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.
