Page:The Innocents Abroad (1869).djvu/189

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
GRAVES FOR SIXTY THOUSAND.
169

We are ready to move again, though we are not really tired, yet, of the narrow passages of this old marble cave. Cave is a good word—when speaking of Genoa under the stars. When we have been prowling at midnight through the gloomy crevices they call streets, where no foot falls but ours were echoing, where only ourselves were abroad, and lights appeared only at long intervals and at a distance, and mysteriously disappeared
GRAVES OF SIXTY THOUSAND.
again, and the houses at our elbows seemed to stretch upward farther than ever toward the leavens, the memory of a cave I used to know at home was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its flitting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations of branching crevices and corridors where we least expected them.

We are not tired of the endless processions of cheerful, chattering gossipers that throng these courts and streets all day long, either; nor of the coarse-robed monks; nor of the “Asti”