The
Rain Was Incessant; Every Brook And Torrent Was Greatly Swollen;
And Such A Deafening Leaping, And Roaring, And Thundering Of Water,
I Never Heard The Like Of In My Life.
Hence, when we came to Spezzia, we found that the Magra, an
unbridged river on the high-road to
Pisa, was too high to be safely
crossed in the Ferry Boat, and were fain to wait until the
afternoon of next day, when it had, in some degree, subsided.
Spezzia, however, is a good place to tarry at; by reason, firstly,
of its beautiful bay; secondly, of its ghostly Inn; thirdly, of the
head-dress of the women, who wear, on one side of their head, a
small doll's straw hat, stuck on to the hair; which is certainly
the oddest and most roguish head-gear that ever was invented.
The Magra safely crossed in the Ferry Boat--the passage is not by
any means agreeable, when the current is swollen and strong--we
arrived at Carrara, within a few hours. In good time next morning,
we got some ponies, and went out to see the marble quarries.
They are four or five great glens, running up into a range of lofty
hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped by being
abruptly strangled by Nature. The quarries, 'or caves,' as they
call them there, are so many openings, high up in the hills, on
either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for
marble: which may turn out good or bad: may make a man's fortune
very quickly, or ruin him by the great expense of working what is
worth nothing. Some of these caves were opened by the ancient
Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour. Many others are
being worked at this moment; others are to be begun to-morrow, next
week, next month; others are unbought, unthought of; and marble
enough for more ages than have passed since the place was resorted
to, lies hidden everywhere: patiently awaiting its time of
discovery.
As you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges (having left
your pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or two lower down)
you hear, every now and then, echoing among the hills, in a low
tone, more silent than the previous silence, a melancholy warning
bugle,--a signal to the miners to withdraw. Then, there is a
thundering, and echoing from hill to hill, and perhaps a splashing
up of great fragments of rock into the air; and on you toil again
until some other bugle sounds, in a new direction, and you stop
directly, lest you should come within the range of the new
explosion.
There were numbers of men, working high up in these hills--on the
sides--clearing away, and sending down the broken masses of stone
and earth, to make way for the blocks of marble that had been
discovered. As these came rolling down from unseen hands into the
narrow valley, I could not help thinking of the deep glen (just the
same sort of glen) where the Roc left Sindbad the Sailor; and where
the merchants from the heights above, flung down great pieces of
meat for the diamonds to stick to. There were no eagles here, to
darken the sun in their swoop, and pounce upon them; but it was as
wild and fierce as if there had been hundreds.
But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however immense
the blocks! The genius of the country, and the spirit of its
institutions, pave that road: repair it, watch it, keep it going!
Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with
great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the
middle of this valley; and THAT being the road--because it was the
road five hundred years ago! Imagine the clumsy carts of five
hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used
to be, five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn
to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are
now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel
work! Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block,
according to its size; down it must come, this way. In their
struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind
them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for
their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy,
are crushed to death beneath the wheels. But it was good five
hundred years ago, and it must be good now: and a railroad down
one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be flat
blasphemy.
When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair
of oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on it), coming
down, I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke,
to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts--and who faced backwards:
not before him--as the very Devil of true despotism. He had a
great rod in his hand, with an iron point; and when they could
plough and force their way through the loose bed of the torrent no
longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it
on their heads, screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got
them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain; repeated all
these persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when they
stopped again; got them on, once more; forced and goaded them to an
abrupter point of the descent; and when their writhing and
smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them plunging down the
precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above his
head, and gave a great whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved
something, and had no idea that they might shake him off, and
blindly mash his brains upon the road, in the noontide of his
triumph.
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