What road could it be? To this day I do not know.
Perhaps I had missed my way and struck the main highway again. Perhaps
(it is often so in the Apennines) it was a road leading nowhere. At
any rate I hesitated, and looked back to judge my direction.
It was a happy accident. I was now some 2000 feet above the Taro.
There, before me, stood the high strange rock that I had watched from
below; all around it and below me was the glen or cup of bare hills,
slabs, and slopes of sand and stone calcined in the sun, and, beyond
these near things, all the plain of Lombardy was at my feet.
It was this which made it worth while to have toiled up that steep
wall, and even to have lost my way - to see a hundred miles of the
great flat stretched out before me: all the kingdoms of the world.
Nor was this all. There were sharp white clouds on the far northern
horizon, low down above the uncertain edge of the world. I looked
again and found they did not move. Then I knew they were the Alps.
Believe it or not, I was looking back to a place of days before: over
how many, many miles of road! The rare, white peaks and edges could
not deceive me; they still stood to the sunlight, and sent me from
that vast distance the memory of my passage, when their snows had
seemed interminable and their height so monstrous; their cold such a
cloak of death. Now they were as far off as childhood, and I saw them
for the last time.
All this I drew. Then finding a post directing me to a side road for
Calestano, I followed it down and down into the valley beyond; and up
the walls of this second valley as the evening fell I heard the noise
of the water running, as the Taro had run, a net of torrents from the
melting snows far off. These streams I soon saw below me, winding (as
those of the Taro had wound) through a floor of dry shingle and rock;
but when my road ceased suddenly some hundreds of feet above the bed
of the river, and when, full of evening, I had scrambled down through
trees to the brink of the water, I found I should have to repeat what
I had done that morning and to ford these streams. For there was no
track of any kind and no bridge, and Calestano stood opposite me, a
purple cluster of houses in the dusk against the farther mountain
side.
Very warily, lobbing stones as I had been taught, and following up and
down each branch to find a place, I forded one by one the six little
cold and violent rivers, and reaching the farther shore, I reached
also, as I thought, supper, companionship, and a bed.
