sentry, as though in command of a gang of convicts, here and there an official of some society for the protection of animals, but he is quite useless.  Whether he be armed to quell a rebellion or to put the injured animals out of their pain, I know not.  In any case, he is a sign of the state of life in these valleys of marble.  Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin about our cities.  Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise like the shrieking of iron on iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture are sawn out of the rock.  There is no joy in this labour, and the savage, harsh yell of the machines drowns any song that of old might have lightened the toil.  Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some 13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities.  Do you wonder why Carrara has never produced a sculptor?  The answer is here in the quarries that, having dehumanised man, have themselves become obscene.  The frightful leprous glare of crude whiteness that shines in every cemetery in Europe marks only the dead; the material has in some strange way lost its beauty, and with the loss of beauty in the material the art of sculpture has been lost.  These thousands of slaves who are hewing away the mountains are ludicrous and ridiculous in their brutality and absurdity.  They have sacrificed their humanity for no end.  The quarries are worked for money, not for art.  The stone is cut not that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a dividend.  As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it is a sense of slavery and death that you feel.  Everywhere there is struggle, rebellion, cruelty; everywhere you see men, bound by ropes, slung over the dazzling face of the cliffs, hacking at the mountains with huge iron pikes, or straining to crash down a boulder for the ox wagons.  As you get higher an anxious and disastrous silence surrounds you, the violated spirit of the mountains that has yielded itself only to the love of Michelangelo seems to be about to overwhelm you in some frightful tragedy.  In the shadowless cool light of early morning, these pallid valleys, horrid with noise of struggle and terror, the snorting of a horse, the bellow of a bullock in pain, seem like some fantastic dream of a new Inferno; but when at last the enormous sun has risen over the mountains, and flooded the glens with furious heat, it is as though you walked in some delirium, a shining world full of white fire dancing in agony around you.  You stumble along, sometimes waiting till a wagon and twelve oxen have been beaten and thrust past you on the ascent, sometimes driven half mad by the booming of the dynamite, here threading an icy tunnel, there on the edge of