n
the spots where fallen soil had covered the mosaics of the imperial
halls. All around nettles and brambles grew up, and ivy preyed on the
overturned porticoes, till there came a day when the colossal assemblage
of palaces and temples, which marble was to have rendered eternal, seemed
to dive beneath the dust, to disappear under the surging soil and
vegetation which impassive Nature threw over it. And then, in the hot
sunlight, among the wild flowerets, only big, buzzing flies remained,
whilst herds of goats strayed in freedom through the throne-room of
Domitian and the fallen sanctuary of Apollo.

A great shudder passed through Pierre. To think of so much strength,
pride, and grandeur, and such rapid ruin--a world for ever swept away! He
wondered how entire palaces, yet peopled by admirable statuary, could
thus have been gradually buried without any one thinking of protecting
them. It was no sudden catastrophe which had swallowed up those
masterpieces, subsequently to be disinterred with exclamations of
admiring wonder; they had been drowned, as it were--caught progressively
by the legs, the waist, and the neck, till at last the head had sunk
beneath the rising tide. And how could one explain that generations had
heedlessly witnessed such things without thought of putting forth a
helping hand? It would seem as if, at a given moment, a black curtain
were suddenly drawn across the world, as if mankind began afresh, with a
new and empty brain which needed moulding and furnishing. Rome had become
depopulated; men ceased to repair the ruins left by fire and sword; the
edifices which by their very immensity had become useless were utterly
neglected, allowed to crumble and fall. And then, too, the new religion
everywhere hunted down the old one, stole its temples, overturned its
gods. Earthly deposits probably completed the disaster--there were, it is
said, both earthquakes and inundations--and the soil was ever rising, the
alluvia of the young Christian world buried the ancient pagan society.
And after the pillaging of the temples, the theft of the bronze roofs and
marble columns, the climax came with the filching of the stones torn from
the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus, with the pounding of the
statuary and sculpture-work, thrown into kilns to procure the lime needed
for the new monuments of Catholic Rome.

It was nearly one o'clock, and Pierre awoke as from a dream. The sun-rays
were streaming in a golden rain