Selling "relics," psalm singing and preaching was about all the business we could see in the Imperial City.
It is very funny how a fool habit will cling to the century pismires of humanity, and actually blind the elements of common sense and patent truth.
We were offered a job lot of "relics" for five florins, which included a piece of the true cross, a bit of the rope that hung Judas, a couple of hairs from the head of the Virgin Mary, a peeling from the apple of Mother Eve, a part of the toe nail of Saint Thomas, a finger of Saint John, a thigh bone of Saint Paul, a tooth of Saint Antony, and a feather of the cock of Saint Peter, but we persistently declined the proffered honors and true "relics of antiquity," spending the five florins for a "night liner" to wheel us about the grand architectural sights of the city of the Cæsars.
The night before leaving Rome William and myself climbed upon the topmost rim of the crumbling Coliseum and gazed down upon the sleeping moonlit capital with entranced admiration.
The night was almost as bright as day, and the mystic rays from the realm of Luna, shining on gate, arch, column, spire, tower, temple and dome, revealed to us the ghosts of vanished centuries, and from the depths of the Coliseum there seemed to rise the shouts of a hundred thousand voices, cheering the gladiator from Gaul, who had just slain a Numidian lion in the arena, when, with "thumbs up," he was proclaimed the victor, decorated with a crown of laurel and given his freedom forever.
Shakspere could not resist his natural gift of exuberant poetry to sound these chunks of eloquence to the midnight air, while I listened with enraptured enthusiasm to the elocution of the Bard:
Hark! Saint Peter, with his brazen tongue
Voices the hour of twelve;
The wizard tones of tireless Time
Thrills the silvery air;
The multitudinous world sleeps,
Pope and beggar alike—
In the land of lingering dreams—
Oblivious of glory,
Poverty, or war, destructive;
Sleep, the daily death of all
Throws her mesmeric mantle
Over prince and pauper;
And care, vulture of fleeting life
Folds her bedraggled wings
To rest a space, 'till first cock crow
Hails the glimmering dawn
With piercing tones triumphant;
Father Tiber, roaring, moves along
Under rude stony arches
And chafes the wrinkled, rocky shores
As when Romulus and Remus
Suckled wolf of Apennines!
Vain are all the triumphs of man.
These temples and palaces,
Reaching up to the brilliant stars
In soaring grandeur, vast—
Shall pass away like morning mist,
Leaving a wilderness of ruins.
And, where now sits pride, wealth and fraud
Pampered in purpled power—
The lizard, the bat and the wolf
Shall hold their habitation;
And the vine and the rag-weed
Swaying in the whistling winds
Shall sing their mournful requiem.
The silence of dark Babylon
Shall brood where millions struggled,
And naught shall be heard in cruel Rome,
But the wail of the midnight storm,
Echoing among the broken columns
Of its lofty, vanished glory—
Where vain, presumptive, midget man
Promised himself Immortality!
After five days of sightseeing we took the public stage for Milan, guarded by soldiers, and arrived safely on board the Albion, which sailed away, through the Strait of Messina, around classic Greece to Negropont and on to Alexandria, Egypt, where we anchored for a load of dates, figs and Persian spices.
William and myself took a boat up the Nile to Cairo, and hired a guide to steer us over the desert to the far-famed Pyramids.
There in the wild waste of desert sands these monuments to forgotten kings and queens lift their giant peaks, appealing to the centuries for recognition, but although the great granite stone memorials still remain as a wonder to mankind, the dark, silent mummies that sleep within and around these funereal emblems give back no sure voice as to when and where they lived, rose and fell in the long night of Egyptian darkness.