The abbot, with whom de Crucis was well-acquainted, welcomed the travellers warmly, making them free of the library and the archives and pressing them to prolong their visit.  Under the spell of these influences they lingered on from day to day; and to Odo they were the pleasantest days he had known.  To be waked before dawn by the bell ringing for lauds—­to rise from the narrow bed in his white-washed cell, and opening his casement look forth over the haze-enveloped valley, the dark hills of the Abruzzi and the remote gleam of sea touched into being by the sunrise—­to hasten through hushed echoing corridors to the church, where in a grey resurrection-light the fathers were intoning the solemn office of renewal—­this morning ablution of the spirit, so like the bodily plunge into clear cold water, seemed to attune the mind to the fullest enjoyment of what was to follow:  the hours of study, the talks with the monks, the strolls through cloister or garden, all punctuated by the recurring summons to devotion.  Yet for all its latent significance it remained to him a purely sensuous impression, the vision of a golden leisure:  not a solution of life’s perplexities, but at best an honourable escape from them.

3.2.

“To know Rome is to have assisted at the councils of destiny!” This cry of a more famous traveller must have struggled for expression in Odo’s breast as the great city, the city of cities, laid her irresistible hold upon him.  His first impression, as he drove in the clear evening light from the Porta del Popolo to his lodgings in the Via Sistina, was of a prodigious accumulation of architectural effects, a crowding of century on century, all fused in the crucible of the Roman sun, so that each style seemed linked to the other by some subtle affinity of colour.  Nowhere else, surely, is the traveller’s first sight so crowded with surprises, with conflicting challenges to eye and brain.  Here, as he passed, was a fragment of the ancient Servian wall, there a new stucco shrine embedded in the bricks of a medieval palace; on one hand a lofty terrace crowned by a row of mouldering busts, on the other a tower with machicolated parapet, its flanks encrusted with bits of Roman sculpture and the escutcheons of seventeenth-century Popes.  Opposite, perhaps, one of Fuga’s golden-brown churches, with windy saints blowing out of their niches, overlooked the nereids of a barocco fountain, or an old house propped itself like a palsied beggar against a row of Corinthian columns; while everywhere flights of steps led up and down to hanging gardens or under archways, and each turn revealed some distant glimpse of convent-walls on the slope of a vineyard or of red-brown ruins profiled against the dim sea-like reaches of the Campagna.