Ian stood between tides, behind him a forenoon, before him an evening of carnival participation.  In the morning he had been with a stream of persons; presently, with the declining sun, would be with another.  Here was an hour or two of pause, time of day for rest with half-closed eyes.  He looked over the pale rose wave of the almonds, he saw Peter’s dome and St. Angelo.  He was conscious of a fatigue of his powers, a melancholy that they gave him no more than they did.  “How it is all tinsel and falsetto!...  I want a clean, cold, searching wave—­desert and night—­not life all choked with wax tapers and harlequins!  I want something....  I don’t know what I want.  I only know I haven’t got it!”

His arm moved upon the base of the statue.  He looked up at the white form with the arrow in its hands.  “Self-containment....  What, goddess, you would call chastity all around?...  All the spilled self somehow centered.  But just that is difficult—­difficult—­more difficult than anything Hercules attempted.  Oh me!” He sat down beneath the cypress that stood behind the statue and rested his head within his hands.  From Rome, on all sides, broke into the still light trumpets and bell-ringing, pipes and drums, shout and singing.  It sounded like a thousand giant cicadae.  A group of masks went through the garden, by the Diana figure.  They threw pine cones and confetti at the gold-brown foreigner seated there.  One wore an ass’s head, another was dressed as a demon with horns and tail, a third rolled as Bacchus, a fourth, fifth, and sixth were his maenads.  All went wildly by, the clamor of the city swelled.

This was first day of carnival.  Succeeding days, succeeding nights, mounted each a stage to heights of folly.  Starred all through was innocent merrymaking, license held in leash.  But the gross, the whirling, and the sinister elements came continuously and more strongly into play.  Measured sound grew racket, camaraderie turned into impudence.  Came at last pandemonium.  All without Rome—­Campagna and mountains—­were in Rome.  Peasant men and women slept, when they slept, in and beneath carts and huge wine-wagons camped and parked in stone forests of imperial ruins.  Artisan, mechanic, and merchant Rome lightened toil and went upon the hunt for pleasure, dropping servility in the first ditch.  Foreigners, artists, men from everywhere, roved, gazed, and listened, shared.  The great made displays, some with beauty, some of a perverted and monstrous taste.  The lords of the Church nodded, looked sleepily or alertly benevolent.  At times all alike turned mere populace.  Courtesans thronged, the robber and the assassin found their prey.  All men and women who might entertain, ever so coarsely, ever so poorly, were here at market.  Mummers and players, musicians, dancers, jugglers, gipsies, and fortune-tellers floated thick as May-flies.  Voices, voices, and every musical instrument—­but all set in a certain range, and that not the deep nor the sweet.  So it seemed, and yet, doubtless, by searching might have been found the deep and the sweet.  Certainly the air of heaven was sweet, and it went in and between.