Our guides,
having questioned the assembled natives, told us there was no
hospital to which he might be taken and that a neighborhood
physician had already been sent for. So, having no desire to look
on the grief of his mother - if she was his mother - a young Austrian
and I turned our attention to the neglected mule. We felt that
we could at least render a little first aid there. We had our
pocket-knives out and were slashing away at the twisted maze of
ropes and straps that bound the brute down between the shafts,
when a particularly shrill chorus of shrieks checked us. We stood
up and faced about, figuring that the poor devil on the muck heap
had died and that his people were bemoaning his death. That was
not it at all. The entire group, including the fat old woman,
were screaming at us and shaking their clenched fists at us, warning
us not to damage that harness with our knives. Feeling ran high,
and threatened to run higher.
So, having no desire to be mobbed on the spot, we desisted and put
up our knives; and after a while we got back into our carriage and
drove on, leaving the capsized mule still belly-up in the debris,
lashing out carefully with her skinned legs at the trappings that
bound her; and the driver was still prone on the dunghill, with
his fingers twitching more feebly now, as though the life had
almost entirely fled out of him - a grim little tragedy set in the
edge of a wide and aching desolation! We never found out his name
or learned how he fared - whether he lived or died, and if he died
how long he lived before he died. It is a puzzle which will always
lie unanswered at the back of my mind, and I know that in odd
moments it will return to torment me. I will bet one thing,
though - nobody else tried to cut that mule out of her harness.
In the chill late afternoon of a Roman day the guides brought us
back to the city and took us down into the Roman Forum, which is
in a hollow instead of being up on a hill as most folks imagine
it to be until they go to Rome and see it; and we finished up the
day at the Golden House of Nero, hard by the vast ruins of the
Coliseum. We had already visited the Forum once; so this time we
did not stay long; just long enough for some ambitious pickpocket
to get a wallet out of my hip pocket while I was pushing forward
with a flock of other human sheep for a better look at the ruined
portico wherein Mark Antony stood when he delivered his justly
popular funeral oration over the body of the murdered Caesar. I
never did admire the character of Mark Antony with any degree of
extravagance, and since this experience I have felt actually
bitter toward him.
The guidebooks say that no visitor to Rome should miss seeing the
Golden House of Nero. When a guidebook tries to be humorous it
only succeeds in being foolish. Practical jokes are out of place
in a guidebook anyway. Imagine a large, old-fashioned brick
smokehouse, which has been struck by lightning, burned to the roots
and buried in the wreckage, and the site used as a pasture land
for goats for a great many years; imagine the debris as having
been dug out subsequently until a few of the foundation lines are
visible; surround the whole with distressingly homely buildings
of a modern aspect, and stir in a miscellaneous seasoning of beggars
and loafers and souvenir venders - and you have the Golden House
where Nero meant to round out a life already replete with incident
and abounding in romance, but was deterred from so doing by reason
of being cut down in the midst of his activities at a comparatively
early age.
In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best
to recreate before my mind's eye the scenes that had been enacted
here once on a time. I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall,
as a great glittering palace; and yonder broken roadbed as a
splendid Roman highway; and these American-looking tenements on
the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and
all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as
arches of triumph and temples of the gods. I tried to convert the
clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained
at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome
flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen
who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the passing populace
as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting underwear on the
many clotheslines as silken banners and gilded trappings. I could
not make it. I tried until I was lame in both legs and my back
was strained. It was no go.
If I had been a poet or a historian, or a person full of Chianti,
I presume I might have done it; but I am no poet and I had
not been drinking. All I could think of was that the guide on
my left had eaten too much garlic and that the guide on my right
had not eaten enough. So in self-defense I went away and ate a
few strands of garlic myself; for I had learned the great lesson
of the proverb:
When in Rome be an aroma!
Chapter XXII
Still More Ruins, Mostly Italian Ones
When I reached Pompeii the situation was different. I could conjure
up an illusion there - the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been
privileged to harbor since I was a small boy.
