A pair of half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on
walking on their hind legs whenever they tire of going on four.
The Appian Way, as at present constituted, is a considerable
disappointment. For long stretches it runs between high stone
walls, broken at intervals by gate-ways, where votive lamps burn
before small shrines, and by the tombs of such illustrious dead
as Seneca and the Horatii and the Curiatii. At more frequent
intervals are small wine groggeries. Being built mainly of Italian
marble, which is the most enduring and the most unyielding substance
to be found in all Italy - except a linen collar that has been
starched in an Italian laundry - the tombs are in a pretty fair
state of preservation; but the inns, without exception, stand most
desperately in need of immediate repairing.
A cow in Italy is known by the company she keeps; she rambles
about, in and out of the open parlor of the wayside inn, mingling
freely with the patrons and the members of the proprietor's household.
Along the Appian Way a cow never seems to care whom she runs with;
and the same is true of the domestic fowls and the family donkey.
A donkey will spend his day in the doorway of a wine shop when he
might just as well be enjoying the more sanitary and less crowded
surroundings of a stable. It only goes to show what an ass a
donkey is.
Anon, as the fancy writers say, we skirted one of the many wrecked
aqueducts that go looping across country to the distant hills,
like great stone straddlebugs. In the vicinity of Rome you are
rarely out of sight of one of these aqueducts. The ancient Roman
rulers, you know, curried the favor of the populace by opening
baths. A modern ruler could win undying popularity by closing up
a few.
We slowed up at the Circus of Romulus and found it a very sad
circus, as such things go - no elevated stage, no hippodrome track,
no centerpole, no trapeze, and only one ring. P. T. Barnum would
have been ashamed to own it. A broken wall, following the lines
of an irregular oval; a cabbage patch where the arena had been;
and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry
- this was the Circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus
of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same
name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era
was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for that
circus a minute.
No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an
hour's stop at the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus; so we stopped.
Guided by a brown Trappist, and all of us bearing twisted tapers
in our hands, we descended by stone steps deep under the skin of
the earth and wandered through dim, dank underground passages,
where thousands of early Christians had lived and hid, and held
clandestine worship before rude stone altars, and had died and
been buried - died in a highly unpleasant fashion, some of them.
The experience was impressive, but malarial. Coming away from
there I had an argument with a fellow American. He said that if
we had these Catacombs in America we should undoubtedly enlarge
them and put in band stands and lunch places, and altogether make
them more attractive for picnic parties and Sunday excursionists.
I contended, on the other hand, that if they were in America the
authorities would close them up and protect the moldered bones of
those early Christians from the vulgar gaze and prying fingers of
every impious relic hunter who might come along. The dispute rose
higher and grew warmer until I offered to bet him fifty dollars
that I was right and he was wrong. He took me up promptly - he had
sporting instincts; I'll say that for him - and we shook hands on
it then and there to bind the wager. I expect to win that bet.
We had turned off the Appian Way and were crossing a corner of that
unutterably hideous stretch of tortured and distorted waste known
as the Campagna, which goes tumbling away to the blue Alban Mountains,
when we came on the scene of an accident. A two-wheeled mule cart,
proceeding along a crossroad, with the driver asleep in his canopied
seat, had been hit by a speeding automobile and knocked galley-west.
The automobile had sped on - so we were excitedly informed by some
other tourists who had witnessed the collision - leaving the wreckage
bottom side up in the ditch. The mule was on her back, all entangled
in the twisted ruination of her gaudy gear, kicking out in that
restrained and genteel fashion in which a mule always kicks when
she is desirous of protesting against existing conditions, but is
wishful not to damage herself while so doing. The tourists, aided
by half a dozen peasants, had dragged the driver out from beneath
the heavy cart and had carried him to a pile of mucky straw beneath
the eaves of a stable. He was stretched full length on his back,
senseless and deathly pale under the smeared grime on his face.
There was no blood; but inside his torn shirt his chest had a
caved-in look, as though the ribs had been crushed flat, and he
seemed not to breathe at all. Only his fingers moved. They kept
twitching, as though his life was running out of him through his
finger ends. One felt that if he would but grip his hands he might
stay its flight and hold it in.
Just as we jumped out of our carriage a young peasant woman, who
had been bending over the injured man, set up a shrill outcry,
which was instantly answered from behind us; and looking round we
saw, running through the bare fields, a great, bulksome old woman,
with her arms outspread and her face set in a tragic shape, shrieking
as she sped toward us in her ungainly wallowing course.
