We went up the hill together over a burnt land, but shaded with trees.
It was very hot. I could scarcely continue, so fast did my companion
go, and so much did the heat oppress me.
We passed a fountain at which oxen drank, and there I supped up cool
water from the spout, but he wagged his finger before his face to tell
me that this was an error under a hot sun.
We went on and met two men driving cattle up the path between the
trees. These I soon found to be talking of prices and markets with my
guide. For it was market-day. As we came up at last on to the little
town--a little, little town like a nest, and all surrounded with
walls, and a castle in it and a church--we found a thousand beasts all
lowing and answering each other along the highroad, and on into the
market square through the gate. There my guide led me into a large
room, where a great many peasants were eating soup with macaroni in
it, and some few, meat. But I was too exhausted to eat meat, so I
supped up my broth and then began diapephradizing on my fingers to
show the great innkeeper what I wanted.
I first pulled up the macaroni out of the dish, and said, _Fromagio,
Pommodoro,_ by which I meant cheese--tomato. He then said he knew what
I meant, and brought me that spaghetti so treated, which is a dish for
a king, a cosmopolitan traitor, an oppressor of the poor, a usurer, or
any other rich man, but there is no spaghetti in the place to which
such men go, whereas these peasants will continue to enjoy it in
heaven.
I then pulled out my bottle of wine, drank what was left out of the
neck (by way of sign), and putting it down said, _'Tale, tantum, vino
rosso.'_ My guide also said many things which probably meant that I
was a rich man, who threw his money about by the sixpence. So the
innkeeper went through a door and brought back a bottle all corked and
sealed, and said on his fingers, and with his mouth and eyes, 'THIS
KIND OF WINE IS SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL.'
Only in the foolish cities do men think it a fine thing to appear
careless of money. So I, very narrowly watching him out of half-closed
eyes, held up my five fingers interrogatively, and said,
_'Cinquante?'_ meaning 'Dare you ask fivepence?'
At which he and all the peasants around, even including my guide,
laughed aloud as at an excellent joke, and said, _'Cinquante, Ho!
ho!'_ and dug each other in the ribs. But the innkeeper of Tizzano Val
Parmense said in Italian a number of things which meant that I could
but be joking, and added (in passing) that a lira made it a kind of
gift to me. A lira was, as it were, but a token to prove that it had
changed hands: a registration fee: a matter of record; at a lira it
was pure charity. Then I said, _'Soixante Dix?'_ which meant nothing
to him, so I held up seven fingers; he waved his hand about genially,
and said that as I was evidently a good fellow, a traveller, and as
anyhow he was practically giving me the wine, he would make it
ninepence; it was hardly worth his while to stretch out his hand for
so little money. So then I pulled out 80 c. in coppers, and said,
_'Tutto',_ which means 'all'. Then he put the bottle before me, took
the money, and an immense clamour rose from all those who had been
watching the scene, and they applauded it as a ratified bargain. And
this is the way in which bargains were struck of old time in these
hills when your fathers and mine lived and shivered in a cave, hunted
wolves, and bargained with clubs only.
So this being settled, and I eager for the wine, wished it to be
opened, especially to stand drink to my guide. The innkeeper was in
another room. The guide was too courteous to ask for a corkscrew, and
I did not know the Italian for a corkscrew.
I pointed to the cork, but all I got out of my guide was a remark that
the wine was very good. Then I made the emblem and sign of a corkscrew
in my sketch-book with a pencil, but he pretended not to
understand--such was his breeding. Then I imitated the mode, sound,
and gesture of a corkscrew entering a cork, and an old man next to me
said '_Tira-buchon'--_a common French word as familiar as the woods of
Marly! It was brought. The bottle was opened and we all drank
together.
As I rose to go out of Tizzano Val Parmense my guide said to me, _'Se
chiama Tira-Buchon perche E' lira il buchon'_ And I said to him,
_'Dominus Vobiscum'_ and left him to his hills.
I took the road downwards from the ridge into the next dip and valley,
but after a mile or so in the great heat (it was now one o'clock) I
was exhausted. So I went up to a little wooded bank, and lay there in
the shade sketching Tizzano Val Parmense, where it stood not much
above me, and then I lay down and slept for an hour and smoked a pipe
and thought of many things.
From the ridge on which Tizzano stands, which is the third of these
Apennine spurs, to the next, the fourth, is but a little way; one
looks across from one to the other. Nevertheless it is a difficult
piece of walking, because in the middle of the valley another ridge,
almost as high as the principal spurs, runs down, and this has to be
climbed at its lowest part before one can get down to the torrent of
the Enza, where it runs with a hollow noise in the depths of the
mountains. So the whole valley looks confused, and it appears, and is,
laborious.
Very high up above in a mass of trees stood the first of those many
ruined towers and castles in which the Apennines abound, and of which
Canossa, far off and indistinguishable in the haze, was the chief
example. It was called 'The Tower of Rugino'. Beyond the deep trench
of the Enza, poised as it seemed on its southern bank (but really much
further off, in the Secchia valley), stood that strange high rock of
Castel-Nuovo, which the peasant had shown me that morning and which
was the landmark of this attempt. It seemed made rather by man than by
nature, so square and exact was it and so cut off from the other
hills.
It was not till the later afternoon, when the air was already full of
the golden dust that comes before the fall of the evening, that I
stood above the Enza and saw it running thousands of feet below. Here
I halted for a moment irresolute, and looked at the confusion of the
hills. It had been my intention to make a straight line for Collagna,
but I could not tell where Collagna lay save that it was somewhere
behind the high mountain that was now darkening against the sky.
Moreover, the Enza (as I could see down, down from where I stood) was
not fordable. It did not run in streams but in one full current, and
was a true river. All the scene was wild. I had come close to the
central ridge of the Apennines. It stood above me but five or six
clear miles away, and on its slopes there were patches and fields of
snow which were beginning to glimmer in the diminishing light.
Four peasants sat on the edge of the road. They were preparing to go
to their quiet homesteads, and they were gathering their scythes
together, for they had been mowing in a field. Coming up to these, I
asked them how I might reach Collagna. They told me that I could not
go straight, as I had wished, on account of the impassable river, but
that if I went down the steep directly below me I should find a
bridge; that thence a path went up the opposite ridge to where a
hamlet, called Ceregio (which they showed me beyond the valley), stood
in trees on the crest, and once there (they said) I could be further
directed. I understood all their speech except one fatal word. I
thought they told me that Ceregio was _half_ the way to Collagna; and
what that error cost me you shall hear.
They drank my wine, I ate their bread, and we parted: they to go to
their accustomed place, and I to cross this unknown valley. But when I
had left these grave and kindly men, the echo of their voices remained
with me; the deep valley of the Enza seemed lonely, and as I went
lower and lower down towards the noise of the river I lost the sun.
The Enza was flooded. A rough bridge, made of stout logs resting on
trunks of trees that were lashed together like tripods and supported a
long plank, was afforded to cross it. But in the high water it did not
quite reach to the hither bank. I rolled great stones into the water
and made a short causeway, and so, somewhat perilously, I attained the
farther shore, and went up, up by a little precipitous path till I
reached the hamlet of Ceregio standing on its hill, blessed and
secluded; for no road leads in or out of it, but only mule-paths.
The houses were all grouped together round a church; it was dim
between them; but several men driving oxen took me to a house that was
perhaps the inn, though there was no sign; and there in a twilight
room we all sat down together like Christians in perfect harmony, and
the woman of the house served us.
Now when, after this communion, I asked the way to Collagna, they must
have thought me foolish, and have wondered why I did not pass the
night with them, for they knew how far off Collagna was. But I (by the
error in language of which I have told you) believed it to be but a
short way off. It was in reality ten miles. The oldest of my
companions said he would put me on the way.
We went together in the half light by a lane that followed the crest
of the hill, and we passed a charming thing, a little white sculpture
in relief, set up for a shrine and representing the Annunciation; and
as we passed it we both smiled. Then in a few hundred yards we passed
another that was the Visitation, and they were gracious and beautiful
to a degree, and I saw that they stood for the five joyful mysteries.
Then he had to leave me, and he said, pointing to the little shrine:
'When you come to the fifth of these the path divides. Take that to
the left, and follow it round the hollow of the mountain: it will
become a lane. This lane crosses a stream and passes near a tower.
When you have reached the tower it joins a great highroad, and that is
the road to Collagna.'
And when he indicated the shrines he smiled, as though in apology for
them, and I saw that we were of the same religion. Then (since people
who will not meet again should give each other presents mutually) I
gave him the best of my two pipes, a new pipe with letters carved on
it, which he took to be the initials of my name, and he on his part
gave me a hedge-rose which he had plucked and had been holding in his
fingers. And I continued the path alone.
Certainly these people have a benediction upon them, granted them for
their simple lives and their justice. Their eyes are fearless and
kindly. They are courteous, straight, and all have in them laughter
and sadness. They are full of songs, of memories, of the stories of
their native place; and their worship is conformable to the world that
God made. May they possess their own land, and may their influence
come again from Italy to save from jar, and boasting, and ineptitude
the foolish, valourless cities, and the garish crowds of shouting
men.... And let us especially pray that the revival of the faith may
do something for our poor old universities.
Already, when I heard all these directions, they seemed to argue a
longer road than I had expected. It proved interminable.
It was now fully dark; the night was very cold from the height of the
hills; a dense dew began to fall upon the ground, and the sky was full
of stars. For hours I went on slowly down the lane that ran round the
hollow of the wooded mountain, wondering why I did not reach the
stream he spoke of. It was midnight when I came to the level, and yet
I heard no water, and did not yet see the tower against the sky.
Extreme fatigue made it impossible, as I thought, to proceed farther,
when I saw a light in a window, and went to it quickly and stood
beneath it. A woman from the window called me _Caro mio,_ which was
gracious, but she would not let me sleep even in the straw of the
barn.
I hobbled on in despair of the night, for the necessity of sleep was
weighing me down after four high hills climbed that day, and after the
rough ways and the heat and the continual marching.
I found a bridge which crossed the deep ravine they had told me of.
This high bridge was new, and had been built of fine stone, yet it was
broken and ruined, and a gap suddenly showed in the dark. I stepped
back from it in fear. The clambering down to the stream and up again
through the briars to regain the road broke me yet more, and when, on
the hill beyond, I saw the tower faintly darker against the dark sky,
I went up doggedly to it, fearing faintness, and reaching it where it
stood (it was on the highest ground overlooking the Secchia valley), I
sat down on a stone beside it and waited for the morning.
The long slope of the hills fell away for miles to where, by daylight,
would have lain the misty plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the
landscape. The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the
place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy
roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a
cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of
Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous--bare, rugged, a desert
place--added something of doom.
The hours were creeping on with the less certain stars; a very faint
and unliving grey touched the edges of the clouds. The cold possessed
me, and I rose to walk, if I could walk, a little farther.
What is that in the mind which, after (it may be) a slight
disappointment or a petty accident, causes it to suffer on the scale
of grave things?
I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful,
colourless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and
influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round
the first uncertain promise of increasing light. For there is an hour
before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul
or around it, when even the stars fail.
And this long and dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst when
one was alone at sea in a small boat without wind; drifting beyond
one's harbour in the ebb of the outer channel tide, and sogging back
at the first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea without any
waves. In such lonely mornings I have watched the Owers light turning,
and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments could
be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I have prayed for the
morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I
say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing.
But now, on this ridge, dragging myself on to the main road, I found a
deeper abyss of isolation and despairing fatigue than I had ever
known, and I came near to turning eastward and imploring the hastening
of light, as men pray continually without reason for things that can
but come in a due order. I still went forward a little, because when I
sat down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune; and because my
feet, going painfully and slowly, yet gave a little balance and rhythm
to the movement of my mind.
I heard no sound of animals or birds. I passed several fields,
deserted in the half-darkness; and in some I felt the hay, but always
found it wringing wet with dew, nor could I discover a good shelter
from the wind that blew off the upper snow of the summits. For a
little space of time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road,
that shadow of sleep which numbs the mind, but it could not compel me
to lie down, and I accepted it only as a partial and beneficent
oblivion which covered my desolation and suffering as a thin,
transparent cloud may cover an evil moon.
Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating
gloom (which I think the clouds in purgatory must reflect) lifted from
the valley as though to a slow order given by some calm and good
influence that was marshalling in the day. Their colours came back to
things; the trees recovered their shape, life, and trembling; here and
there, on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their
movement took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the
first time the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. That subtle
barrier was drawn which marks to-day from yesterday; all the night and
its despondency became the past and entered memory. The road before
me, the pass on my left (my last ridge, and the entry into Tuscany),
the mass of the great hills, had become mixed into the increasing
light, that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present which I
have always found capable of opening the doors of the future with a
gesture of victory.
My pain either left me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little
way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and
dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing to the
east.
There, without any warning of colours, or of the heraldry that we have
in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without
doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with
security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun.
The air became warmer almost suddenly. The splendour and health of the
new day left me all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to
immediate sleep.
I found therefore in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath
one of my trees, a place for lying down; I stretched myself out upon
it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vague and
tenuous delight separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last
confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of
prayer--and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of
adoration--this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good
proceeds, but partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the
things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most
complete and glorious.
Therefore the first hours of the sunlight, after I had wakened, made
the place like a new country; for my mind which received it was new. I
reached Collagna before the great heat, following the fine highroad
that went dipping and rising again along the mountain side, and then
(leaving the road and crossing the little Secchia by a bridge), a
path, soon lost in a grassy slope, gave me an indication of my way.
For when I had gone an hour or so upwards along the shoulder of the
hill, there opened gradually before me a silent and profound vale,
hung with enormous woods, and sloping upwards to where it was closed
by a high bank beneath and between two peaks. This bank I knew could
be nothing else than the central ridge of the Apennines, the
watershed, the boundary of Tuscany, and the end of all the main part
of my journey. Beyond, the valleys would open on to the Tuscan Plain,
and at the southern limit of that, Siena was my mark; from Siena to
Rome an eager man, if he is sound, may march in three long days. Nor
was that calculation all. The satisfaction of the last lap, of the
home run, went with the word Tuscany in my mind; these cities were the
approaches and introduction of the end.
When I had slept out the heat, I followed the woods upward through the
afternoon. They stood tangled and huge, and the mosses under them were
thick and silent, because in this last belt of the mountains height
and coolness reproduced the north. A charcoal burner was making his
furnace; after that for the last miles there was no sound. Even the
floor of the vale was a depth of grass, and no torrent ran in it but
only a little hidden stream, leafy like our streams at home.
At last the steep bank, a wall at the end of the valley, rose
immediately above me. It was very steep and bare, desolate with the
many stumps of trees that had been cut down; but all its edge and
fringe against the sky was the line of a deep forest.
After its laborious hundreds of feet, when the forest that crowned it
evenly was reached, the Apennines were conquered, the last great range
was passed, and there stood no barrier between this high crest and
Rome.
The hither side of that bank, I say, had been denuded of its trees;
the roots of secular chestnuts stood like graves above the dry steep,
and had marked my last arduous climb. Now, at the summit, the highest
part was a line of cool forest, and the late afternoon mingled with
the sanctity of trees. A genial dampness pervaded the earth beneath;
grasses grew, and there were living creatures in the shade.
Nor was this tenanted wood all the welcome I received on my entry into
Tuscany. Already I heard the noise of falling waters upon every side,
where the Serchio sprang from twenty sources on the southern slope,
and leapt down between mosses, and quarrelled, and overcame great
smooth dark rocks in busy falls. Indeed, it was like my own country in
the north, and a man might say to himself--'After so much journeying,
perhaps I am in the Enchanted Wood, and may find at last the fairy
Melisaunde.'
A glade opened, and, the trees no longer hiding it, I looked down the
vale, which was the gate of Tuscany. There--high, jagged, rapt into
the sky--stood such a group of mountains as men dream of in good
dreams, or see in the works of painters when old age permits them
revelations. Their height was evident from the faint mist and grey of
their hues; their outline was tumultuous, yet balanced; full of
accident and poise. It was as though these high walls of Carrara, the
western boundary of the valley, had been shaped expressly for man, in
order to exalt him with unexpected and fantastic shapes, and to expand
his dull life with a permanent surprise. For a long time I gazed at
these great hills.
Then, more silent in the mind through their influence, I went down
past the speech and companionship of the springs of the Serchio, and
the chestnut trees were redolent of evening all round. Down the bank
to where the streams met in one, down the river, across its gaping,
ruinous bridge (which some one, generations ago, had built for the
rare travellers--there were then no main roads across the Apennine,
and perhaps this rude pass was in favour); down still more gently
through the narrow upper valley I went between the chestnut trees, and
calm went with me for a companion: and the love of men and the
expectation of good seemed natural to all that had been made in this
blessed place. Of Borda, where the peasants directed me, there is no
need to speak, till crossing the Serchio once more, this time on a
trestle bridge of wood, I passed by a wider path through the groves,
and entered the dear village of Sillano, which looks right into the
pure west. And the peaks are guardians all about it: the elder
brothers of this remote and secluded valley.
An inn received me: a great kitchen full of men and women talking, a
supper preparing, a great fire, meat smoking and drying in the
ingle-nook, a vast timbered roof going up into darkness: there I was
courteously received, but no one understood my language. Seeing there
a young priest, I said to him--
_'Pater, habeo linguam latinam, sed non habeo linguam Italicam. Visne
mi dare traductionem in istam linguam Toscanam non nullorum
verborum?'_
To this he replied, _'Libenter,'_ and the people revered us both. Thus
he told me the name for a knife was _cultello;_ for a room, _camera
par domire;_ for 'what is it called?' _'come si chiama?';_ for 'what
is the road to?' _'quella e la via a...?'_ and other phrases wherein,
no doubt, I am wrong; but I only learnt by ear.
Then he said to me something I did not understand, and I answered,
_'Pol-Hercle!'_ at which he seemed pleased enough.