On either side of them, beyond the trees, stood two couples of long-legged black horses. Above them, in the segment of a circle between the upper line of this band of paintings and the vaulted roof, a great leopard lay couchant, white-skinned, with a pattern of black spots arranged like those on the china dogs and cats of a later age. On the wall to the left they were feasting: red-brown Etruscans reclined on couches; porcelain-white women, contrasting as voluptuously with their tanned companions as the pale, plump nymphs of Boucher with their brown pastoral lovers, sat by their sides. With hieratic gestures of mutual love they pledged one another in bowls of wine. On the opposite wall the fowlers were busy—here with slings, there with nets. The sky was alive with birds. In the blue sea below they were spearing fish. A long inscription ran from right to left across the wall. The vaulted roof was painted with chequers, red, black and white. Over the low, narrow door that led from the tomb into the ante-chamber there knelt a benevolent white bull. Two thousand five hundred years ago they had wept here over the newly dead. “You see them,” continued Mr. Cardan, “hunting, drinking, playing, making love. What else could you expect them to do? This writing will tell us no more than we know already. True, I want to know what it means, but only because I hope that the brown man may be saying to the white lady: ‘_Flucuthukh_ to me only with thine eyes,’ or words to that effect, ‘and I will _flucuthukh_ with mine.’ If that was what they really were saying, it would throw an entirely new light on the notion of drinking. An entirely new light.” “It would throw no new light on love, if lovers they are,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle mournfully.