Its Proprietor Is Something Of A
Brigand; So Am I, At A Pinch.
It is "honour among thieves," or "diamond
cut diamond."
Already a few enthusiasts are gathered here, on the glowing sands. But
the water is still cold; indeed, the Tiber is never too warm for me. If
you like it yet more chill, you must walk up to where the Aniene
discharges its waves whose temperature, at this season, is of a kind to
tickle up a walrus.
Whether it be due to the medley of races or to some other cause, there
is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my
old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed,
both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their
freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied
their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on
sunburn - a darker problem than it seems to be. [20]
These men and boys do not grow uniformly sunburnt. They display so many
different colour-shades on their bodies that an artist would be
delighted with the effect. From that peculiar milky hue which, by reason
of some pigment, contrives to resist the rays, the tints diverge; the
reds, the scarcer group, traversing every gradation from pale rose to
the ruddiest of copper - not excluding that strange marbled complexion
concerning which I cannot make up my mind whether it be a beauty or a
defect; while the xanthous tones, the yellows, pass through silvery gold
and apricot and cafe au lait to a duskiness approaching that of the
negro. At this season the skins are still white. Your artist must come
later - not later, however, than the end of August, for on the first of
September the bathing, be the weather never so warm, is officially, and
quite suddenly, at an end. Tiber water is declared to be "unhealthy"
after that date, and liable to give you fever; a relic of the days when
the true origin of malaria was unknown.
A glance at the papers is sufficient to prove that bathing has not yet
begun in earnest. No drowning accidents, up to the present. Later on
they come thick and fast. For this river, with its rapid current and
vindictive swirling eddies, is dangerous to young swimmers; it grips
them in its tawny coils and holds them fast, often within a few yards of
friend or parent who listens, powerless to help, to the victim's cries
of anguish and sees his arm raised imploringly out of that serpent-like
embrace. So it hurries him to destruction, only to be fished up later in
a state, as the newspapers will be careful to inform us, of "incipient
putrefaction."
A murderous flood....
That hoary, trickling structure - that fountain which has forgotten to be
a fountain, so dreamily does the water ooze through obstructive mosses
and emerald growths that dangle in drowsy pendants, like wet beards,
from its venerable lips - that fountain un-trimmed, harmonious, overhung
by ancient ilexes:
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