All who might or who chose went masked.  So few did not choose that street and piazza seemed filled with all orders of being and moments of time.  Terrible, grotesque, fantastic, pleasing, went the rout, and now the hugest crowd was here and now it was there, and now there were moments of even diffusion.  At night the lights were in multitude, and in multitude the flaring and strange decorations.  Day and night swung processions, stood spectacles, huge symbolic movements and attitudes, grown obscure and molded to the letter, now mere stage effects.  Day by day through carnival week the noise increased, restraint lessened.

At times Ian was in company with monseigneur and those who came to the villa; at times he sought or was sought by others that he knew in Rome, fared into carnival with them.  Much more rarely he dipped into the swirl alone.

The saturnalia drew toward its close.  Ash Wednesday, like a great gray-sailed ship, was seen coming large into port.  The noise grew wild, license general.  All available oil must be poured into the fire of the last day of pleasures.  Ian was to have been with monseigneur’s party gathered to view a pageant lit by torches of wax, then to drink wine, then, in choice masks, to break in upon a dance of nymphs, whirl away with black or brown eyes....  It was the program, but at the last he evaded it, slipped from the villa, chose solitary going.  Why, he did not know, save that he felt aching satiety.

Here in the streets were half-lights, afterglow from the sunken sun and smoky torches.  The latter increased in number, the oil-lamps, great and small, were lit, the tapers of various qualities and thicknesses.  Where there were open spaces vast heaps of seasoned wood now flaming caused processions of light and shadow among ruins, against old triumphal arches, against churches and dwellings old, half-old, and new, lived in, chanted in still, intact and usable.  Above was star-sown night, but Rome lay under a kobold roof of her own lighting.  Noise held grating sway, mere restless motion enthroned with her.  Worlds of drunken grasshoppers in endless scorched plains!  The masks seemed now demoniac, less beauty than ugliness.

Ian found himself on the Quirinal, in the great ragged space dominated by the Colossi.  Here burned a bonfire huge enough to make Plutonian day, and here upon the fringes of that light he encountered a carnival brawl, and became presently involved in it.  He wore a domino striped black and silver, and a small black mask, a black hat with wide brim and a long, curling silver feather.  He was tall, broad-shouldered, noticeable....  The quarrel had started among unmasked peasants, then had swooped in a numerous band dressed as ravens.  Light-fingered gentry, inconspicuously clad, aided in provoking misunderstanding that should shake for them the orchard trees.  A company of wine-bibbers with monstrous, leering masks, staggering from a side-street, fell into the whirlpool.