The blue sky of Italy; the blue sky of Rome. Sunlight pouring white and clear from the wide-stretched sky. Sunlight sliding softly over white marble, lying in jasmine circles before cool porticoes, striking sharply upon roofs and domes, recoiling before straight façades of grey granite, foiled and beaten by the deep halls of temples.
Sunlight on tiles and tufa, sunlight on basalt and porphyry. The sky stripes Rome with sun and shadow; strips of yellow, strips of blue, pepper-dots of purple and orange. It whip-lashes the four great horses of gilded bronze, harnessed to the bronze quadriga on the Arch of Nero, and they trot slowly forward without moving. The horses tread the marbles of Rome beneath their feet. Their golden flanks quiver in the sunlight. One foot paws the air. A step, and they will lance into the air, Pegasus-like, stepping the wind. But they do not take the step. They wait—poised, treading Rome as they trod Alexandria, as they trod the narrow Island of Cos. The spokes of the quadriga wheels flash, but they do not turn. They burn like day-stars above the Arch of Nero. The horses poise over Rome, a constellation of morning, triumphant above Emperors, proud, indifferent, enduring, relentlessly spurning the hot dust of Rome. Hot dust clouds up about them, but not one particle sticks to their gilded manes. Dust is nothing, a mere smoke of disappearing hours. Slowly they trot forward without moving, and time passes and passes them, brushing along their sides like wind.
People go and come in the streets of Rome, shuffling over the basalt paving-stones in their high latcheted sandals. White and purple, like the white sun and the purple shadows, the senators pass, followed by a crowd of slaves. Waves of brown-coated populace efface themselves before a litter, carried by eight Cappadocians in light-red tunics; as it moves along, there is the flicker of a violet stola and the blowing edge of a palla of sky-white blue. A lady, going to the bath to lie for an hour in the crimson and wine-red reflections of a marble chamber, to glide over a floor of green and white stones into a Carraran basin, where the green and blue water will cover her rose and blue-veined flesh with a slipping veil. Aqua Claudia, Aqua Virgo, Aqua Marcia, drawn from the hills to lie against a woman's body. Her breasts round hollows for themselves in the sky-green water, her fingers sift the pale water and drop it from her as a lark drops notes backwards into the sky. The lady lies against the lipping water, supine and indolent, a pomegranate, a passion-flower, a silver-flamed lily, lapped, slapped, lulled, by the ripples which stir under her faintly moving hands.
Later, beneath a painting of twelve dancing girls upon a gold ground, the slaves will anoint her with cassia, or nakte, or spikenard, or balsam, and she will go home in the swaying litter to eat the tongues of red flamingoes, and drink honey-wine flavoured with far-smelling mint.
Legionaries ravish Egypt for her entertainment; they bring her roses from Alexandria at a cost of thirty thousand pounds. Yet she would rather be at Baiae, one is so restricted in one's pleasures in Rome! The games are not until next week, and her favourite gladiator, Naxos, is in training just now, therefore time drags. The lady lags over her quail and peacocks' eggs. How dull it is. White, and blue, and stupid. Rome!
Smoke flutters and veers from the top of the Temple of Vesta. Altar smoke winding up to the gilded horses as they tread above Rome. Below—laughing, jangling, pushing and rushing. Two carts are jammed at a street corner, and the oaths of the drivers mingle, and snap, and corrode, like hot fused metal, one against another. They hiss and sputter, making a confused chord through which the squeal of a derrick winding up a granite slab pierces, shrill and nervous, a sharp boring sound, shoring through the wide, white light of the Roman sky. People are selling things: matches, broken glass, peas, sausages, cakes. A string of donkeys, with panniers loaded with red asparagus and pale-green rue, minces past the derrick, the donkeys squeeze, one by one, with little patting feet, between the derrick and the choked crossing. "Hey! Gallus, have you heard that Cæsar has paid a million sestertii for a Murrhine vase. It is green and white, flaked like a Spring onion, and has the head of Minerva cut in it, sharp as a signet." "And who has a better right indeed, now that Titus has conquered Judea. He will be here next week, they say, and then we shall have a triumph worth looking at." "Famous indeed! We need something. It's been abominably monotonous lately. Why, there was not enough blood spilled in the games last week to give one the least appetite. I'm damned stale, for one."
Still, over Rome, the white sun sails the blue, stretching sky, casting orange and purple striæ down upon the marble city, cool and majestic, between cool hills, white and omnipotent, dying of languor, amusing herself for a moment with the little boats floating up the Tiber bringing the good grain of Carthage, then relaxed and falling as water falls, dropping into the bath. Weak as water; without contour as water; colourless as water; Rome bathes, and relaxes, and melts. Fluid and fluctuating, a liquid city pouring itself back into the streams of the earth. And above, on the Arch of Nero, hard, metallic, firm, cold, and permanent, the bronze horses trot slowly, not moving, and the moon casts the fine-edged shadow of them down upon the paving-stones.
Hills of the city: Pincian, Esquiline, Cælian, Aventine, the crimson tip of the sun burns against you, and you start into sudden clearness and glow red, red-gold, saffron, gradually diminishing to an outline of blue. The sun mounts over Rome, and the Arch of Augustus glitters like a cleft pomegranate; the Temples of Julius Cæsar, Castor, and Saturn, turn carbuncle, and rose, and diamond. Columns divide into double edges of flash and shadow; domes glare, inverted beryls hanging over arrested scintillations. The fountains flake and fringe with the scatter of the sun. The mosaic floors of atriums are no longer stone, but variegated fire; higher, on the walls, the pictures painted in the white earth of Melos, the red earth of Sinope, the yellow ochre of Attica, erupt into flame. The legs of satyrs jerk with desire, the dancers whirl in torch-bright involutions. Grapes split and burst, spurting spots and sparks of sun.
It is morning in Rome, and the bronze horses on the Arch of Nero trot quietly forward without moving, but no one can see them, they are only a dazzle, a shock of stronger light against the white-blue sky.
Morning in Rome; and the whole city foams out to meet it, seething, simmering, surging, seeping. All between the Janiculum and the Palatine is undulating with people. Scarlet, violet, and purple togas pattern the mass of black and brown. Murex-dyed silk dresses flow beside raw woollen fabrics. The altars smoke incense, the bridges shake under the caking mass of sight-seers. "Titus! Titus! Io triumphe!" Even now the troops are collected near the Temple of Apollo, outside the gates, waiting for the signal to march. In the parching Roman morning, the hot dust rises and clouds over the city—an aureole of triumph. The horses on the Arch of Nero paw the golden dust, but it passes, passes, brushing along their burnished sides like wind.