which the world knew.

Now and then, as he walked up the mule path with a step which became
lighter with the lightness of the air, he threw a word in Italian to a
passing peasant, some Ligurian-looking man who drove a bright-coloured
market garden ending in a donkey's head and tail. Eyes and teeth flashed
comprehension, but the answer was in a queer _patois_, a hotch-potch of
Latin, Italian, French, and Arabic.

On the top of the mountain Vanno breakfasted, at a pink hotel
fantastically built in hybrid Moorish style. From his window-table he
could see the Tour de Supplice on a height below; a broken column of
stone said to mark the place where Romans tortured and executed their
prisoners. Far beneath lay the Rock of Hercules and Monte Carlo, the
four unequal horns of the great white animal springing saliently to the
eye even at this height. To the right, the great iron-gray bulk of the
Tete de Chien hid the promontories which, like immense prehistoric
reptiles, swam out to sea beyond Beaulieu; but to the left were the
mountains of Italy, their highest ridges marbled with dazzling snow;
and Cap Martin's green length was frilled with silver ripples.

Still Vanno was happy, as he had not been since he saw Mary dining alone
in the restaurant of the Hotel de Paris. He had made a plan for the next
hours, which gave him hope for the future.

After breakfast, he walked into the gray and ancient mountain-village of
La Turbie, whose old houses and walls of tunnelled streets were built
from the wreckage of Caesar's Trophy. Jewish faces peered at him from
high, dark windows, for here it was that, in the Middle Ages, Jews fled
from persecution, and made La Turbie a Jewish settlement. Even in the
newer town of pink and blue and yellow houses there were Jewish faces to
be seen in dusky shops where fruit was displayed for sale, in heaps like
many-coloured jewels.

Just beyond the oldest outskirts Vanno came to the foot of the monument,
unspeakably majestic still, though long ago stripped of its splendid
marbles, and its statues that commemorated Caesar's triumph. Men were
working in the shadow of the vast column of stone and crumbling Roman
brick, digging for lost knowledge in the form of broken inscriptions,
hands and heads of statues, bits of carved cornice, and a hundred buried
treasures by means of which the historical puzzle-picture might
gradually be matched together. Vanno became interested, and spent an
hour watching and