For Some Distance We Had The
Company Of The Different Aqueducts, But Their Broken Stretches Presently
Ceased Altogether, And Then For Other Human Association We Had, Besides
The Fencings Of The Meadows, Only The Huts And Shelters Scattered Among
The Grassy Humps And Hollows.
There were more humps than I had
remembered of the Campagna, and probably they were the rounded and
turfed-over chunks of antiquity which otherwhere showed their naked
masonry unsoft-ened and unfriended by the passing centuries.
At times a
dusty hamlet, that seemed to crop up from the roadside ditches, followed
us a little way with children that shouted for joy in our motor and dogs
that barked for pleasure in their joy. Women with the square linen
head-dress of the Roman peasants stood and stared, and sallow men, each
with his jacket hanging from one of his shoulders, seemed stalking
backward from us as we whirled by. Here and there we scared a horse or a
mule, but we did not so much as run over a hen; and both man and beast
are becoming here, as elsewhere, reconciled to the automobile. Now and
then a carter would set his team slantwise in our course and stay us out
of good-humored deviltry, and when he let us pass would fling some chaff
to the fresh-faced English youngster who was our chauffeur.
"I suppose you don't always understand what those fellows say," I
suggested from my seat beside him.
"No, sir," he confessed. "But I give it to 'em back in English," he
added, joyously.
He rather liked these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp,
broken stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that
there was not a steam-roller in all Italy, and he seemed to reserve an
opinion of the government's motives in the matter with respect to
motors, as if he thought them bad.
The scenery of the Campagna was not varied. Once we came to a
battlemented tomb, of mighty girth and height, as perdurable in its
masonry as the naked, stony hills that in the distance propped the
mountains fainting along the horizon under their burden of snow. But as
we drew nearer Tivoli the hills drew nearer us, and now they were no
longer naked, but densely covered with the gray, interminable stretch of
the olive forests. The olive is the tree which, of all others, is the
friend of civilized man; it is older and kinder even than the apple,
which is its next rival in beneficence; but these two kinds are so like
each other, in the mass, that this boundless forest of olives around
Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated apple-orchards in the
world. Where the trees came closest to the road they seemed to watch our
passing, each with its trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a
humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many
gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children's play-fellowship.
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