Everywhere Albano would fain have alighted, and stepped in among great ruins and into the splendor of the scattered insignia, which had been lost by the conquerors of the world out of their triumphal chariots on the way to Rome. But the Knight advised him to spare and save his eyes and inspiration for Rome itself. How his heart beat, when at last in the waste _Campagna_, which lay full of lava-eruptions around the nest of the Roman eagles, those world-driven storm-birds, they rolled along over the Flaminian road! But he and Gaspard felt themselves wonderfully oppressed. One seemed to be wading through the stagnant lake of a sultry sulphurous atmosphere, which his father ascribed to the brimstone huts at Baccano,--he thirsted for the snow on the distant mountains,--the heavens were dark-blue and still,--single lofty clouds flew arrow-swift through the silent wilderness. A man in the distance set down again an urn which he had dug up, and prayed, anxiously looking to heaven, and telling his beads. Albano turned toward the mountains, to which the evening sun was sinking, as if dissolved in piercing splendor. All at once the Knight ordered the postilion to stop, who passionately threw up his arms toward heaven, while it went on rumbling under the carriage, and exclaimed, "Holy mother of God, an earthquake!" But Gaspard touched his son, who seemed intoxicated with the splendors of sunset, and said, pointing, "_Ecco Roma!_" Albano looked, and saw in the depths of the distance the dome of St. Peter's gleaming in the sun. The sun went down, the earth quaked once more, but in his spirit nothing was save Rome. 103. CYCLE. Half an hour after the earthquake, the heavens swathed themselves in seas and dashed them down in masses and in torrents. The naked _Campagna_ and heath were covered with the mantle of rain. Gaspard was silent,--the heavens black,--the great thought stood alone in Albano, that he was hastening on towards the bloody scaffold and the throne scaffolding of humanity, the heart of a cold, dead, heathen-world, the eternal Rome; and when he heard, on the _Ponte Molle_, that he was now going across the Tiber, he felt as if the past had risen from the dead,--as if the stream of time ran backward, and he were sailing on it; under the streams of heaven he heard the seven old mountain-streams rushing and roaring, which once came down from Rome's hills, and with seven arms uphove the world from its foundations.