She wondered what attracted Michael to living here among ruins. It was a city rendered into poetry by its recession into the past, as cities are rendered into poetry by the painters because of the elements left out, allowing each spectator to fill in the spaces for himself. The missing elements of the half-empty canvas were important because they were the only spaces in which human imagination could draw its own inferences, its own architecture from its private myths, its streets and personages from a private world.

A city in ruins, as this ancient city was, was more powerful and evocative because it had to be constructed anew by each person, therefore enhanced into illimitable beauty, never destroyed or obscured by the realism of the present, never rendered familiar and forced to expose its flaws.

To gain such altitude it was necessary to learn from the artist how to overlook, leave out, the details which weighed down the imagination and caused crash landings.

Even the prisons, where one knew that scenes of horror had taken place, acquired in the sun, under streams of ivy gently bleached by time, a serenity, a passivity, a transmutation into resignation which included forgiveness of man's crimes against man. In time man will forgive even the utmost cruelty merely because the sacred personal value of each man is lost when the father, the mother, son or daughter, brother or sister, wife of this man have ceased to exist—the ones who gave his life its importance, its irreplaceable quality. Time, powerless to love one man, promptly effaces him. His sorrows, torments, and death recede into impersonal history, or evaporate into these poetic moments which the tourists come to seek, sitting on broken columns, or focusing their cameras on empty ransacked tombs, none of them knowing they are learning among ruins and echoes to devaluate the importance of one man, and to prepare themselves for their own disappearance.

The ancient city gave Lillian a constriction of the heart. She was not given to such journeys into the past. To her it seemed like a city mourning its dead, even though it could not remember those it mourned. She saw it as the ruins of Chirico's paintings and asked Michael: "But why the heavy silence?"

"There's no wind here," said Michael.

It was true. The windlessness gave it the static beauty of a painting.

But there was another reason for the silence, which she discovered only in the afternoon. She was taking a sunbath on the terrace, alone.

The sun was so penetrating that it drugged her. She fell asleep and had a dream. A large vulture was flying above the terrace, circling over her, and then it swooped downward and she felt its beak on her shoulder. She awakened screaming, sat up, and saw that she had not been dreaming, for a vulture had marked her shoulder and was flying away slowly, heavily.

Wherever vultures settled they killed the singing birds. The absence of singing birds, as well as of the wind, was the cause of that petrified silence.