Novel
effects, you perceive, obtained by a mere intensification of colour.
As to Frattura - yes, it is shattered. Vainly we tried to identify
Ferdinando's abode among all that debris. The old man himself escaped
the cataclysm, and now sells his wares in one of the miserable wooden
shanties erected lower down. The mellow hermit at St. Egidio, of whom
more on p. 171, has died; his place is taken by a worthless vagabond.
Saint Domenico and his serpents, the lonely mead of Jovana (? Jovis
fanum), that bell in the church-tower of Villalago which bears the
problematical date of 600 A.D. - they are all in their former places.
Mount Velino still glitters over the landscape, for those who climb high
enough to see it. The cliff-swallows are there, and dippers skim the
water as of old. Women, in their unhygienic costume, still carry those
immense loads of wood on their heads, though payment is considerably
higher than the three half-pence a day which it used to be.
Enough of Scanno!
Whoever wishes to leave the place on foot and by an unconventional
route, may go to Sora via Pescasseroli. Adventurous souls will scramble
over the Terrata massif, leaving the summit well on their right, and
descend on its further side; others may wander up the Valle dei Prati
and then, bending to the right along the so-called Via del Campo, mount
upwards past a thronged alp of sheep, over the watershed, and down
through charming valleys of beechen timber. A noble walk, and one that
compares favourably with many Abruzzi excursions. What deserts they
often are, these stretches of arid limestone, voiceless and waterless,
with the raven's croak for your only company!
I am glad to have seen Pescasseroli, where we arrived at about 9 a.m.
For the rest, it is only one of many such places that have been brought
to a state of degradation by the earthquake, the present war, and
governmental neglect. Not an ounce of bread was procurable for money, or
even as a gift. The ordinary needs of life - cigars, matches, maccheroni
and so forth: there were none of them. An epidemic of the gapes,
infecting the entire race of local hens, had caused the disappearance of
every egg from the market. And all those other countless things which a
family requires for its maintenance - soap and cloth and earthenware and
kitchen utensils and oils - they have become rarities; the natives are
learning to subsist without them; relapsing into a kind of barbarism. So
they sit among the cracked tenements; resentful, or dumbly apathetic.
"We have been forgotten," said one of them.
The priests inculcate submission to the will of God. What else should
they teach? But men will outgrow these doctrines of patience when
suffering is too acute or too prolonged. "Anything is better than this,"
they say. Thus it comes about that these ruined regions are a goodly
soil for the sowing of subversive opinions; the land reeks of
ill-digested socialism.
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