At the head of the expedition had been a priest, young and elegant, a Roman Monsignor, clad in silk, and with him two showy foreign women, who were always climbing up in the highest places, raising their skirts rather high for fear of the star lizards that were writhing in and out of the ruins.  Ferragut, in humble admiration, always remained below, glimpsing the country from behind their legs.  “Ay!  Twenty-two years!...”  Afterwards when he heard Pompeii spoken of, it always evoked in his memory several strata of images.  “Very beautiful!  Very interesting!” And in his mind’s eye he saw again the palaces and temples, but as a secondary consideration, like a shrouded background, while in the forefront were four magnificent legs standing forth,—­a human colonnade of slender shafts swathed in transparent black silk.

The solitude so long desired for his second visit was now aggressively in evidence.  In this deserted, dead city there were to-day no other sounds than the whirring of insect wings over the plants beginning to clothe themselves with springtime verdure, and the invisible scampering of reptiles under the layers of ivy.

At the gate of Herculaneum, the guardian of the little museum left Ferragut to examine in peace the excavations of the various corpses, petrified Pompeiians of plaster still in the attitudes of terror in which death had surprised them.  He did not abandon his post in order to trouble the captain with his explanations; he scarcely raised his eyes from the newspaper that he had before him.  The news from Rome,—­the intrigues of the German diplomats, the possibility that Italy might enter the war,—­were absorbing his entire attention.

Afterwards on the solitary streets the sailor found everywhere the same preoccupation.  His footsteps resounded in the sunlight as though treading the depths of the hollow tombs.  The moment he stopped, silence again enveloped him,—­“A silence of two thousand years,” thought Ferragut to himself, and in the midst of this primeval silence sounded far-away voices in the violence of a sharp discussion.  They were the guardians and the employees of the excavations who, lacking work, were gesticulating and insulting each other in these strongholds twenty centuries old so profoundly isolated from patriotic enthusiasm or fear of the horrors of war.

Ferragut, map in hand, passed among these groups without annoyance from insistent guides.  For two hours he fancied himself an inhabitant of ancient Pompeii who had remained alone in the city on a holiday devoted to the rural divinities.  His glance could reach to the very end of the straight streets without encountering persons or things recalling modern times.

Pompeii appeared to him smaller than ever in this solitude,—­an intersection of narrow roads with high sidewalks paved with polygonal blocks of blue lava.  In its interstices Spring was forming green grass plots dotted with flowers.  Carriages,—­of whose owners not even the dust was left,—­had with their deep wheels opened up ridges in the pavement more than a thousand years ago.  In every crossway was a public fountain with a grotesque mask which had spouted water through its mouth.