to
which the atmosphere is ever eating, nowadays only hold together by the
help of cement, bars, and hooks. And having examined them, Pierre was
leaning forward to glance at the Vatican's jumble of ruddy roofs, when it
seemed to him that the shout from which he had fled was rising from the
piazza, and thereupon, in all haste, he resumed his ascent within the
pillar conducting to the dome. There was first a staircase, and then came
some narrow, oblique passages, inclines intersected by a few steps,
between the inner and outer walls of the cupola. Yielding to curiosity,
Pierre pushed a door open, and suddenly found himself inside the Basilica
again, at nearly 200 feet from the ground. A narrow gallery there ran
round the dome just above the frieze, on which, in letters five feet
high, appeared the famous inscription: _Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram
oedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni coelorum._* And then,
as Pierre leant over to gaze into the fearful cavity beneath him and the
wide openings of nave, and aisles, and transepts, the cry, the delirious
cry of the multitude, yet clamorously swarming below, struck him full in
the face. He fled once more; but, higher up, yet a second time he pushed
another door open and found another gallery, one perched above the
windows, just where the splendid mosaics begin, and whence the crowd
seemed to him lost in the depths of a dizzy abyss, altar and
_baldacchino_ alike looking no larger than toys. And yet the cry of
idolatry and warfare arose again, and smote him like the buffet of a
tempest which gathers increase of strength the farther it rushes. So to
escape it he had to climb higher still, even to the outer gallery which
encircles the lantern, hovering in the very heavens.

* Thou art Peter (Petrus) and on that rock (Petram) will I build
my church, and to thee will I give the keys of the Kingdom of
Heaven.

How delightful was the relief which that bath of air and sunlight at
first brought him! Above him now there only remained the ball of gilt
copper into which emperors and queens have ascended, as is testified by
the pompous inscriptions in the passages; a hollow ball it is, where the
voice crashes like thunder, where all the sounds of space reverberate. As
he emerged on the side of the apse, his eyes at first plunged into the
papal gardens, whose clumps of trees seemed mere bushes almost level with
the soil; and he could retrace his recent stroll amon