“Now, good-bye! we must go back. Thank you, Claudio. Remember me always
as a devoted sister. You will never find my tenderness wanting....”
She turned away her face, for her eyes were filling with tears, and I
kissed both her hands.
“Good-bye,” she repeated, trying to get up and begin the descent; but
she tottered on the rock.
“I entreat you, Anatolia, stay a little longer!” I implored, as I held
her up. “Just stay a few minutes longer here in the shade, that you may
get back your strength.... The descent is very steep.”
“They are waiting for us! They are waiting for us!” she stammered,
almost beside herself, and her frenzied anxiety communicated itself to
me. “Let us go, Claudio! I will lean on you. If we stayed any longer,
I should feel worse, I should not be able to go one step.... Ah, this
horrible thirst!”
I could see well enough that her poor mouth was burning with thirst,
and such anguish of pity was I enduring that I would have opened a vein
to slake it. There was not a trace of water anywhere around. Nothing
but the waters of the lake looking like molten lead at the bottom of
the extinct crater. Rapid visions crossed my brain, as they do in the
delirium of fever; the great, rosy river covered with water-lilies,
Violante leaning over the edge of the boat, her face bending to breathe
the moisture of the flowers, the hardness of a sharp glance from under
her knitted brows....
But we both started, as a sudden wave of sound came rolling towards us,
we knew not whence. The silence in these lofty solitudes was so intense
as to seem inviolable, and the rough, sudden breaking of it struck
us, in the confused state of our senses, as an extraordinary event.
Anatolia clung to my arm, and questioned me with startled eyes.
“Secli,” I said, as I recognised the nature of the sound. “The bells of
Secli.”
And we listened, side by side, leaning towards the echoing crater, in
the shadow thrown over our heads by the boulder.
The empty crater, resonant as a gigantic drum, echoed back the waves
of sound sent by the quivering bells, and mingled them into one long
hollow rumble that repeated itself indefinitely through the solitudes
of light. All through those solitudes, where primary matter, petrified
into a thousand expressions of rage and sorrow, shone in its grandeur,
down the tawny valley furrowed by the winding river, through the Alpine
vegetation sloping away to the distant sea, everywhere the voice of
bronze, modulated by the terrible fiery mouth, went proclaiming its
mysterious message. Further and further it penetrated, and further
still again, through limitless space, away to shores beyond the
mountains and the sea, away to where my weary sight failed me, away
to where my thoughts, still unformed and uncontrolled, but instinct
with mysterious creative power, wandered like winds laden with pollen.
A grand, vague feeling, in which innumerable things of sorrow and
joy, past and future, of death and life, were mingled, troubled my
consciousness, and seemed tossing it to and fro as the storm tosses the
ocean.
Amazed, I looked down at the Tartarean lake, thick and stagnant like
the blind eye of a subterranean world; and I looked at the greedy
crater where the impetus of the primeval fire had been arrested, just
as the contracted expression of the last agony sometimes lingers on the
lips of corpses. And my gaze rested on the humble cottages of Secli,
on that fragile nest, hardly distinguishable from the rock on which
it hung. And I had a fantastic vision of that unconscious taciturn
race, busied from time immemorial in turning the entrails of lambs
into musical strings destined to express through the language of art
the highest inspirations of life, and to intoxicate myriads of unknown
souls in the world.
On and on rolled the sound, rumbling ceaselessly, monotonously, through
the scorching air. And seeing my companion motionless at my side, I
dared not speak, nor break the spell. But suddenly she turned round and
broke into sobs, as if she had just witnessed the end of a death agony.
Leaning against the rock with her face in her hands, she sobbed on
despairingly.
“Anatolia, Anatolia, what is the matter with you? Answer me, Anatolia!
Say one word to me.”
And unable to resist the pain, I was just going to take her wrists and
uncover her face.
I heard close by the sound of a swift step on the stones, the sound of
painful breathing; I saw a shadow.
“You, Violante?”
She came up the steep rock with something of the elastic stride of a
wild animal, something hostile and malevolent expressed in her whole
person. Her thick blue veil was wrapped round her head in such a way
that her whole face was hidden down to the chin, as if by a mask, and
her eyes glittered through the gauze.
She stopped near the boulder in a hostile attitude throwing back her
head like one who is suffocating, yet she did not loosen her veil.
The vehemence of her breathing made her bosom rise and fall, and the
veil flutter; an uncontrollable tremor shook her hands within the torn
gloves she wore, torn probably on the sharp rocks in some perilous fall.
“We waited for you,” she said at last in a broken voice that almost
hissed; “we waited for you a long time.... As you did not seem to be
coming back, I came up ... to meet you....”
I could trace the convulsive motion of her lips through her veil; I
could guess at the change in her face behind that suffocating blue mask
that she would not lift up. And I felt my inward emotion increase so
violently every minute, that it was impossible for me to open my lips.
But I felt that not on me alone the necessity for silence had fallen.
The rumble of the bronze bells reverberating in the crater passed
ceaselessly over our heads.
Anatolia had stopped sobbing, but the traces of tears were still on her
face, and the eyelids that she kept lowered were red. “Let us go,” she
said softly, without looking either at me or at her sister.
And in silence, under the desolation of the sunshine, we began the
descent, accompanied by the rumbling sound.
Miserable descent, which seemed as if it would never end! They walked
on, or lingered behind, according to the necessities of the path; and
I supported sometimes the one, and sometimes the other, when their
steps faltered. Every now and then my heart failed me with the fear
of seeing them succumb. When the bells of Secli ceased ringing we felt
a momentary relief; but we discovered immediately that the oppressive
irregularity of our breathing in the stillness of the air increased our
suffering, and we felt as though we could hear only too distinctly the
murmur of the blood in our veins.
With a savage pertinacity Violante persisted in braving suffocation
under her blue mask. No doubt her throat must be parched with a
horrible thirst, like mine, like her sister’s. When I took her hand
to help her down, I saw a little blood where the skin had been grazed
through the rents in her glove; and with deep emotion I remembered the
hill-slope covered with flowers.
* * * * *
Later on, when we reached the level ground, where my men were waiting
with the mules, and where we rested awhile parched with thirst and
exhausted by fatigue, I composed the beauty and the sorrow of the three
princesses, for the last time, into a harmony of infinite beauty and
pain.
They were not in their cloistered garden, yet a rocky cloister worthy
of their souls and their fate was surrounding them, for strange and
grand was the aspect of the scenery around. The rocks, standing round
in a circle of varying height, made one think of some amphitheatre
built by Cyclopean hands, worn away, indeed, by centuries and storms
without number, yet still remaining like stupendous ruins. Fragments
of unknown writing were traceable there, incomprehensible riddles of
Life and Death; the twisted veins of the stone were channels for the
essence of a divine thought; and the lines of the shapeless masses were
as full of meaning as the attitudes of perfect statues.
There we rested, there I caught their final harmony.
A field labourer--very like the one who had cut the branches of almond
blossom for us with his bill-hook--showed us the way to a spring hidden
in the hollow of a rock. The clear, icy water spurted out with a gentle
murmur, and on the pool beneath floated a rustic cup made of bark,
cracked and bottomless, like the useless husk of some fruit.
I offered Anatolia another cup, which the man had brought with him.
But Violante, without waiting, raised her veil, and bending over the
sparkling spring, drank in long draughts like a wild animal.
I saw the drops glistening on her mouth and chin when she rose, but she
turned away suddenly and drew down the edge of her veil. Thus veiled,
she sat down on the stone nearest to the mountain spring, whose song
was too gentle for her taste; and her attitude awakened in my soul
all the magic spell of her own fountains. Even in fatigue she did not
let her figure relax; for now she sat almost rigidly erect, sustained
by her silent angry pride. Once again everything around her seemed to
acknowledge the sovereignty of her presence; secret analogies bound up
the surrounding mysteries with her mystery. Once again she seemed to
drive back my spirit into the furthest distances of time, towards the
ancient ideas of Beauty and Sorrow. She was present, and yet far away.
And in the silence she seemed to be informing me, like the Princess
Dejanira: “I possess an ancient gift from an old centaur, hidden in a
vessel of bronze.”
Anatolia had sat down beside her pensive brother; she had thrown one
arm round his neck, and her brow seemed gradually to clear as if some
inner light were rising. Massimilla seemed to be listening to the
faint, unquenchable voice of the spring; sitting with the fingers of
her hands clasped together, holding within them the weary knee.
Over our heads the sky bore no traces of clouds, save a slight shadow
like the ashes of a burnt-out funeral pyre. The sun was scorching the
peaks all around, outlining their solemn features on the blue sky. A
great sadness and a great sweetness fell from above into the lonely
circle, like a magic draught into a rough goblet.
There the three sisters rested, there I caught their final harmony.