Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/140

 Upon the walls of this spacious place were painted figures seated at a banquet, dancing before an altar, leading strange forest beasts, playing on lyres, riding on many-coloured steeds: around them and above them were pictured lotus flowers.

But these she scarcely saw in the dim shadowy atmosphere; what her gaze was fastened on, what made her tremble in every limb, was the recumbent figure, stretched upon a bier of stone, of a man in armour of bronze and casque of gold; a gold cup stood beside him on the ground, and a shield of gold was on the bier, and a golden lamp was near, of which the light was spent. About his helmet was a diadem of oak-leaves in gold, and on his breast was an ivory sceptre tipped with an eagle of gold.

When the vast, desolate, lonely lands stretching towards the south had borne on their breast the towers and walls and palaces and sepulchres of Vetulonia and Cosa, of Rusellæ and Tarquinii, of Ardea and Norchia, this man had been a magnate of the land; his women, his children, his servitors, his descendants for many a generation, had doubtless been laid in costly state here, where the mastic-tree and the mountain-box