To escape
from home and find his way to America under my passport and protection.
Here was his chance - a foreigner (American) returning sooner or later to
his own country! He pressed the matter with naif forcefulness. Vainly I
told him that there were other lands on earth; that I was not going to
America. He shook his head and sagely remarked:
"I have understood. You think my journey would cost too much. But you,
also, must understand. Once I get work there, I will repay you every
farthing."
As a consolation, I offered him some cigarettes. He accepted one;
pensive, unresigned.
The goat-herds had no such cravings - in the days of Theocritus.
XL
THE COLUMN
"Two hours - three hours - four hours: according!"
The boatmen are still eager for the voyage. It all depends, as before,
upon the wind.
And day after day the Ionian lies before us - immaculate, immutable.
I determined to approach the column by land. A mule was discovered, and
starting from the "Concordia" rather late in the morning, reached the
temple-ruin in two hours to the minute. I might have been tempted to
linger by the way but for the intense sunshine and for the fact that the
muleteer was an exceptionally dull dog - a dusky youth of the taciturn
and wooden-faced Spanish variety, whose anti-Hellenic profile irked me,
in that landscape. The driving road ends at the cemetery. Thence onward
a pathway skirts the sea at the foot of the clay-hills; passes the
sunken wells; climbs up and down steepish gradients and so attains the
plateau at whose extremity stands the lighthouse, the column, and a few
white bungalows - summer-residences of Cotrone citizens.
A day of shimmering heat. . . .
The ground is parched. Altogether, it is a poor and thinly peopled
stretch of land between Cotrone and Capo Rizzuto. No wonder the wolves
are famished. Nine days ago one of them actually ventured upon the road
near the cemetery, in daylight.
Yet there is some plant-life, and I was pleased to see, emerging from
the bleak sand-dunes, the tufts of the well-known and conspicuous sea
lily in full flower. Wishful to obtain a few blossoms, I asked the boy
to descend from his mule, but he objected.
"Non si toccano questi fiori," he said. These flowers are not to be
touched.
Their odour displeased him. Like the Arab, the uncultivated Italian is
insensitive to certain smells that revolt us; while he cannot endure, on
the other hand, the scent of some flowers. I have seen a man professing
to feel faint at the odour of crushed geranium leaves. They are fiori
di morti, he says: planted (sometimes) in graveyards.
The last remarkable antiquity found at this site, to my knowledge, is a
stone vase, fished up some years ago out of the sea, into which it may
have fallen while being carried off by pious marauders for the purpose
of figuring as font in some church (unless, indeed, the land has sunk at
this point, as there is some evidence to show). I saw it, shortly after
its return to dry land, in a shed near the harbour of Cotrone; the
Taranto museum has now claimed it.
