Boys, as we drove
on, ran stoutly along by the side of the chaise, begging as often as they
could find breath, but were constrained finally to give up the pursuit.
The great ragged bulks of the tombs along the Appian Way now hove in
sight, one with a farm-house on its summit, and all of them
preposterously huge and massive. At a distance, across the green
campagna on our left, the Claudian aqueduct strode away over miles of
space, and doubtless reached even to that circumference of blue hills
which stand afar off, girdling Rome about. The tomb of Cecilia Metella
came in sight a long while before we reached it, with the warm buff hue
of its travertine, and the gray battlemented wall which the Caetanis
erected on the top of its circular summit six hundred years ago. After
passing it, we saw an interminable line of tombs on both sides of the
way, each of which might, for aught I know, have been as massive as that
of Cecilia Metella, and some perhaps still more monstrously gigantic,
though now dilapidated and much reduced in size.


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