The ghastly priest has gone from Nemi; but the lake is there still, and the successors of the trees. Access is courteously granted by the present owner, who, we may believe, has never slain anybody, and who, we hope, may not be slain himself. But though we may admire Nemi from close by, we do not fully understand Nemi and its place among things, till we can look upon it in company with its greater fellow of Alba. That is, we must climb the Alban mount, or a good part of its height. But we go first to the Alban lake itself; and to do so we go along its rim and slide down the side of its crater. There we find the _emissarius_, so deftly cut in the rock, and which has done its work so well for so many ages. Who made it? Camillus, or some one long before Camillus? The men who built the great _cloaca_ of Rome were quite capable of cutting the hole through the rock of Alba, without any message from Delphi or any design against the walls of Veii. Whoever the borer was, he did his work far more thoroughly than Claudius ages afterwards did his for the Fucine lake, which work it has been left for the Torlonia of our own day to finish. But no one, we may suppose, wished at any time to drain the Alban lake, but only to keep it in order. How needful such a work is we do not fully grasp till we can look down from above. Then we take in the strict accuracy of the name _crater_. We see the two lakes, greater and smaller, side by side, like two basins in the strictest sense, in which, at some time which geologists may fix, but which it is enough for history to say that it was long before the oldest primæval wall, the powers of water supplanted those of fire. We take in how the larger lake, with its narrow rim, in some parts of its circuit with its low rim, liable to be swollen, but with no natural outlet for its waters, might easily come to overflow, if artificial means had not been, in some early time, taken to check it.