In the ancient court, under the tall whispering trees, on the broken stair, in the crumbling _loggia_, in the church itself, which smelt of damp like a tomb, everywhere there was silence and desolation. Anania put Aunt Varvara's candle on a dusty altar, then looked at the rude frescoes on the walls, at the stucco figures gilded with a melancholy light, at the rough images of Sardinian saints, at everything which once had moved him to wonder and to terror. He smiled; but languidly and sadly. He returned to the Court and saw, through an open window, the hat of a carabiniere and a pair of boots hung on the wall of a cell. In his memory resounded once more that air from the Gioconda-- "_A te questo rosario_--" The smell of wax reached him. Where were the children, the companions of his infancy, the little birds savage and half naked which had animated the steps of the church? Anania had no wish to see them now, to make himself known to them; yet how tenderly did he remember the games played with them beneath these trees while the dead leaves were falling, falling like the feathers of dying birds. A barefooted woman with an amphora on her head, passed at the far end of the court. Anania trembled, for the woman reminded him of his mother. Where was his mother? Why had he not dared, even though he had wished, to speak of her to the widow? Why had not the widow alluded to her old, ungrateful guest? To escape from these questions the young man went next to the Post Office, and sent a picture card to Margherita. Then he visited the Rector, and towards evening he walked along the road to the west, the road which looked down on the immensity of the valleys. Seeing the Fonni women going to the fountain, straitened in their strange "_tunics_," he remembered his early love dreams; and how he had wished himself a herdsman and Margherita a peasant girl, delicate and graceful, but with the amphora on her head like some Pompeian damsel made in stucco. And he smiled again contrasting his romantic fancies with the rough disillusion which had awaited him among the wonders of the Basilica. A glory of sunset spread itself over the heaven. It seemed an apocalyptic vision. The clouds painted a tragic scene: a burning plain, furrowed by lakes of gold and rivers of purple from whose depths rose bronze coloured mountains, edged with amber and pearly snow, severed by flaming apertures which seemed mouths of grottoes, sending up fountains of gilded blood. A battle of solar giants, of formidable denizens of the infinite, was in progress among these aerial mountains, in the profound grottoes of the bronze clouds. From the apertures flashed the gleam of arms carved in the metal of the sun; the blood poured in torrents, rolling into the lakes of molten gold, serpentining in rivers which seemed arrows, inundating the fiery plains of heaven.