Of the higher
lands may have suffocated the original sources with soil carried down
from thence, and forced them to seek a lower level, thus shortening the
stream and reducing its volume of water.
But who shall decide? If we follow Polybius, another brook at the
further end of the inland sea has more valid claims to the title of
Galaesus. Virgil called it "black Galaesus " - a curious epithet, still
applied to water in Italy as well as in Greece (Mavromati, etc.). "For
me," says Gissing, "the Galaesus is the stream I found and tracked,
whose waters I heard mingle with the little sea." There is something to
be said for such an attitude, on the part of a dilettante traveller,
towards these desperate antiquarian controversies.
It is an agreeable promenade from the Giadrezze rivulet to Taranto along
the shore of this inland sea. Its clay banks are full of shells and
potteries of every age, and the shallow waters planted with stakes
indicating the places where myriads of oysters and mussels are
bred - indeed, if you look at a map you will observe that the whole of
this lagoon, as though to shadow forth its signification, is split up
into two basins like an opened oyster.
Here and there along this beach are fishermen's huts constructed of
tree-stems which are smothered under multitudinous ropes of grass, ropes
of all ages and in every stage of decomposition, some fairly fresh,
others dissolving once more into amorphous bundles of hay.
