[14] And Those Legions Of Butterflies - Do They Still Hover Among The Sunny Patches In The Narrow Vale Leading To Mount Terrata?

And Frattura, that strange place - what has happened to Frattura?

Built on a fracture, on the rubble of that shattered mountain which produced the lake lower down, it has probably crumbled away in the last earthquake. Well I remember Frattura! It was where the wolf ate the donkey, and where we, in our turn, often refreshed ourselves in the dim hovel of Ferdinando - never with greater zest than on the hot downward march from Mount Genzana. Whether those small purple gentians are still to be found on its summit? And the emerald lizard on the lower slopes? Whether the eagles still breed on the neighbouring Montagna di Preccia? They may well be tired of having their nest plundered year after year.

What foreigner has older and pleasanter memories of Scanno? I would like to meet that man, and compare notes.

And so, glancing over the hills from Bellegra, I sent my thoughts into those Abruzzi mountains, and registered a vow to revisit Scanno - if only in order to traverse once more by moonlight, for the sake of auld lang syne, the devious paths to Roccaraso, or linger in that moist nook by the lake-side where stood the Scanno of olden days (the Betifuli, if such it was, of the Pelignians), where the apples grow, where the sly dabchick plays among the reeds, and where, one evening, I listened to something that might have been said much sooner.

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