“Be quiet, please!” she implored, in a voice I scarcely recognised. “Don’t make me cry! What would my sisters think? I should not be able to hide my tears.... And I am choking.”
Oddo’s voice was heard calling to us from the ruins. Anatolia and Violante had already set foot in the dead city. One of the boatmen came towards us with his skiff, thinking perhaps that our delay was caused by my inexperience in guiding the boat through the tangle of water-lilies.
“Ah, I shall always bear within me the regret of having lost thee!” I said in silence to her who was about to depart. “I should rather behold thee laid out in the perfection of death than know thy soul to be straitened in a life alien to that which my love and my art had promised thee. And perhaps thou wouldest have led me to explore some far-away region of my inner world, which without thee will remain neglected and uncultivated....”
The boat was gliding lightly over the snowy flock; in its track the leaves and blossoms rippled apart, and through the crystalline clearness of the water the pale forest of stems was visible, pale and languid, as if fed by the mud of Lethe. The ruins of Linturno embraced by the water and the flowers looked, in their secular, stony apathy, like a great collection of broken skeletons. Even the eyeballs of a human skull are not so lifelessly empty as were the hollows of those worn-out stones, bleached white like bones by the mists and the heat. And I imagined that I was ferrying a dead maiden.
Everything after that bore the impress of my sadness on that cloudless afternoon. For a long time we wandered about the ruins searching out the traces of vanished life.
They were uncertain traces, which gave rise to all sorts of different conjectures. Was the theory true of the band of youths crowned with garlands descending to the parent river singing and dedicating their unshorn, growing locks to him? Or was it rather a white procession of catechumens like little children, fed on milk and honey, who descended there to receive baptism? A dim legend of martyrs cast a sort of mournful sanctity over the pagan remains. “Martyris ossa jacent....” we read on the fragment of a sarcophagus; and here and there among the few sculptured stones lying about we found emblems and symbols of double meaning; Jove’s eagle and Cybele’s lion subdued to the Evangelists; the vines of Dionysius twisted to express the parable of the Saviour; Diana’s stag representing the thirsty soul. Now and then a snake darted out from among the stones and roots, and vanished quickly as an arrow. An invisible bird was making a strange imitation of the rattles which announce the hours of silence on Good Friday.
“And where is your great Madonna?” asked Anatolia, recalling my words of long ago. We sought among the fallen masonry for a path to lead us to the ruined basilica, which stood at the extreme end of the island, on the branch of the Saurgo nearest the rocks.
“Perhaps the water will prevent our getting there,” I said, as I perceived the glittering reflections close to the wall.
The river had indeed flooded part of the sacred ruin, and a forest of water weeds was growing there undisturbed. But we found a gap by which we were able to enter the apse. Each of the three sisters as she entered made the sign of the cross, amid a great whirring of wings.
Inside all was cool and damp, and the palpitating light took a greenish hue. The apse and a few pillars of the central nave were left, and formed a kind of cave, which the waters had invaded almost up to the deserted altar steps; and a multitude of water-lilies, larger and whiter even than those through which we had rowed, clustered as if in adoration at the feet of the great Madonna in mosaic, who occupied alone the concave heaven of gold which formed the apse. She did not hold the Infant in her arms, but stood alone, wrapped in a mantle of leaden hue like a shadow of mourning, and a deep mystery of sorrow lay in her large, fixed eyes. High above the curve of the arch the swallows had made a charming crown of nests, following the order of the words written round it—