CHAPTER IV
Count Daun, the Imperial Viceroy of Naples, invited the Tsarevitch to an evening interview at the royal palace on September 26.
During the last few days the atmosphere had indicated the approach of the sirocco, that African wind which carries with it clouds of hot sand from the depths of the Sahara. The storm was probably already raging in the upper regions of the air, while on the earth there was absolute calm; the leaves of the palms and branches of mimosa hung motionless. The sea alone was agitated; huge foamless ridges swelled up and broke on the shore with heavy rumbling. The distance was shrouded in dense gloom, and the sun in the cloudless heavens was seen dimly as through a smoked opal. The air was permeated with the finest dust which penetrated everywhere, even into well-closed rooms; it covered white sheets of paper and the pages of books with a grey layer; it made the teeth gritty, it inflamed eyes and throats. It was close, and hourly became more stifling. In nature there was the same feeling as in the body round a tumour. Men and animals were restless, tossed about in distress. The people were expectant of some calamity; war, or pestilence, or perhaps an eruption of Vesuvius.
And really in the night from the 23rd to the 24th September, the inhabitants of Torre del Greco, Resina and Portici felt the first underground shocks. Lava appeared. The glowing avalanche was already nearing the uppermost vineyards, planted on the slopes of the hill. To appease God’s wrath penitential processions were inaugurated, with burning candles, subdued singing and loud sobbing. But God’s wrath was not appeased.
A thick black smoke rose from Vesuvius in the daytime, as from some furnace, spreading out in the shape of a long cloud from Castellamare to Posilippo. At night the red flames were visible like the glow from some great subterranean fire. The peaceful altar of the gods was transformed into the terrible torch of the Eumenides.
At last in Naples itself the first rumble of the earthquake, like underground thunder, was heard. The ancient Titans were again awaking. The town was terror-stricken. The days of Sodom and Gomorrah were recalled. At night when all was quiet, somewhere in the chinks of the window, or under the door, or in the chimney there would rise a low-pitched piping like the hum of a mosquito. It was Sirocco beginning his song. The noise grew louder and stronger, and at the moment when it was expected to burst into furious howling, suddenly died away, and again stillness ensued, only more death-like. It seemed as if the evil spirits below held converse with one another about the terrible day of the Lord.
During these days the Tsarevitch felt indisposed; but the doctor reassured him that this was only the ordinary effect of the sirocco upon those not used to it, and prescribed a cooling medicine, which seemed to ease him.
On the appointed day and hour he drove to the palace for his interview with the Viceroy. The officer on duty met him in the antechamber and gave him a polite excuse from Count Daun, asking his Highness to wait a few moments in the reception hall, as the Viceroy had been obliged to absent himself on some urgent business. Alexis entered the huge, lonely reception hall furnished with a gloomy, almost sinister, Spanish luxury: blood-red silk tapestries, an excess of heavy gilt decorations; cupboards carved in black wood resembling tombs; mirrors, so dim that they reflected spectres. On the walls large dark canvasses, religious paintings by old masters: Roman soldiers, looking very much like butchers, were burning, kicking, sawing and in sundry other ways torturing Christian martyrs; it reminded one of a slaughterhouse or a torture chamber of the Holy Inquisition. Across the ceiling amid the gilt scrolls and shells was a representation of the Triumph of the Olympian Gods. This abortion, bastard offspring of some follower of Titian and Rubens, marked the end of the Renaissance, in which refined effeminacy had become a barbarian savagery, brutalizing art. Masses of nude bodies, nude flesh, fat backs, puffed-out pleated bellies, sprawling feet, monstrous breasts; these swine-fed gods and goddesses, and the little amoretti very much like sucking pigs, all this beast-like Olympus seemed predestined for the Christian shambles; for the torture-instruments of the holy Inquisition.
The Tsarevitch walked up and down the room for some time; at last he got tired and sat down. Dusk was creeping in through the windows and grey shadows, like spiders, were spinning their webs in the corner. Only here and there a bright gilt lion’s paw, or the pointed breast of a griffin, supporting the bloodstone or malachite slabs of tables, broke the gloom; the candelabra, shrouded in muslin, dimly glittered with their crystal pendants, like gigantic cocoons beaded with dew. This mass of nude fleshy bodies, fat and pagan on the ceiling, suffering Christians round the walls, only seemed to augment the stifling effects of the sirocco. His attention was arrested by a picture, which, unlike the others, was a bright spot among them; it represented a girl nude to her waist, with auburn hair, an almost child-like innocent bosom, clear yellow eyes and a vacant smile on her lips. In the raised corners of her mouth the wild natural smile and the almond-shaped eyes there was something resembling Afrossinia. All at once there came to him an indistinct feeling that there was some connection between this smile and the stifling oppressiveness of the sirocco. It was a poor picture, a copy of an old work belonging to the Lombard school, probably by a pupil of Leonardo’s pupil. This vacant yet still mysterious smile was a last reflection from the face of Naples’ noble citizen Monna Lisa Gioconda.
The Tsarevitch was surprised at having to wait so long for the Viceroy, who was always so exceedingly polite; and where was Weingart? Why this death-like stillness in the castle?