“It is splendid.”
It was of a blue with the lustre of mother-of-pearl; in the zenith a stray star was imperceptibly shining; to the west floated golden and red clouds.
They went down the steep street, alongside a garden wall. In some places, bunches of century plants showed their hard spikes, sharp as daggers, over the low walls.
There was a great silence in this coming of night. Among the foliage of the trees they heard the piping of sparrows. From far away there came, from time to time, the puffing of a train.
DESOLATION
They walked without speaking, mastered by the melancholy of their surroundings. Now and again, a peasant, tanned by the sun, with his little sack full of grass, came home from the fields, singing.
Cæsar and Susanna passed alongside of the Jewish cemetery, and stopped to look in through a grill. The wall hid the burning zone of twilight; a greenish blue reigned in the zenith.
They went on again. A bell began to ring.
Cæsar was depressed. Susanna was silent.
They crossed a street of new, dark houses; they passed by a little square with a melancholy church. The street they took was named for Saint Theodore. To the left, down the Via del Velabro, they saw an arch with many niches on the sides of the single opening.