Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door to him, and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a silent permission to step in, he had already become more serious.
He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once seen that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any particular thing among the various objects worthy of admiration.

For already in the anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him.

The large halls, which were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were as still as the grave.

And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had been shining brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had disappeared behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he had ever seen, surrounded him.

Then he perceived that it came in through the black velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room through which he was passing.
In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him--had vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms.