rnal turn of his feelings, fear was coming over
him as he reached the end of his tragic dream. When the numbness which
spreads across the aged world should have passed Rome, when Lombardy
should have yielded to it, and Genoa, Turin, and Milan should have fallen
asleep as Venice has fallen already, then would come the turn of France.
The Alps would be crossed, Marseilles, like Tyre and Sidon, would see its
port choked up by sand, Lyons would sink into desolation and slumber, and
at last Paris, invaded by the invincible torpor, and transformed into a
sterile waste of stones bristling with nettles, would join Rome and
Nineveh and Babylon in death, whilst the nations continued their march
from orient to occident following the sun. A great cry sped through the
gloom, the death cry of the Latin races! History, which seemed to have
been born in the basin of the Mediterranean, was being transported
elsewhere, and the ocean had now become the centre of the world. How many
hours of the human day had gone by? Had mankind, starting from its cradle
over yonder at daybreak, strewing its road with ruins from stage to
stage, now accomplished one-half of its day and reached the dazzling hour
of noon? If so, then the other half of the day allotted to it was
beginning, the new world was following the old one, the new world of
those American cities where democracy was forming and the religion of
to-morrow was sprouting, those sovereign queens of the coming century,
with yonder, across another ocean, on the other side of the globe, that
motionless Far East, mysterious China and Japan, and all the threatening
swarm of the yellow races.

However, while the cab climbed higher and higher up the Via Nazionale,
Pierre felt his nightmare dissipating. There was here a lighter
atmosphere, and he came back into a renewal of hope and courage. Yet the
Banca d'Italia, with its brand-new ugliness, its chalky hugeness, looked
to him like a phantom in a shroud; whilst above a dim expanse of gardens
the Quirinal formed but a black streak barring the heavens. However, the
street ever ascended and broadened, and on the summit of the Viminal, on
the Piazza delle Terme, when he passed the ruins of Diocletian's baths,
he could breathe as his lungs listed. No, no, the human day could not
finish, it was eternal, and the stages of civilisation would follow and
follow without end! What mattered that eastern wind which carried the
nations towards the west, as if borne