The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the
place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy
roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a
cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of
Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous - bare, rugged, a desert
place - added something of doom.
The hours were creeping on with the less certain stars; a very faint
and unliving grey touched the edges of the clouds. The cold possessed
me, and I rose to walk, if I could walk, a little farther.
What is that in the mind which, after (it may be) a slight
disappointment or a petty accident, causes it to suffer on the scale
of grave things?
I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful,
colourless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and
influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round
the first uncertain promise of increasing light. For there is an hour
before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul
or around it, when even the stars fail.
And this long and dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst when
one was alone at sea in a small boat without wind; drifting beyond
one's harbour in the ebb of the outer channel tide, and sogging back
at the first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea without any
waves. In such lonely mornings I have watched the Owers light turning,
and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments could
be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I have prayed for the
morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I
say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing.
But now, on this ridge, dragging myself on to the main road, I found a
deeper abyss of isolation and despairing fatigue than I had ever
known, and I came near to turning eastward and imploring the hastening
of light, as men pray continually without reason for things that can
but come in a due order. I still went forward a little, because when I
sat down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune; and because my
feet, going painfully and slowly, yet gave a little balance and rhythm
to the movement of my mind.
I heard no sound of animals or birds. I passed several fields,
deserted in the half-darkness; and in some I felt the hay, but always
found it wringing wet with dew, nor could I discover a good shelter
from the wind that blew off the upper snow of the summits. For a
little space of time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road,
that shadow of sleep which numbs the mind, but it could not compel me
to lie down, and I accepted it only as a partial and beneficent
oblivion which covered my desolation and suffering as a thin,
transparent cloud may cover an evil moon.
Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating
gloom (which I think the clouds in purgatory must reflect) lifted from
the valley as though to a slow order given by some calm and good
influence that was marshalling in the day. Their colours came back to
things; the trees recovered their shape, life, and trembling; here and
there, on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their
movement took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the
first time the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. That subtle
barrier was drawn which marks to-day from yesterday; all the night and
its despondency became the past and entered memory. The road before
me, the pass on my left (my last ridge, and the entry into Tuscany),
the mass of the great hills, had become mixed into the increasing
light, that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present which I
have always found capable of opening the doors of the future with a
gesture of victory.
My pain either left me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little
way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and
dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing to the
east.
There, without any warning of colours, or of the heraldry that we have
in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without
doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with
security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun.
The air became warmer almost suddenly. The splendour and health of the
new day left me all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to
immediate sleep.
I found therefore in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath
one of my trees, a place for lying down; I stretched myself out upon
it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vague and
tenuous delight separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last
confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of
prayer - and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of
adoration - this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good
proceeds, but partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the
things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most
complete and glorious.
Therefore the first hours of the sunlight, after I had wakened, made
the place like a new country; for my mind which received it was new. I
reached Collagna before the great heat, following the fine highroad
that went dipping and rising again along the mountain side, and then
(leaving the road and crossing the little Secchia by a bridge), a
path, soon lost in a grassy slope, gave me an indication of my way.
For when I had gone an hour or so upwards along the shoulder of the
hill, there opened gradually before me a silent and profound vale,
hung with enormous woods, and sloping upwards to where it was closed
by a high bank beneath and between two peaks.
