In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best to recreate before my mind's eye the scenes that had been enacted here once on a time. I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall, as a great glittering palace; and yonder broken roadbed as a splendid Roman highway; and these American-looking tenements on the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as arches of triumph and temples of the gods. I tried to convert the clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the passing populace as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting underwear on the many clotheslines as silken banners and gilded trappings. I could not make it. I tried until I was lame in both legs and my back was strained. It was no go. If I had been a poet or a historian, or a person full of Chianti, I presume I might have done it; but I am no poet and I had not been drinking. All I could think of was that the guide on my left had eaten too much garlic and that the guide on my right had not eaten enough. So in self-defense I went away and ate a few strands of garlic myself; for I had learned the great lesson of the proverb: When in Rome be an aroma! Chapter XXII Still More Ruins, Mostly Italian Ones When I reached Pompeii the situation was different. I could conjure up an illusion there--the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been privileged to harbor since I was a small boy. It was worth spending four days in Naples for the sake of spending half a day in Pompeii; and if you know Naples you will readily understand what a high compliment that is for Pompeii. To reach Pompeii from Naples we followed a somewhat roundabout route; and that trip was distinctly worth while too. It provided a most pleasing foretaste of what was to come. Once we had cleared the packed and festering suburbs, we went flanking across a terminal vertebra of the mountain range that sprawls lengthwise of the land of Italy, like a great spiny-backed crocodile sunning itself, with its tail in the Tyrrhenian Sea and its snout in the Piedmonts; and when we had done this we came out on a highway that skirted the bay. There were gaps in the hills, through which we caught glimpses of the city, lying miles away in its natural amphitheater; and at that distance we could revel in its picturesqueness and forget its bouquet of weird stenches. We could even forget that the automobile we had hired for the excursion had one foot in the grave and several of its most important vital organs in the repair shop. I reckon that was the first automobile built. No; I take that back. It never was a first--it must have been a second to start with.