"He tormented his body so continuously and obstinately with pins,
needles and blades of steel, and with such effusion of blood, that even
now, after entire years, the walls of his cell and other places of
retirement are discoloured and actually encrusted with blood." Which of
them was it - the chamber that witnessed these atrocious macerations? It
was all so gloomy and forlorn.
Then, pushing aside a door in these tenebrous regions, I suddenly found
myself bathed in dazzling light. A loggia opened here, with a view over
stretches of gnarled olives, shining all silvery under the immaculate
sky of noonday and bounded by the sapphire belt of the Ionian. Sunshine
and blue sea! Often must the monks have taken pleasure in this fair
prospect; and the wiser among them, watching the labourers returning
home at nightfall, the children at play, and all the happy life of a
world so alien to their own, may well have heaved a sigh.
Meanwhile a crowd of citizens had assembled below, attracted by the
unusual novelty of a stranger in their town. The simple creatures
appeared to regard my investigations in the light of a good joke; they
had heard of begging monks, and thieving monks, and monks of another
variety whose peculiarities I dare not attempt to describe; but a flying
monk - no, never!
"The Dark Ages," said one of them - the mayor, I dare say - with an air of
grave authority. "Believe me, dear sir, the days of such fabulous
monsters are over."
So they seem to be, for the present.
No picture or statue records the life of this flying wonder, this
masterpiece of Spanish priestcraft; no mural tablet - in this land of
commemorative stones - has been erected to perpetuate the glory of his
signal achievements; no street is called after him. It is as if he had
never existed. On the contrary, by a queer irony of fate, the roadway
leading past his convent evokes the memory of a misty heathen poet,
likewise native of these favoured regions, a man whose name Joseph of
Copertino had assuredly never heard - Ennius, of whom I can now recall
nothing save that one unforgettable line which begins "O Tite tute Tati
tibi - - "; Ennius, who never so much as tried to fly, but contented
himself with singing, in rather bad Latin, of the things of this earth.
Via Ennio. . . .
It is the swing of the pendulum. The old pagan, at this moment, may be
nearer to our ideals and aspirations than the flying monk who died only
yesterday, so to speak.
But a few years hence - who can tell?
A characteristic episode. I had carefully timed myself to catch the
returning train to Tarante. Great was my surprise when, half-way to the
station, I perceived the train swiftly approaching. I raced it, and
managed to jump into a carriage just as it drew out of the station. The
guard straightway demanded my ticket and a fine for entering the train
without one (return tickets, for weighty reasons of "internal
administration," are not sold). I looked at my watch, which showed that
we had left six minutes before the scheduled hour. He produced his; it
coincided with my own. "No matter," he said. "I am not responsible for
the eccentricities of the driver, who probably had some urgent private
affairs to settle at Taranto. The fine must be paid." A fellow-passenger
took a more charitable view of the case. He suggested that an inspector
of the line had been travelling along with us, and that the driver,
knowing this, was naturally ambitious to show how fast he could go.
A mile or so before reaching Tarante the railway crosses a stream that
flows into the inland sea. One would be glad to believe those sages who
hold it to be the far-famed Galaesus. It rises near at hand in a marsh,
amid mighty tufts of reeds and odorous flowers, and the liquid bubbles
up in pools of crystalline transparency - deep and perfidious cauldrons
overhung by the trembling soil on which you stand. These fountains form
a respectable stream some four hundred yards in length; another copious
spring rises up in the sea near its mouth. But can this be the river
whose virtues are extolled by: Virgil, Horace, Martial, Statius,
Propertius, Strabo, Pliny, Varro and Coramella? What a constellation of
names around these short-lived waters! Truly, minuit praesentia
famam, as Boccaccio says of the once-renowned Sebethus.
Often have I visited this site and tried to reconstruct its vanished
glories. My enthusiasm even led me, some years ago, to the town hall, in
order to ascertain its true official name, and here they informed me
that "it is vulgarly called Citrezze; but the correct version is 'Le
Giadrezze,' which, as you are aware, sir, signifies pleasantness"
This functionary was evidently ignorant of the fact that so long ago as
1771 the learned commentator (Carducci) of the "Delizie Tarentine"
already sneered at this popular etymology; adding, what is of greater
interest, that "in the time of our fathers" this region was covered with
woods and rich in game. In the days of Keppel Craven, the vale was
"scantily cultivated with cotton." Looking at it from above, it
certainly resembles an old river-bed of about five hundred yards in
breadth, and I hold it possible that the deforestation 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.
