In a hundred or a thousand years, it would be like that, fallen, obliterated from the black sky.

One day, already, he had felt it tottering and cracking beneath him, and had foreseen that this temple of Catholicism would fall even as Jove's temple had fallen on the Capitol.

And it was over now, the dome had strewn the ground with fragments, and all that remained standing, in addition to a portion of the apse, where five columns of the central nave, still upholding a shred of entablature, and four cyclopean buttress-piers on which the dome had rested--piers which still arose, isolated and superb, looking indestructible among all the surrounding downfall.

But a denser mist flowed past, another thousand years no doubt went by, and then nothing whatever remained.

The apse, the last pillars, the giant piers themselves were felled! The wind had swept away their dust, and it would have been necessary to search the soil beneath the brambles and the nettles to find a few fragments of broken statues, marbles with mutilated inscriptions, on the sense of which learned men were unable to agree.