Has some one lived here in our time or was it in the distant past? How many hours--or how many centuries--has he been gone, and who could he have been, the occupant of the abandoned room? Some sad dreamer evidently, to have chosen this shadowy retreat; some one very refined, to have left behind him this distinguished fragrance, and very weary, to have been pleased with this dull simplicity and this eternal twilight. One feels stifled by the smallness of the windows, whose panes are veiled with silky paper, and which never can be opened to admit light or air because they are sealed into the wall. And besides, you recall the weary way you must take to get here, and the obstacles you encounter, and that disturbs you. First, there is the big black Babylonian wall, the superhuman ramparts of a city more than ten leagues around, which to-day is a mass of ruins, half empty, and strewn with corpses; then a second wall, painted blood-red, which forms a second city enclosed in the first. Then a third wall, more magnificent still, and also the color of blood; this is the wall that surrounds the great mysteries of the place, and before the days of the war and the fall of the city no European had ever gone beyond it; to-day we were detained for more than an hour, in spite of passes, signed and countersigned; through the keyhole of a great gate guarded by soldiers and barricaded from within, we were compelled to threaten and argue at length with the guards inside, who sought to hide and to escape. These gates once opened, another wall appeared, separated from the former one by a road going all the way around the enclosure; here tattered garments were scattered about, and dogs were playing with the bones of the dead. This wall was of the same red, but still more splendid, and was crowned along its entire length by a horned ornamentation and by monsters made of a golden yellow faience. When we had finally passed this third wall, queer old beardless persons came to meet us with distrustful greetings, and guided us through a maze of little courts and small gardens, walled and walled again, in which old trees were growing amongst rockwork and jars. All of it was separate, concealed, distressing; all of it protected and peopled by monsters and chimæras in bronze or marble, by a thousand faces, whose grimaces signified ferocity and hatred, by a thousand unknown symbols. And every time each gate in the red walls with the yellow faience tops closed behind us, as in horrible dreams the doors of a series of passageways close upon one, nevermore to permit one to go out.