or "golden exhalations of the dawn "?

The Campagna has one more aspect, different from all the rest, where the
Tiber, weary with his long wanderings, rolls lazily to the sea. It is a
dreary waste of swamp and sandhill and scrub growth, but with a forlorn
beauty of its own, and the beauty of color, never absent in Italy. The
tall, coarse grass and reeds pass through a series of vivid tones,
culminating in tawny gold and deep orange, against which the
silver-fretted violet blue-green of the Mediterranean assumes a magical
splendor. Small, shaggy buffaloes with ferocious eyes, and sometimes a
peasant as wild-looking as they, are the only inhabitants of this
wilderness. The machicolated towers of Castel Fusano among its grand
stone-pines stand up from the marshes, and farther seaward another
castle with a single pine; but they only enhance the surrounding
loneliness. Ostia, the ancient port, which sea and river have both
deserted, is now a city of the dead, a Pompeii above ground, whose
avenues of tombs lead to streets of human dwellings more desolate still.
It is no longer by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that one can reach the
sea: the way was choked by sand and silt seventeen centuries ago, and
Trajan caused the canal to be made which bears his name; and this is
still the outlet from Rome to the Mediterranean, while the river expires
among the pestilential marshes.

[Illustration: HEAD OF THE TRAJAN CANAL, NEAR OSTIA.]




SIX MONTHS AMONG CANNIBALS.