Your Fathers And Mine, To Whom Allusion Has Been Made
Above {As They Say In The Dull History Books - [LECTOR.
How many more
interior brackets are we to have?
Is this algebra? AUCTOR. You
yourself, Lector, are responsible for the worst.]} your fathers and
mine coming down into this country to fight, as was their annual
custom, must have had a plaguy time of it, when you think that they
could not get across the Alps till summer-time, and then had to hack
and hew, and thrust and dig, and slash and climb, and charge and puff,
and blow and swear, and parry and receive, and aim and dodge, and butt
and run for their lives at the end, under an unaccustomed sun. No
wonder they saw visions, the dear people! They are dead now, and we do
not even know their names.) - Where was I?
LECTOR. You were at the uninteresting remark that the heat was
increasing.
AUCTOR. Precisely. I remember. Well, the heat was increasing, but it
seemed far more bearable than it had been in the earlier places; in
the oven of the Garfagnana or in the deserts of Siena. For with the
first slopes of the mountain a forest of great chestnut trees
appeared, and it was so cool under these that there was even moss, as
though I were back again in my own country where there are full rivers
in summer-time, deep meadows, and all the completion of home.
Also the height may have begun to tell on the air, but not much, for
when the forest was behind me, and when I had come to a bare heath
sloping more gently upwards - a glacis in front of the topmost bulwark
of the round mountain - - I was oppressed with thirst, and though it
was not too hot to sing (for I sang, and two lonely carabinieri passed
me singing, and we recognized as we saluted each other that the
mountain was full of songs), yet I longed for a bench, a flagon, and
shade.
And as I longed, a little house appeared, and a woman in the shade
sewing, and an old man. Also a bench and a table, and a tree over it.
There I sat down and drank white wine and water many times. The woman
charged me a halfpenny, and the old man would not talk. He did not
take his old age garrulously. It was his business, not mine; but I
should dearly have liked to have talked to him in Lingua Franca, and
to have heard him on the story of his mountain: where it was haunted,
by what, and on which nights it was dangerous to be abroad. Such as it
was, there it was. I left them, and shall perhaps never see them
again.
The road was interminable, and the crest, from which I promised myself
the view of the crater-lake, was always just before me, and was never
reached. A little spring, caught in a hollow log, refreshed a meadow
on the right.
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