Alas! I may not linger on that charge, for if I did I should not give
you any measure of its determination and rapidity. Many little places
passed me off the road on the flanks of that valley, and mostly to the
left. While the morning was yet young, I came to the packed little
town of Bodio, and passed the eight franc limit by taking coffee,
brandy, and bread. There also were a gentleman and a lady in a
carriage who wondered where I was going, and I told them (in French)
'to Rome'. It was nine in the morning when I came to Biasca. The sun
was glorious, and not yet warm: it was too early for a meal. They gave
me a little cold meat and bread and wine, and seven francs stood out
dry above the falling tide of my money.
Here at Biasca the valley took on a different aspect. It became wider
and more of a countryside; the vast hills, receding, took on an
appearance of less familiar majesty, and because the trend of the
Ticino turned southerly some miles ahead the whole place seemed
enclosed from the world. One would have said that a high mountain
before me closed it in and rendered it unique and unknown, had not a
wide cleft in the east argued another pass over the hills, and
reminded me that there were various routes over the crest of the Alps.
Indeed, this hackneyed approach to Italy which I had dreaded and
despised and accepted only after a defeat was very marvellous, and
this valley of the Ticino ought to stand apart and be a commonwealth
of its own like Andorra or the Gresivaudan: the noble garden of the
Isere within the first gates of the Dauphine.
I was fatigued, and my senses lost acuteness. Still I noticed with
delight the new character of the miles I pursued. A low hill just
before me, jutting out apparently from the high western mountains,
forbade me to see beyond it. The plain was alluvial, while copses and
wood and many cultivated fields now found room where, higher up, had
been nothing but the bed of a torrent with bare banks and strips of
grass immediately above them; it was a place worthy of a special name
and of being one lordship and a countryside. Still I went on towards
that near boundary of the mountain spur and towards the point where
the river rounded it, the great barrier hill before me still seeming
to shut in the valley.
It was noon, or thereabouts, the heat was increasing (I did not feel
it greatly, for I had eaten and drunk next to nothing), when, coming
round the point, there opened out before me the great fan of the lower
valley and the widening and fruitful plain through which the Ticino
rolls in a full river to reach Lake Major, which is its sea.
