The noisy arrival of the express train gave the Sardinian youth an electric shock, a sense of terror, the first giddy impression of a civilization, violent, even destructive. The red-eyed monster would ravish him away as the wind ravishes the leaves. He would be pitched into a cauldron of new life, boiling over with terrible joys and griefs. Ah! that would be life in reality! dreamed of but never known I civilization! the human ebb and flow! the omnipotent palpitation of the great collective heart! Then he looked out of the train and watched the long melancholy lines of the Campagna Romana, warm green under the autumnal sun, reminding him of the tablelands of his home; but the new life upon which he was entering usurped all his thoughts obliterating the landscape, putting memory to flight. Everything, the walls, the trees, the bushes, the air itself, seemed in motion flying madly by, as if terrified, as if pursued by some unseen monster. Only the express train, itself a monster but beneficent, protecting, the immense warrior of civilization, advanced violently towards the persecutor dragon to fall upon and destroy it. In Rome, the two students lived on the third floor of a huge house in Piazza della Consolazione, kept by a widow with two pretty daughters--telegraphists at a newspaper office. The companionship of Daga, a chameleon-like personage, sometimes merry, sometimes hypochondriacal, often choleric, often apathetic, always egotistical and sarcastic, was a great solace to Anania during the first days of his residence in the capital. The pair slept in one room, divided by a screen made out of a yellow rug. The room was vast but dark, with one little window looking out on the internal court. Anania's first glance from this window filled him with dismay. From the lurid depths of the court rose high walls of dirty yellow, pierced with irregular windows from which exhaled kitchen odours of grease and onions. Iron rods ran along the walls and across the court; from them depended miserable garments of doubtful cleanliness, one of these rods passed just under the student's window, long strands of twisted pack-thread floating from it. Anania stood looking gloomily at the faded walls, but Battista Daga shook the rod and laughed. "Look!" he said, "the rings on this rod and the skeins of thread dance as if they were alive. It's amusing!" Anania looked, and saw the resemblance to marionettes. Battista went on. "That's life! an iron rod spanning a dirty court and men who dance suspended over an abyss." "Don't destroy my illusions," said Anania, "I'm dull enough without your philosophy. Let's go out. I'm smothering." They went out and walked till they were tired, bewildered by the noise of carriages and trams, by the splendour of the lamps, by the violent rush and raucous cries of the motors, above all by the surging of the crowd.