"The last scion of the ancient patrician family of the Furii," answered Arsinoë. "The mother wishes to make a consul of him. His only dream is to flee into some Thebaïd, or monkish community in the desert, to spend his days in prayer. He loves his mother and hides himself from her as from an enemy."
"The descendants of the Furii, monks?... 'T is a queer age," sighed the Epicurean.
They approached the arenarium, old excavations in crumbling tufa, and went down narrow steps to the bottom of the quarry. The volcanic blocks of red earth looked strange-hued in the moonlight. Juventinus took a little clay lamp from a dark niche, and lighted it; the long flame flickered feebly in its narrow gullet.
They entered the darkness of the side galleries of the arenarium. Hollowed by the ancient Romans, the quarry was large and spacious and descended in steep slopes. It was therefore pierced by numerous galleries, for the use of workmen in transporting the tufa. Juventinus led his companions through the labyrinth and halted at last in front of a shaft from which he lifted the coverlid of wood; the party went cautiously down the damp and slippery steps; at the bottom was a narrow door; Juventinus knocked; the door opened, and a grey-headed monk introduced them into a passage hollowed in harder tufa. The walls on both sides from floor to vaulting were covered with slabs of marble, the seals of tombs in which coffins (loculi) were ranged.
At every step folk carrying lamps came to meet them. By the flickering light Anatolius read with curiosity on one of these stone flags: "Dorotheus, son of Felix, in this place of coolness, light, and peace, reposes" ("requiescit in loco refrigii, luminis, pacis"). On another: "Brethren, disturb not my deep slumber."
The style of the inscriptions was radiant and happy: "Sophronia, beloved, thou art alive for ever in God" ("Sophronia, dulcis, semper vivis Deo"). And a little farther on: "Sophronia vivis!" ("Sophronia, thou livest!") as if he who had written these words had at length realised that there was no more death.
Nowhere was it written "He is buried here," but only "Here is laid for a certain time" (depositus). It seemed as if millions of people, generation upon generation, were lying in this place, not dead, but fallen asleep, all full of mysterious expectation. In the niches lamps were placed. They burned in the close atmosphere with a long steady flame and graceful vases exhaled penetrating odours. Nothing but the faint smell of putrefying bones, which escaped by fissures in the coffins, gave any hint of death.
The passages went down lower and lower, curved as round an amphitheatre; and here and there in the ceiling a large aperture gave light from luminaria opening on the country without.
Sometimes a weak moon-ray passing down the luminaria would strike at the bottom on a slab of marble covered with inscriptions.
At the end of one of these passages they saw a sexton who, chanting gaily, was hollowing the ground with heavy blows of his pick. Several Christians were standing near the principal inspector of the tombs, the fossor. He was very well dressed and had a fat cunning face. The fossor had inherited a right freely to dispose of a gallery of catacombs, and to sell unoccupied sites in his gallery, which was all the more appreciated because in it were buried the relics of St. Laurence. Although rich, the fossor was keenly bargaining, as they came up, with a wealthy and miserly leather-merchant. Arsinoë stopped a moment to hear the discussion.