To our unskilled eyes nothing seemed to promise that our surroundings would prove other than the usual Majorcan farm placed on a particularly rocky bit of country.
Our guide, who had been walking in advance, stopping suddenly, pointed to the ground at his feet.
"There!" he said.
And looking, we saw that we were standing on the top step of a barely distinguishable semicircle that had been roughly hewn in the rock. With a beautiful disrespect for age, a stone dike had been built right across the seats. I think we counted six rows above and five below the wall. And in the arena flourishing almond-trees had rooted deep in the once blood-stained soil. A hole in the ground allowed a peep into a cavern where the wild beasts used in the combats had been housed.
But the ground held other secrets. In the solid rock that rose above the sides of the amphitheatre there were many graves—once sealed; now, having been desecrated by bygone generations of Moors, merely slits gaping to the skies.
About four years earlier a strange finding had taken place within a few paces of the farm-house. An untouched Roman grave had been discovered; and our guide, who had been present at the opening, described the scene in language so graphic, and accompanied by such dramatic gesture, that we had not the smallest difficulty in following the most minute detail.
He told us how, when the hermetically sealed top stone had been lifted away, the complete body of a woman, apparently young, lay before them, as she had been placed two thousand years before, with a necklace of gold round her throat, earrings in her ears, rings on her fingers. And how, as they looked in awed silence, the body that throughout these ages had maintained a semblance of humanity, had before their eyes slowly crumbled into undistinguishable dust.
