We Know Very Little, However, Upon This Subject, And Are
Continually Shown To Be At Fault By Finding An Unexpectedly Small
Cross Produce A Wide Diversion Of The Mental Images, While In Other
Cases A Wide One Will Produce Hardly Any Result.
Sometimes again,
a cross which we should have said was much too wide will have an
excellent effect.
I did not anticipate, for example, that my
saying "chow" would have done much for the poor woman who had lost
her daughter; the cross did not seem wide enough; she was already,
as I thought, saturated with "chow." I can only account for the
effect my application of it produced by supposing the word to have
derived some element of strangeness and novelty as coming from a
foreigner - just as land which will give a poor crop, if planted
with sets from potatoes that have been grown for three or four
years on this same soil, will yet yield excellently if similar sets
be brought from twenty miles off. For the potato, so far as I have
studied it, is a good-tempered, frivolous plant, easily amused and
easily bored, and one, moreover, which if bored, yawns horribly.
As an example of a cross proving satisfactory which I had expected
would be too wide, I would quote the following, which came under my
notice when I was in America. A young man called upon me in a
flood of tears over the loss of his grandmother, of whose death at
the age of ninety-three he had just heard. I could do nothing with
him; I tried all the ordinary panaceas without effect, and was
giving him up in despair, when I thought of crossing him with the
well-known ballad of Wednesbury Cocking. {7} He brightened up
instantly, and left me in as cheerful a state as he had been before
in a desponding one. "Chow" seems to do for the Italians what
Wednesbury Cocking did for my American friend; it is a kind of
small spiritual pick-me-up, or cup of tea.
From Rossura I went on to Tengia, about a hundred and fifty feet
higher than Rossura. From Tengia the path to Calonico, the next
village, is a little hard to find, and a boy had better be taken
for ten minutes or so beyond Tengia, Calonico church shows well for
some time before it is actually reached. The pastures here are
very rich in flowers, the tiger lilies being more abundant before
the hay is mown, than perhaps even at Fusio itself. The whole walk
is lovely, and the Gribbiasca waterfall, the most graceful in the
Val Leventina, is just opposite.
How often have I not sat about here in the shade sketching, and
watched the blue upon the mountains which Titian watched from under
the chestnuts of Cadore. No sound except the distant water, or the
croak of a raven, or the booming of the great guns in that battle
which is being fought out between man and nature on the Biaschina
and the Monte Piottino. It is always a pleasure to me to feel that
I have known the Val Leventina intimately before the great change
in it which the railway will effect, and that I may hope to see it
after the present turmoil is over. Our descendants a hundred years
hence will not think of the incessant noise as though of
cannonading with which we were so familiar. From nowhere was it
more striking than from Calonico, the Monte Piottino having no
sooner become silent than the Biaschina would open fire, and
sometimes both would be firing at once. Posterity may care to know
that another and less agreeable feature of the present time was the
quantity of stones that would come flying about in places which one
would have thought were out of range. All along the road, for
example, between Giornico and Lavorgo, there was incessant blasting
going on, and it was surprising to see the height to which stones
were sometimes carried. The dwellers in houses near the blasting
would cover their roofs with boughs and leaves to soften the fall
of the stones. A few people were hurt, but much less damage was
done than might have been expected. I may mention for the benefit
of English readers that the tunnels through Monte Piottino and the
Biaschina are marvels of engineering skill, being both of them
spiral; the road describes a complete circle, and descends rapidly
all the while, so that the point of egress as one goes from Airolo
towards Faido is at a much lower level than that of ingress.
If an accident does happen, they call it a disgrazia, thus
confirming the soundness of a philosophy which I put forward in an
earlier work. Every misfortune they hold (and quite rightly) to be
a disgrace to the person who suffers it; "Son disgraziato" is the
Italian for "I have been unfortunate." I was once going to give a
penny to a poor woman by the roadside, when two other women stopped
me. "Non merita," they said; "She is no deserving object for
charity" - the fact being that she was an idiot. Nevertheless they
were very kind to her.
CHAPTER V - Calonico (continued) and Giornico
Our inventions increase in geometrical ratio. They are like living
beings, each one of which may become parent of a dozen others - some
good and some ne'er-do-weels; but they differ from animals and
vegetables inasmuch as they not only increase in a geometrical
ratio, but the period of their gestation decreases in geometrical
ratio also. Take this matter of Alpine roads for example. For how
many millions of years was there no approach to a road over the St.
Gothard, save the untutored watercourses of the Ticino and the
Reuss, and the track of the bouquetin or the chamois? For how many
more ages after this was there not a mere shepherd's or huntsman's
path by the river side - without so much as a log thrown over so as
to form a rude bridge?
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