Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances,
these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not availed to keep so much
as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious
of everlasting remembrance, as they were, the slumberers might just
as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a
columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard, without a
headstone to mark the spot. It is rather satisfactory than otherwise, to
think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.
About two miles, or more, from the city gate, and right upon the
roadside, Kenyon passed an immense round pile, sepulchral in its
original purposes, like those already mentioned. It was built of
great blocks of hewn stone, on a vast, square foundation of rough,
agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other
ruinous tombs. But whatever might be the cause, it was in a far
better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rose the
battlements of a mediaeval fortress, out of the midst of which (so long
since had time begun to crumble the supplemental structure, and cover
it with soil, by means of wayside dust) grew trees, bushes, and thick
festoons of ivy. This tomb of a woman had become the citadel and
donjon-keep of a castle; and all the care that Cecilia Metella's husband
could bestow, to secure endless peace for her beloved relics, had only
sufficed to make that handful of precious ashes the nucleus of battles,
long ages after her death.
A little beyond this point, the sculptor turned aside from the Appian
Way, and directed his course across the Campagna, guided by tokens that
were obvious only to himself. On one side of him, but at a distance, the
Claudian aqueduct was striding over fields and watercourses. Before him,
many miles away, with a blue atmosphere between, rose the Alban hills,
brilliantly silvered with snow and sunshine.
He was not without a companion. A buffalo-calf, that seemed shy and
sociable by the selfsame impulse, had begun to make acquaintance with
him, from the moment when he left the road. This frolicsome creature
gambolled along, now before, now behind; standing a moment to gaze at
him, with wild, curious eyes, he leaped aside and shook his shaggy head,
as Kenyon advanced too nigh; then, after loitering in the rear, he came
galloping up, like a charge of cavalry, but halted, all of a sudden,
when the sculptor turned to look, and bolted across the Campagna at the
slightest signal of nearer approach. The young, sportive thing, Kenyon
half fancied, was serving him as a guide, like the heifer that led
Cadmus to the site of his destined city; for, in spite of a hundred
vagaries, his general course was in the right direction, and along by
several objects which the sculptor had noted as landmarks of his way.