As I looked on, a demon seemed to enter my brain and fingers, hurrying me into a Bacchanalian frenzy of sound; and the faster I played, the more furiously her dizzily gliding feet flashed hither and thither in a bewildering, still-renewing maze, so that from her to me and me to her an electric impulse of rhythmical movement perpetually vibrated to and fro. Ever and anon the semicircle of eagerly watching girls, sympathetically thrilled by the spectacle, clapped their hands, shouting for joy; and balancing themselves on tiptoe, joined in the headlong dance. And as they glided to and fro, the wild roses and ivy and long tendrils of the vine, flaunting it on the crumbling walls, seemed to wave in unison and dance round the dancing girls. As I went on playing the never-ending, still-beginning tune, night overtook us, and we should have been in profound obscurity but for continuous brilliant flashes of lightning shooting up from the horizon, like the gleaming lances hurled as from the vanguard of an army of Titans. In the absorbing interest, however, with which we watched the deliriously whirling figure, unconscious of aught but the music, we took but little note of the lightning. Sometimes, when from some black turreted thunder-cloud, a triple-pronged dart came hissing and crackling to the earth as though launched by the very hand of Jove, I saw thirteen hands suddenly lifted, thirteen fingers instinctively flying from brow to breast making the sign of the cross, and heard thirteen voices mutter as one, "Nel nome del Padre, e del Figlio, e dello Spirito Santo." But the ecstatic dancer paused not nor rested in her incredible exertions; the excited girls alternately told their beads and then joined in the dance again, while the gray-haired mother, kneeling on the marble pediment of what might have been the fragment of a temple of Bacchus, lifted her hands in prayer to a little shrine of the Madonna, placed there, strangely enough, amidst the relics of paganism. All of a sudden, however, a horrific blaze, emitted from a huge focus of intolerable light, set the whole heavens aflame. As from a fresh-created baleful sun, blue and livid and golden-colored lightnings were shivered from it on all sides; dull, however, in comparison to the central ball, which, bursting instantaneously, bathed the sky, earth, and air in one insufferable glare of phosphorescent light. The deadly blue flame lit up everything with a livid brightness unknown to day. Walls and faded wall-paintings, limbs of decapitated goddesses gleaming white through the grass and rioting weeds, tottering columns, arches, and vaults, and deserted galleries receding in endless perspective, leaped out lifelike on a background of night and storm.