or twenty restorations of the Forum that have been planned on paper, each
of them as plausible as the other. But to the mere passer-by, who is not
a professional scholar and has not recently re-perused the history of
Rome, the details have no significance. All he sees on this searched and
scoured spot is a city's cemetery where old exhumed stones are whitening,
and whence rises the intense sadness that envelops dead nations. Pierre,
however, noting here and there fragments of the Sacred Way, now turning,
now running down, and now ascending with their pavement of silex indented
by the chariot-wheels, thought of the triumphs, of the ascent of the
triumpher, so sorely shaken as his chariot jolted over that rough
pavement of glory.

But the horizon expanded towards the southeast, and beyond the arches of
Titus and Constantine he perceived the Colosseum. Ah! that colossus, only
one-half or so of which has been destroyed by time as with the stroke of
a mighty scythe, it rises in its enormity and majesty like a stone
lace-work with hundreds of empty bays agape against the blue of heaven!
There is a world of halls, stairs, landings, and passages, a world where
one loses oneself amidst death-like silence and solitude. The furrowed
tiers of seats, eaten into by the atmosphere, are like shapeless steps
leading down into some old extinct crater, some natural circus excavated
by the force of the elements in indestructible rock. The hot suns of
eighteen hundred years have baked and scorched this ruin, which has
reverted to a state of nature, bare and golden-brown like a
mountain-side, since it 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