Fabio mounted upon the thymele of the tragic theatre while Max and Octavian climbed to the upper benches; and there, with extravagant gestures, he commenced to recite whatever poetical fragments came to his memory, much to the terror of the lizards, who fled, vibrating their tails, and hid themselves in the joints of the ruined stonework. Although the brazen or earthen vessels formerly used to reverberate sounds no longer existed, Fabio's voice sounded none the less full and vibrant. The guide then conducted them across the open fields which overlie those portions of Pompeii still buried, to the amphitheatre situated at the other end of the city. They passed under those trees whose roots plunge down through the roofs of the edifices interred, displacing tiles, cleaving ceilings asunder, and disjointing columns; and they traversed the farms where vulgar vegetables sprout above wonders of art--material images of that oblivion wherewith time covers all things. The amphitheatre caused them little surprise. They had seen that of Verona, vaster and equally well preserved; besides, the arrangement of such antique arenas was as familiar to them as that of those in which bull-fights are held in Spain, and which they much resemble save in solidity of construction and beauty of material. Accordingly they soon retraced their footsteps and gained the Street of Fortune by a cross-path, listening half-distractedly to the _cicerone_, who named each house they passed by the name which had been given it immediately upon its discovery, owing to some characteristic peculiarity--the House of the Brazen Bull, the House of the Faun, the House of the Ship, the Temple of Fortune, the House of Meleager, the Tavern of Fortune, at the angle of the Consular Road (Via Consularia), the Academy of Music, the Public Market, the Pharmacy, the Surgeon's Shop, the Custom House, the House of the Vestals, the Inn of Albinus, the Thermopolium, and so on--until they came to that gate which leads to the Street of the Tombs. Within the interior arch of this brick-built gate, once adorned with statues which have long since disappeared, may be noticed two deep grooves designed to receive a sliding portcullis, after the style of a mediæval donjon, to which era, indeed, one might have supposed such a defence peculiar. "Who," exclaimed Max to his friends, "could have dreamed of finding in Pompeii, the Græco-Latin city, a gate so romantically Gothic? Fancy some belated Roman knight blowing his horn before this entrance, summoning them to raise the portcullis, like a page of the fifteenth century!" "There is nothing new under the sun," replied Fabio; "and the aphorism itself is not new, inasmuch as it was formulated by Solomon." "Perhaps there may be something new under the moon," observed Octavian, with a smile of melancholy irony.