But I Had Accepted My Fate On The Gries And The Falling Road
Also Held Me, And So I Continued My Way.
Everything was pleasing in this new valley under the sunlight that
still came strongly from behind the enormous mountains;
Everything
also was new, and I was evidently now in a country of a special kind.
The slopes were populous, I had come to the great mother of fruits and
men, and I was soon to see her cities and her old walls, and the
rivers that glide by them. Church towers also repeated the same shapes
up and up the wooded hills until the villages stopped at the line of
the higher slopes and at the patches of snow. The houses were square
and coloured; they were graced with arbours, and there seemed to be
all around nothing but what was reasonable and secure, and especially
no rich or poor.
I noticed all these things on the one side and the other till, not two
hours from Airolo, I came to a step in the valley. For the valley of
the Ticino is made up of distinct levels, each of which might have
held a lake once for the way it is enclosed: and each level ends in
high rocks with a gorge between them. Down this gorge the river
tumbles in falls and rapids and the road picks its way down steeply,
all banked and cut, and sometimes has to cross from side to side by a
bridge, while the railway above one overcomes the sharp descent by
running round into the heart of the hills through circular tunnels and
coming out again far below the cavern where it plunged in.
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