At last, the sun declined, and Laurent became melancholy. He saw in the distance the smoke of the _Ferruccio_, the steamer from Spezzia, which was getting up steam in readiness for sailing, and that black cloud passed over his mind. Thérèse saw that she must distract his thoughts to the very last, and she asked the boatman what more there was to see in the bay. "There is Isola Palmaria," he replied, "and the _portor_ marble-quarry. If you care to go there, you can take the steamer there. It has to pass the island to go out to sea, for it stops at Porto Venere to take passengers or freight. You will have time enough. I will answer for that." The two friends bade him row them to Isola Palmaria. It is a perpendicular block of marble on the side of the sea, with fertile fields sloping gently down to the shore on the side of the bay. There are a few houses half-way down the slope and two villas on the shore. The island is planted, a sort of natural fortification, at the mouth of the bay, the passage being very narrow between it and the small harbor once consecrated to Venus. Hence the name Porto Venere. There is nothing about that repulsive village to justify its poetic name; but its situation on the naked rocks, lashed by angry waves,--for they are genuine waves from the sea that rush through the passage,--is as picturesque as possible. One could not imagine a more characteristic stage-setting for a nest of pirates. The houses, black and wretched, corroded by the salt air, stand one above another, immeasurably high, on the uneven rocks. Not a pane unbroken in the little windows, which seem like restless eyes watching for a victim on the horizon. Not a wall that is not stripped of its plaster, which hangs in great layers, like veils torn off by the storm. Not a straight line in all those buildings, which lean against one another and seem on the point of crumbling together. They reach to the very extremity of the promontory, where they come to an end in an old dilapidated fort and the steeple of a tiny church, standing like sentinels facing the immensity. Behind this picture, which stands in bold outline against the expanse of sea, rise towering cliffs of a livid tint, whose base, irised by reflections from the sea, seems to plunge into something as indefinite and impalpable as the color of the void. From the marble-quarry on Isola Palmaria, across the narrow passage, Laurent and Thérèse looked upon that picturesque scene. The setting sun cast on the foreground of the picture a reddish light which blended in a single mass, homogeneous in appearance, cliffs, old walls, and ruins, so that everything, even the church, seemed hewn from the same block, while the great rocks in the background swam in a sea-green haze. Laurent was deeply impressed with the spectacle, and, forgetting all else, contemplated it with the eye of a painter, wherein Thérèse saw, as in a mirror, all the flaming colors of the sky.