thing than this, nor ever will, until the light and the warmth of the
sun shall be withdrawn for ever, and the earth shall remain alone
with her buried multitudes.

There was only Don Silverio who thought of such a thing as this, a
scholar all alone amongst barbarians; for his heart ached for his
barbarians, though they bore him no love in return for his pity. They
would have liked better a gossiping, rotund, familiar, ignorant,
peasant priest, one of themselves, chirping formula comfortably over
skeleton corpses.

In default of other interests he interested himself in this ancient
place, passing from neglect into oblivion, as his own life was doing.
There were Etruscan sepulchres and Pelasgic caves which had been
centuries earlier rifled of their objects of value, but still
otherwise remained untouched under the acacia woods by the river.
There were columns and terraces and foundations of marble which had
been there when the Latin city of Ruscinonis had flourished, from the
time of Augustus until its destruction by Theodoric. And nearest of
all these to him were the Longobardo church and the ancient houses
and the dismantled fortress and the ruined walls of what had been the
fief of the Toralba, the mediaeval fortified town of Ruscino. It
still kept this, its latest, name, but it kept little else. Thrice a
thousand centuries had rolled over it, eating it away as the sea eats
away a cliff. War and fire and time had had their will with it for so
long that dropped acorns and pine-pips had been allowed leisure to
sink between the stones, and sprout and bud and rise and spread, and
were now hoary and giant trees, of which the roots were sunk deep
into its ruins, its graves, its walls.