At length the constellation of the mountain city of God, that stood so broad before him, opened out into nights; cities with scattered lights lay up and down, and the bells (which to his ear were alarm-bells) sounded out the fourth[75] hour, when the carriage rolled through the triumphal gate of the city, the _Porta del Popolo_; then the moon rent her black heavens, and poured down out of the cleft clouds the splendor of a whole sky. There stood the Egyptian obelisk of the gateway, high as the clouds in the night, and three streets ran gleaming apart. "So," said Albano to himself, as they passed through the long _corso_ to the Tenth Ward, "thou art veritably in the camp of the god of war; here, where he grasped the hilt of the monstrous war-sword, and with the point made the three wounds in three quarters of the world." Rain and splendor gushed through the vast, broad streets,--occasionally he passed suddenly along by gardens and into broad city-deserts and market-places of the past. The rolling of the chariot amidst the rush and roar of the rain resembled the thunder, whose days were once holy to this heroic city, like the thundering heaven to the thundering earth; muffled-up forms, with little lights, stole through the dark streets; often there stood a long palace with colonnades in the fire of the moon, often a solitary gray column, often a single high fir-tree, or a statue behind cypresses. Once, when there was neither rain nor moonshine, the carriage went round the corner of a large house, on whose roof a tall, blooming virgin, with an uplooking child on her arm, herself directed a little hand-light, now toward a white statue, now toward the child, and so alternately illuminated the whole group. The friendly company made its way to the very centre of his exalted soul and brought with it to him many a recollection; particularly was a Roman child to him a wholly new and mighty idea. They alighted at last at the Prince di Lauria's, Gaspard's father-in-law, and old friend. Near his palace lay the _Campo Vaccino_ (the ancient Forum), and the radiant moon shone on the broad steps and the three wondrous edifices of the Capitol; in the distance stood the Colosseum. Albano ascended hesitatingly into the lighted house, before which the carriage of the Princess stood, reluctantly turning his eye from those heights of the world, from which once a light word like a snow-flake rolled far and wide, and grew and grew, till at last in a strange land it crushed a city with the weight of an avalanche.