And there they were. On the sun-warmed marble of a fallen column basked a large tabby. A family of ginger kittens were playing on the ground below. Small tigers stalked between the blocks of masonry. A miniature black panther was standing up on its hind legs to sharpen its claws on the bark of a little tree. At the foot of the column lay an emaciated corpse. “Puss, puss,” Miss Elver shrilly yelled. “No good,” said Mr. Cardan. “They only understand Italian.” Miss Elver looked at him. “Perhaps I’d better learn a little, then,” she said. “Cat’s Italian.” Mrs. Chelifer meanwhile was looking down very earnestly into the forum. “Why, there are at least twenty,” she said. “How do they get there?” “People who want to get rid of their cats just come and drop them over the railing into the forum,” Mr. Cardan explained. “And they can’t get out?” “So it seems.” An expression of distress appeared on Mrs. Chelifer’s gentle face. She made a little clicking with her tongue against her teeth and sadly shook her head. “Dear, dear,” she said, “dear, dear. And how do they get fed?” “I’ve no idea,” said Mr. Cardan. “Perhaps they feed on one another. People throw things down from time to time, no doubt.” “There’s a dead one there, in the middle,” said Mrs. Chelifer; and a note of something like reproach came into her voice, as though she found that Mr. Cardan was to blame for the deadness of the little corpse at the foot of the triumphal column. “Very dead,” said Mr. Cardan. They walked on. Mrs. Chelifer did not speak; she seemed preoccupied. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V “_An pris caruns flucuthukh_”; Mr. Cardan beckoned to the guide. “Bring the lamp a little nearer,” he said in Italian, and when the light had been approached, he went on slowly spelling out the primitive Greek writing on the wall of the tomb: “_flucuthukh nun tithuial khues khathc anulis mulu vizile ziz riin puiian acasri flucuper pris an ti ar vus ta aius muntheri flucuthukh_.” He straightened himself up. “Charming language,” he said, “charming! Ever since I learned that the Etruscans used to call the god of wine Fufluns, I’ve taken the keenest interest in their language. Fufluns—how incomparably more appropriate that is than Bacchus, or Liber, or Dionysos! Fufluns, _Fufluns_,” he repeated with delighted emphasis. “It couldn’t be better. They had a real linguistic genius, those creatures. What poets they must have produced! ‘When Fufluns _flucuthukhs_ the _ziz_’—one can imagine the odes in praise of wine which began like that. You couldn’t bring together eight such juicy, boozy syllables as that in English, could you?” “What about ‘Ale in a Saxon rumkin then’?” suggested Chelifer. Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It doesn’t compare with the Etruscan,” he said. “There aren’t enough consonants. It’s too light, too fizzy and trivial. Why, you might be talking about soda water.”