I Do Not Know Even Approximately The Numbers Of These
Migratory Swarms Of All Ages And Both Sexes; Let Us Say, To Be On The
Safe Side, A Quarter Of A Million.
They herd down there, in the broiling
heat of summer and autumn, under conditions which are not all that could
be desired.
[31] Were they housed in marble palaces and served on
platters of gold, the risk would not be diminished by a hair. How many
return infected? I have no idea. It cannot be less than sixty per cent.
How many of these perish? Perhaps five per cent. A few thousand annual
deaths are not worth talking about. What concerns the country - and what
the country, indeed, has taken seriously in hand - is this impoverishment
of its best blood; this devitalising action of malaria upon unnumbered
multitudes of healthy men, women, and children who do not altogether
succumb to its attacks.
I sometimes recognise them on the platform of Rome station - family
parties whom I have met in their country villages, now bound for
Maccarese or one of those infernal holes in the Campagna, there to earn
a little extra money with hay, or maize, or wheat, or tomatoes, or
whatever the particular crop may be. You chat with the parents; the
youngsters run up to you, all gleeful with the change of scene and the
joy of travelling by railway. I know what they will look like, when they
return to their mountains later on....
And so, discoursing of this and that, one rambles oneself into a
book....
Into half a book; for here - at Alatri, and now - midsummer, I mean to
terminate these non-serious memories and leave unrecorded the no less
insignificant events which followed up to the mornings in October, those
mornings when jackdaws came cawing past my window from the thickly
couched mists of the Borghese Gardens, and the matutinal tub began to
feel more chilly than was altogether pleasant.
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