It May Be As Well To Explain That The Breakfast Consisted Of
Very Bad Coffee, With Goat's Milk, Hard, Coarse Bread, And Goat's
Butter, Which Tasted Exactly Like Indifferent Lard.
The so-called
butter, by a strange custom of Cotrone, was served in the emptied
rind of a spherical cheese - the small caccio cavallo, horse
cheese, which one sees everywhere in the South.
I should not have
liked to inquire where, how, when, or by whom the substance of the
cheese had been consumed. Possibly this receptacle is supposed to
communicate a subtle flavour to the butter; I only know that, even
to a healthy palate, the stuff was rather horrible. Cow's milk could
be obtained in very small quantities, but it was of evil flavour;
butter, in the septentrional sense of the word, did not exist.
It surprises me to remember that I went out, walked down to the
shore, and watched the great waves breaking over the harbour mole.
There was a lull in the storm, but as yet no sign of improving
weather; clouds drove swiftly across a lowering sky. My eyes turned
to the Lacinian promontory, dark upon the turbid sea. Should I ever
stand by the sacred column? It seemed to me hopelessly remote; the
voyage an impossible effort.
I talked with a man, of whom I remember nothing but his piercing
eyes steadily fixed upon me; he said there had been a wreck in the
night, a ship carrying live pigs had gone to pieces, and the shore
was sprinkled with porcine corpses.
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