Was one devil who with great joy was
carrying off a rich man's gold in a bag. But now we are too wise to
believe in such follies, and when we die we take our wealth with us;
in the ninth century they had no way of doing this, for no system of
credit yet obtained.
Then leaving the main road which runs to Pontremoli and at last to
Spezzia, my lane climbed up into the hills and ceased, little by
little, to be even a lane. It became from time to time the bed of a
stream, then nothing, then a lane again, and at last, at the head of
the glen, I confessed to having lost it; but I noted a great rock or
peak above me for a landmark, and I said to myself -
'No matter. The wall of this glen before me is obviously the ridge of
the spur; the rock must be left to the north, and I have but to cross
the ridge by its guidance.' By this time, however, the heat overcame
me, and, as it was already afternoon, and as I had used so much of the
preceding night for my journey, I remembered the wise custom of hot
countries and lay down to sleep.
I slept but a little while, yet when I woke the air was cooler. I
climbed the side of the glen at random, and on the summit I found, to
my disgust, a road. 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.
But it is not in this simple way that human life is arranged. What
awaited me in Calestano was ill favour, a prison, release, base
flattery, and a very tardy meal.
It is our duty to pity all men. It is our duty to pity those who are
in prison. It is our duty to pity those who are not in prison. How
much more is it the duty of a Christian man to pity the rich who
cannot ever get into prison? These indeed I do now specially pity, and
extend to them my commiseration.
What! Never even to have felt the grip of the policeman; to have
watched his bold suspicious eye; to have tried to make a good show
under examination ... never to have heard the bolt grinding in the
lock, and never to have looked round at the cleanly simplicity of a
cell? Then what emotions have you had, unimprisonable rich; or what do
you know of active living and of adventure?
It was after drinking some wine and eating macaroni and bread at a
poor inn, the only one in the place, and after having to shout at the
ill-natured hostess (and to try twenty guesses before I made her
understand that I wanted cheese), it was when I had thus eaten and
shouted, and had gone over the way to drink coffee and to smoke in a
little cafe, that my adventure befell me.
