That smiling, unobtrusive city, half veiled by golden mist, immersed as it were in some dream of childhood, now appeared to him flooded with a crude light, motionless, hard of outline and silent like death.

The distance was as if devoured by too keen a flame, steeped in a luminous dust in which it crumbled.

And against that blurred background the whole city showed with violent distinctness in great patches of light and shade, their tracery harshly conspicuous.

One might have fancied oneself above some very ancient, abandoned stone quarry, which a few clumps of trees spotted with dark green.

Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood.