This then was the Rome of which he had heard such marvelous tales! The city of palaces, basilicas and shrines had sunk to this! Her magnificent thoroughfares had become squalid streets, her monuments were crumbled and forgotten, or worse, they were abused by every lawless wretch who cared to seize upon them and build thereon his fortress or palace. A dismal fate indeed to have fallen to the former mistress of the world! Far better, he thought, to be deserted and forgotten utterly, like many a former seat of empire, far better to be overgrown with grass and dock and nettle, to be left to dream and oblivion than to survive in low estate as had this city on the banks of the Tiber.
With these reflections, engendered no less by the air of desolation than by the occasional appearance of armed bands of feudal soldiery who hurled defiance at each other, Tristan found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the heart of Rome, a hotbed of open and silent rebellion against the rule of any one who dared to lord it over the degenerate descendants of the former masters of the world. Here representatives of the nations of all the earth jostled one another and the poor dregs of Romulus; or peoples of wilder aspect from Persia or Egypt, within whose mind floated mysterious Oriental wisdom, bequeathed from the dawn of Time. And as the scope of Tristan's observation widened, the demon of disillusion unfolded gloomy wings over the far horizon of his soul. And the Tiber rolled calmly on below, catching in its turbid waves the golden sunset glow.
Now and then he encountered the armed retinue of some feudal baron clattering along the narrow ill-paved streets, chasing pedestrians into adjacent doorways and porticoes and pursuing their precipitate retreat with outbursts of banter and mirth.
Unfamiliar as Tristan was with the factions that usurped the dominion of the Seven Hills, the escutcheons and coats-of-arms of these marauding parties meant little to him. Now and then however it would chance that two rival factions clashed, each disputing the other's passage. Then, only, did he become alive to the dangers that beset the unwary in the city of the Pontiff, and a sudden spirit of recklessness and daring, born of the moment, prompted the desire to plunge into this seething vortex, if but to purchase temporary oblivion and relief.
He faced the many dangers of the streets, loitering here and there and curiously eyeing all things, and would eventually have lost himself, when the mantle of night began to fall on the Seven Hills, had he not instinctively remarked that the ascending road removed him from the river.
[CHAPTER V]
ON THE AVENTINE
When Tristan at last regained his bearings, he found himself among the convents and cloisters on Mount Aventine. His eyes rested wearily on the eddying gleam of the Tiber as it wound its coils round the base of the Mount of Cloisters, thence they roamed among the grass and weed-grown ruins of ancient temples and crumbling porticoes, which rose on all sides in the silent desolation.
Just then a last gleam of the disappearing sun touched the bronze figure of the Archangel on the summit of Castel San Angelo, imbuing it for an instant with a weird effect, as though the ghost of some departed watchman were waving a lighted torch aloft in the heavens. Then the glow faded before a dead grey twilight, which settled solemnly over the melancholy landscape.