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The outer entrance alone had suffered, buried under the rubbish of two millenniums: the burial-place of the Volumnii has been restored externally after ancient Etruscan models, but within it has been left untouched.

Etruscan Volumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight of their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly. St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element.

We entered one by one the nine small grotto-like compartments which surround the central cavern: the white shapes turned out to be cinerary urns, enclosing the ashes of the three thousand years dead Volumnii.

Colwood retreated to their rooms to write letters and to rest; Forbes was hotly engaged in bargaining for an Umbrian primitif, which he had just discovered in an old house in a back street, whither, no doubt, the skilful antiquario had that morning transported it from his shop; and Sir James had gone out for a stroll, on the splendid road which winds gradually down the hill on which Perugia stands, to the tomb of the Volumnii, on the edge of the plain, and so on to Assisi and Foligno, in the blue distance.