Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off
from the mass and lie detached, but the mass keeps the form and dignity
of the original design; and in the lonely fields there it had something
august and proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or the
Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced
the interior, and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth,
but near the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them
which restored the vision of the "grandeur that was Rome" pretty well
over the known world when this great work was in its prime. Our
custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any old
Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own Spanish
was so slight and his _patois_ was so dense that the best we could do
was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On this his one word of
English, repeated as we passed through the subterranean doors, "Lion,
lion, lion," cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened into a vivid
community of ideas when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell
us some of the small Roman coins which formed his stock in trade.
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