With Whip-Cracking And Vociferation, Amid
Good-Natured Farewells From The Crowd, We Started Away.
It was just
ten o'clock.
At once the road began to climb, and nearly three hours were spent
in reaching the highest point of the mountain barrier. Incessantly
winding, often doubling upon itself, the road crept up the sides of
profound gorges, and skirted many a precipice; bridges innumerable
spanned the dry ravines which at another season are filled with
furious torrents. From the zone of orange and olive and cactus we
passed that of beech and oak, noble trees now shedding their
rich-hued foliage on bracken crisped and brown; here I noticed the
feathery bowers of wild clematis ("old man's beard"), and many a
spike of the great mullein, strange to me because so familiar in
English lanes. Through mists that floated far below I looked over
miles of shore, and outward to the ever-rising limit of sea and sky.
Very lovely were the effects of light, the gradations of colour;
from the blue-black abysses, where no shape could be distinguished,
to those violet hues upon the furrowed heights which had a
transparency, a softness, an indefiniteness, unlike anything to be
seen in northern landscape.
The driver was accompanied by a half-naked lad, who, at certain
points, suddenly disappeared, and came into view again after a few
minutes, having made a short cut up some rugged footway between the
loops of the road. Perspiring, even as I sat, in the blaze of the
sun, I envied the boy his breath and muscle. Now and then he slaked
his thirst at a stone fountain by the wayside, not without
reverencing the blue-hooded Madonna painted over it. A few lean,
brown peasants, bending under faggots, and one or two carts, passed
us before we gained the top, and half-way up there was a hovel where
drink could be bought; but with these exceptions nothing broke the
loneliness of the long, wild ascent. My man was not talkative, but
answered inquiries civilly; only on one subject was he very curt -
that of the two wooden crosses which we passed just before arriving
at the summit; they meant murders. At the moment when I spoke of
them I was stretching my legs in a walk beside the carriage, the
driver walking just in front of me; and something then happened
which is still a puzzle when I recall it. Whether the thought of
crimes had made the man nervous, or whether just then I wore a
peculiarly truculent face, or had made some alarming gesture, all of
a sudden he turned upon me, grasped my arm and asked sharply: "What
have you got in your hand?" I had a bit of fern, plucked a few
minutes before, and with surprise I showed it; whereupon he murmured
an apology, said something about making haste, and jumped to his
seat. An odd little incident.
At an unexpected turn of the road there spread before me a vast
prospect; I looked down upon inland Calabria.
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