Or we shall all be in
jail to-morrow."
It contained a dozen pears.
Driving along, I tried to enter into conversation with the coachman who,
judging by his face, was a mine of local lore. But I had come too late;
the poor old man was so weakened by age and infirmities that he cared
little for talk, his thoughts dwelling, as I charitably imagined, on his
wife and children, all dead and buried (so he said) many long years ago.
He mentioned, however, the diluvio, the deluge, which I have heard
spoken of by older people, among whom it is a fixed article of faith.
This deluge is supposed to have affected the whole Crati valley,
submerging towns and villages. In proof, they say that if you dig near
Tarsia below the present river-level, you will pass through beds of silt
and ooze to traces of old walls and cultivated land. Tarsia used to lie
by the river-side, and was a flourishing place, according to the
descriptions of Leandro Alberti and other early writers; floods and
malaria have now forced it to climb the hills.
The current of the Crati is more spasmodic and destructive than in
classical times when the river was "navigable"; and to one of its
inundations may be due this legend of the deluge; to the same
one, maybe, that affected the courses of this river and the Coscile,
mingling their waters which used to flow separately into the Ionian. Or
it may be a hazy memory of the artificial changing of the riverbed when
the town of Sybaris, lying between these two rivers, was destroyed. Yet
the streams are depicted as entering the sea apart in old maps such as
those of Magini, Fiore, Coronelli, and Cluver; and the latter writes
that "near the mouth of the Crati there flows into the same sea a river
vulgarly called Cochile." [Footnote: In the earlier part of
Rathgeber's astonishing "Grossgriechenland und Pythagoras" (1866) will
be found a good list of old maps of the country.]
This is important. It remains to be seen whether this statement is the
result of a personal visit, or whether he simply repeated the old
geography. His text in many places indicates a personal acquaintance
with southern Italy - Italian, says Heinsius, non semel
peragravit - and he may well have been tempted to investigate a site
like that of Sybaris. If so, the change in the river courses and
possibly this "deluge" has taken place since his day.
Deprived of converse, I relapsed into a doze, but soon woke up with a
start. The carriage had stopped; it was nearly midnight; we were at
Terranova di Sibari, whose houses were lit up by the silvery beams of
the moon.
Thurii - death-place of Herodotus! How one would like to see this place
by daylight. On the ancient site, which lies at a considerable distance,
they have excavated antiquities, a large number of which are in the
possession of the Marchese Galli at Castrovillari.
