And now, let me hear a little of your own language."
I gave utterance to a few verses of Shakespeare, which caused
considerable merriment.
"Do you mean to tell me," she asked, "that people really talk like that?"
"Of course they do."
"And pretend to understand what it means?"
"Why, naturally."
"Maybe they do," she agreed. "But only when they want to be thought
funny by their friends."
The afternoon drew on apace, and at last the pitiless sun sank to rest.
I perambulated Spezzano in the gathering twilight; it was now fairly
alive with people. An unclean place; an epidemic of cholera would work
wonders here. . . .
At 9.30 p.m. the venerable coachman presented himself, by appointment;
he was to drive me slowly (out of respect for his horse) through the
cool hours of the night as far as Vaccarizza, on the slopes of the Greek
Sila, where he expected to arrive early in the morning. (And so he did;
at half-past five.) Not without more mirth was my leave-taking from the
good shopwoman; something, apparently, was hopelessly wrong with the
Albanian words of farewell which I had carefully memorized from our
preceding lesson. She then pressed a paper parcel into my hand.
"For the love of God," she whispered, "silence! 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. I endeavoured to see
his museum, but found it inaccessible for "family reasons." The same
answer was given me in regard to a valuable private library at Rossano,
and annoying as it may be, one cannot severely blame such local
gentlemen for keeping their collections to themselves. What have they to
gain from the visits of inquisitive travellers?
During these meditations on my part, the old man hobbled busily to and
fro with a bucket, bearing water from a fountain near at hand wherewith
to splash the carriage-wheels. He persisted in this singular occupation
for an unreasonably long time. Water was good for the wheels, he
explained; it kept them cool.
At last we started, and I began to slumber once more. The carriage
seemed to be going down a steep incline; endlessly it descended, with a
pleasant swaying motion. . . . Then an icy shiver roused me from my
dreams. It was the Crati whose rapid waves, fraught with unhealthy
chills, rippled brightly in the moonlight. We crossed the malarious
valley, and once more touched the hills.
From those treeless slopes there streamed forth deliciously warm
emanations stored up during the scorching hours of noon; the short scrub
that clothed them was redolent of that peculiar Calabrian odour which
haunts one like a melody - an odour of dried cistus and other aromatic
plants, balsamic by day, almost overpowering at this hour. To aid and
diversify the symphony of perfume, I lit a cigar, and then gave myself
up to contemplation of the heavenly bodies. We passed a solitary man,
walking swiftly with bowed head. What was he doing there?
"Lupomanaro," said the driver.
