They gathered close round him without a word.  “Suddenly I noticed that the crowd had turned to the left.  Round we all went; very slowly, with the greatest difficulty, shoved, trampled on, knocked about; with our arms pinned to our sides, and hardly able to breathe, we fought our way, street by street, to the little square by the bridge of St. Angelo.  The bridge itself was crammed with people; beyond it, there were more crowds, which seemed to stretch all the way to St. Peter’s.  The right bank of the Tiber swarmed like an ant-hill.  Crossing the bridge was a hard job; it took us over a quarter of an hour.  The poor devils on each side, in their fear of being pushed over the edge, clutched the parapet madly, and shouted with terror; I believe there were several accidents.

“Well, at last we got across.  All the streets leading to the Piazza of St. Peter were choked with human beings.  When we reached the foot of one of the two streets that run straight to St. Peter’s we heard a great roar, like the noise of the sea in a gale; it seemed to come to us in gusts, now near by, now a long way off.  It was the noise of the crowd in the square before St. Peter’s.  We rushed ahead more madly than ever; climbing over each other, carried along, pushed, swept, and dragged, till at last we reached the square.  God, if you could have seen it!—­ What a spectacle!—­The whole huge square was jammed, black, swarming; no longer a square, but an ocean.  All around the outer edge, between the four lines of columns, on the steps of the church, in the portico, on the great terraced roof, in the outer galleries of the dome, on the capitals of the columns, on the very pilasters; in the windows of the houses to the right of the square, on the balconies, on the leads, above, below, to the right and to the left, wherever a human being could find foothold, wherever there was some projection to cling to or to dangle from, everywhere there were heads, arms, legs, banners, shouts, gesticulations.  The whole of Rome was there.”

“Heavens! ...  And the Vatican?” the women cried, in a tremble.

“All shut up.  You know that a wing of the Vatican overlooks the square, and that the Pope’s apartments are in that wing.  Every window was closed; it looked like an abandoned palace; like a cold, rigid, impassive face, staring straight ahead with wide-open motionless eyes.  The crowd looked up at it with a murmur.

“Over by the church steps I noticed a lot of officers and gentlemen moving about and giving orders, which seemed to be handed on through the crowd.  The excitement was increasing.  Every head in the square was uncovered; white heads of old men, brown heads of soldiers, fair heads of little children.  The sun blazed down on it all.  Thousands of shapes, colors, sounds, seemed to undulate and blend; banners, green boughs, fluttering rags, were tossed back and forth as though upon a dancing sea.  The crowd seethed and quivered as if the ground underfoot were on fire.