"No. Let us talk about something else."
"No? Then what shall we tell our mother? That we brought you here, and
that you were afraid of a little mouthful of acqua santa? We thought you
had more courage. We thought you could strangle a lion."
"Something will happen," I said, as I drained that glass.
Nothing happened for a few hours.
Two days' rest is working wonders....
I profit by the occasion of this slight indisposition to glance
backwards - and forwards.
I am here, at Alatri, on the 22 June: so much is beyond contestation.
A later page of that old diary of dates. August 31: Palombara. Well I
remember the hot walk to Palombara!
August 3: Mons Lucretilis, that classical mountain from whose summit I
gazed at the distant Velino which overtops like a crystal of amethyst
all the other peaks. This was during one of my two visits to Licenza.
Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have
noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing
so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely
commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking
almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in
whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral - aloft
under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my
two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who
told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing
would induce me to set down here.
July 26: La Rocca. What happened at La Rocca?
October 2: Florence. What happened at Florence? A good deal, during
those noteworthy twelve hours!
Some memories have grown strangely nebulous; impossible to reconstruct,
for example, what went on during the days of drowsy discomfort at
Montecelio. A lethargy seems to have fallen on me; I lived in a dream
out of which there emerges nothing save the figure of the local
tobacconist, a ruddy type with the face of a Roman farmer, who took me
to booze with him, in broad patriarchal style, every night at a
different friend's house. Those nights at Montecelio! The mosquitoes!
The heat! Could this be the place which was famous in Pliny's day for
its grove of beeches? How I used to envy the old Montecelians their
climate!
July 23: Saracinesca. What happened? I recollect the view over the
sweltering Campagna from the dizzy castle-ruin, in whose garden I see
myself nibbling a black cherry, the very last of the season, plucked
from a tree which grows beside the wall whereon I sat. That suffices: it
gives a key to the situation. I can now conjure up the gaunt and sombre
houses of this thick-clustering stronghold; the Rembrandtesque shadows,
the streets devoid of men, the picture of some martial hero in a
cavern-like recess where I sought shelter from the heat, a black
crucifix planted in the soil below the entrance of the village - my
picture of Saracinesca is complete, in outline.
