The road was interminable, and the crest, from which I promised myself
the view of the crater-lake, was always just before me, and was never
reached. A little spring, caught in a hollow log, refreshed a meadow
on the right. Drinking there again, I wondered if I should go on or
rest; but I was full of antiquity, and a memory in the blood, or what
not, impelled me to see the lake in the crater before I went to sleep:
after a few hundred yards this obsession was satisfied.
I passed between two banks, where the road had been worn down at the
crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of
silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw
the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark
slopes around it. Its darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn
of our saved and happy world.
At its hither end a hill, that had once been a cone in the crater,
stood out all covered with a dense wood. It was the Hill of Venus.
There was no temple, nor no sacrifice, nor no ritual for the Divinity,
save this solemn attitude of perennial silence; but under the
influence which still remained and gave the place its savour, it was
impossible to believe that the gods were dead.
