Then I needed wine and food for the later
day in the mountain. Yet, again, it was getting hot. It was past
eight, the mist had long ago receded, and I feared delay. So I mused
on the white road under the tall towers and dead walls of Viterbo, and
ruminated on an unimportant thing. Then curiosity did what reason
could not do, and I entered by a gate.
The streets were narrow, tortuous, and alive, all shaded by the great
houses, and still full of the cold of the night. The noise of
fountains echoed in them, and the high voices of women and the cries
of sellers. Every house had in it something fantastic and peculiar;
humanity had twined into this place like a natural growth, and the
separate thoughts of men, both those that were alive there and those
dead before them, had decorated it all. There were courtyards with
blinding whites of sunlit walls above, themselves in shadow; and there
were many carvings and paintings over doors. I had come into a great
living place after the loneliness of the road.
There, in the first wide street I could find, I bought sausage and
bread and a great bottle of wine, and then quitting Viterbo, I left it
by the same gate and took the road.
For a long while yet I continued under the walls, noting in one place
a thing peculiar to the Middle Ages, I mean the apse of a church built
right into the wall as the old Cathedral of St Stephen's was in Paris.
These, I suppose, enemies respected if they could; for I have noticed
also that in castles the chapel is not hidden, but stands out from the
wall. So be it. Your fathers and mine were there in the fighting, but
we do not know their names, and I trust and hope yours spared the
altars as carefully as mine did.
The road began to climb the hill, and though the heat increased - for
in Italy long before nine it is glaring noon to us northerners (and
that reminds me: 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. Drinking there again, I wondered if I should go on or
rest; but I was full of antiquity, and a memory in the blood, or what
not, impelled me to see the lake in the crater before I went to sleep:
after a few hundred yards this obsession was satisfied.
I passed between two banks, where the road had been worn down at the
crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of
silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw
the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark
slopes around it.
