ly lighted by
candles. With another feeble creature, once a man, he preceded me, and
speaking poor French said he had had my letter and had prepared me the
best apartment in his house. We climbed stone staircases as one might
climb the Pyramids, wandered on through resounding and ghostly
corridors, and finally came to a room as vast as a quarry and almost as
chilly as a catacomb. When he placed the candle on a cold slab of a
table and withdrew with many bows I could have imagined myself a lost
spirit. There was just sufficient light to see the darkness. The room
was a kind of tragedy in itself; the floor was stone; a little bed in
one far distant corner was only to be discovered by travel. It was a
long walk to the window. Outside I saw white foam breaking in the
harbour now silted up and wholly useless.

I dined that night in another hall which could have accommodated a
hundred. I was lost in shadows. But then I was a shadow among shades.
This was the past indeed, an ancient world. And after dinner, at last, I
got a bath. It took me two hours to get it, and when it came it was
nothing more than a great kettle for boiling fish in. I knew it was that
by the smell. I rejected it for a basin which was almost as large as an
English saucer for a breakfast cup. And then I slept. I felt that I was
in a tomb, sleeping with my fathers. It was a kind of unexpected
resurrection to wake and find daylight about me.

I had meant to stay for a little while at Terracina, but somehow I took
a kind of "scunner" at this poor old hotel of magnificent distances and
the lingering, doddering, unwashed old men who acted as chambermaids.
Perhaps, too, the fish kettle as a bath was a discouragement. No bath at
all can be put up with in course of time, but a fish kettle invited me
to be clean and yet did not allow me to smell so. I went down to my
prehistoric landlord and requested him to get me a carriage to go in to
Formia, where I should be once more in touch with the rail. I
instructed him to get it for me at a reasonable price, and that price I
knew to be about twenty lire or francs. For the first time in my Italian
experiences I had come across a hotel-keeper who was not in league with
the owners of carriages. I was soon made aware of this by overhearing an
awful uproar in the big outside corridor. I lighted a cigarette and went
out to find the landlord and the man of carriages, a very black and
hairy brigand, enjoying themselves as only s