, that resurrection of the past which he had beheld on the
Palatine again confronted his mind's eye. On either hand the tombs once
more rose up intact, with marble of dazzling whiteness. Had not the head
of a colossal statue been found, mingled with fragments of huge sphinxes,
at the foot of yonder vase-shaped mass of bricks? He seemed to see the
entire colossal statue standing again between the huge, crouching beasts.
Farther on a beautiful headless statue of a woman had been discovered in
the cella of a sepulchre, and he beheld it, again whole, with features
expressive of grace and strength smiling upon life. The inscriptions also
became perfect; he could read and understand them at a glance, as if
living among those dead ones of two thousand years ago. And the road,
too, became peopled: the chariots thundered, the armies tramped along,
the people of Rome jostled him with the feverish agitation of great
communities. It was a return of the times of the Flavians or the
Antonines, the palmy years of the empire, when the pomp of the Appian
Way, with its grand sepulchres, carved and adorned like temples, attained
its apogee. What a monumental Street of Death, what an approach to Rome,
that highway, straight as an arrow, where with the extraordinary pomp of
their pride, which had survived their dust, the great dead