‘This night is a great night,’ Alice went
on. ’It comes rarely—when seven
times thirteen ...’
At this point I could not catch a few words.
‘To-night we can see what is hidden at other
times.’
‘Alice!’ I implored, ‘but who are
you, tell me at last?’
Silently she lifted her long white hand. In the
dark sky, where her finger was pointing, a comet flashed,
a reddish streak among the tiny stars.
‘How am I to understand you?’ I began,
’Or, as that comet floats between the planets
and the sun, do you float among men ... or what?’
But Alice’s hand was suddenly passed before
my eyes.... It was as though a white mist from
the damp valley had fallen on me....
‘To Italy! to Italy!’ I heard her whisper.
‘This night is a great night!’
The mist cleared away from before my eyes, and I saw
below me an immense plain. But already, by the
mere breath of the warm soft air upon my cheeks, I
could tell I was not in Russia; and the plain, too,
was not like our Russian plains. It was a vast
dark expanse, apparently desert and not overgrown
with grass; here and there over its whole extent gleamed
pools of water, like broken pieces of looking-glass;
in the distance could be dimly descried a noiseless
motionless sea. Great stars shone bright in the
spaces between the big beautiful clouds; the murmur
of thousands, subdued but never-ceasing, rose on all
sides, and very strange was this shrill but drowsy
chorus, this voice of the darkness and the desert....
‘The Pontine marshes,’ said Alice.
’Do you hear the frogs? do you smell the sulphur?’
‘The Pontine marshes....’ I repeated,
and a sense of grandeur and of desolation came upon
me. ’But why have you brought me here, to
this gloomy forsaken place? Let us fly to Rome
instead.’
‘Rome is near,’ answered Alice....
‘Prepare yourself!’
We sank lower, and flew along an ancient Roman road.
A bullock slowly lifted from the slimy mud its shaggy
monstrous head, with short tufts of bristles between
its crooked backward-bent horns. It turned the
whites of its dull malignant eyes askance, and sniffed
a heavy snorting breath into its wet nostrils, as
though scenting us.
‘Rome, Rome is near...’ whispered Alice.
‘Look, look in front....’
I raised my eyes.
What was the blur of black on the edge of the night
sky? Were these the lofty arches of an immense
bridge? What river did it span? Why was it
broken down in parts? No, it was not a bridge,
it was an ancient aqueduct. All around was the
holy ground of the Campagna, and there, in the distance,
the Albanian hills, and their peaks and the grey ridge
of the old aqueduct gleamed dimly in the beams of
the rising moon....
We suddenly darted upwards, and floated in the air
before a deserted ruin. No one could have said
what it had been: sepulchre, palace, or castle....
Dark ivy encircled it all over in its deadly clasp,
and below gaped yawning a half-ruined vault.
A heavy underground smell rose in my face from this
heap of tiny closely-fitted stones, whence the granite
facing of the wall had long crumbled away.
