Therefore the first hours of the sunlight, after I had wakened, made the place like a new country; for my mind which received it was new. I reached Collagna before the great heat, following the fine highroad that went dipping and rising again along the mountain side, and then (leaving the road and crossing the little Secchia by a bridge), a path, soon lost in a grassy slope, gave me an indication of my way. For when I had gone an hour or so upwards along the shoulder of the hill, there opened gradually before me a silent and profound vale, hung with enormous woods, and sloping upwards to where it was closed by a high bank beneath and between two peaks. This bank I knew could be nothing else than the central ridge of the Apennines, the watershed, the boundary of Tuscany, and the end of all the main part of my journey. Beyond, the valleys would open on to the Tuscan Plain, and at the southern limit of that, Siena was my mark; from Siena to Rome an eager man, if he is sound, may march in three long days. Nor was that calculation all. The satisfaction of the last lap, of the home run, went with the word Tuscany in my mind; these cities were the approaches and introduction of the end.
When I had slept out the heat, I followed the woods upward through the afternoon. They stood tangled and huge, and the mosses under them were thick and silent, because in this last belt of the mountains height and coolness reproduced the north. A charcoal burner was making his furnace; after that for the last miles there was no sound. Even the floor of the vale was a depth of grass, and no torrent ran in it but only a little hidden stream, leafy like our streams at home.
At last the steep bank, a wall at the end of the valley, rose immediately above me. It was very steep and bare, desolate with the many stumps of trees that had been cut down; but all its edge and fringe against the sky was the line of a deep forest.
After its laborious hundreds of feet, when the forest that crowned it evenly was reached, the Apennines were conquered, the last great range was passed, and there stood no barrier between this high crest and Rome.
The hither side of that bank, I say, had been denuded of its trees; the roots
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THE FURTHER SIDE
of secular chestnuts stood like graves above the dry steep, and had marked my last arduous climb. Now, at the summit, the highest part was a line of cool forest, and the late afternoon mingled with the sanctity of trees. A genial dampness pervaded the earth beneath; grasses grew, and there were living creatures in the shade.
Nor was this tenanted wood all the welcome I received on my entry into Tuscany. Already I heard the noise of falling waters upon every side, where the Serchio sprang from twenty sources on the southern slope, and leapt down between mosses, and quarrelled, and overcame great smooth dark rocks in busy falls. Indeed, it was like my own country in the north, and a man might say to himself--'After so much journeying, perhaps I am in the Enchanted Wood, and may find at last the fairy Melisaunde.'
A glade opened, and, the trees no longer hiding it, I looked down the vale, which was the gate of Tuscany. There--high, jagged, rapt into the sky--stood such a group of mountains as men dream of in good dreams, or see in the works of painters when old age permits them revelations. Their height was evident from the faint mist and grey of their hues; their outline was tumultuous, yet balanced; full of accident and poise. It was as though these high walls of Carrara, the western boundary of the valley, had been shaped expressly for man, in order to exalt him with unexpected and fantastic shapes, and to expand his dull life with a permanent surprise. For a long time I gazed at these great hills.
Then, more silent in the mind through their influence, I went down past the speech and companionship of the springs of the Serchio, and the chestnut trees were redolent of evening all round. Down the bank to where the streams met in one, down the river, across its gaping, ruinous bridge (which some one, generations ago, had built for the rare travellers--there were then no main roads across the Apennine, and perhaps this rude pass was in favour); down
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SILLANO
still more gently through the narrow upper valley I went between the chestnut trees, and calm went with me for a companion: and the love of men and the expectation of good seemed natural to all that had been made in this blessed place. Of Borda, where the peasants directed me, there is no need to speak, till crossing the Serchio once more, this time on a trestle bridge of wood, I passed by a wider path through the groves, and entered the dear village of Sillano, which looks right into the pure west. And the peaks are guardians all about it: the elder brothers of this remote and secluded valley.
An inn received me: a great kitchen full of men and women talking, a supper preparing, a great fire, meat smoking and drying in the ingle-nook, a vast timbered roof going up into darkness: there I was courteously received, but no one understood my language. Seeing there a young priest, I said to him--
'Pater, habeo linguam latinam, sed non habeo linguam Italicam. Visne mi dare traductionem in istam linguam Toscanam non nullorum verborum?'
To this he replied, 'Libenter,' and the people revered us both. Thus he told me the name for a knife was cultello; for a room, camera par domire; for 'what is it called?' 'come si chiama?'; for 'what is the road to?' 'quella e la via a ...?' and other phrases wherein, no doubt, I am wrong; but I only learnt by ear.
Then he said to me something I did not understand, and I answered, 'Pol-Hercle!' at which he seemed pleased enough.
Then, to make conversation, I said, 'Diaconus es?'
And he answered me, mildly and gravely, 'Presbyter sum.'
And a little while after he left for his house, but I went out on to the balcony, where men and women were talking in subdued tones. There, alone, I sat and watched the night coming up into these Tuscan hills. The first moon since that waning in Lorraine--(how many nights ago, how many marches!)--hung in the sky, a full crescent, growing into brightness and glory as she assumed her reign. The one star of the west called out his silent companions in their order; the mountains merged into a fainter confusion; heaven and the infinite air became the natural seat of any spirit that watched this spell. The fire-flies darted in the depths of vineyards and of trees below; then the noise of the grasshoppers brought back suddenly the gardens of home, and whatever benediction surrounds our childhood. Some promise of eternal pleasures and of rest deserved haunted the village of Sillano.
In very early youth the soul can still remember its immortal habitation, and clouds and the edges of hills are of another kind from ours, and every scent and colour has a savour of Paradise. What that quality may be no language can tell, nor have men made any words, no, nor any music, to recall it--only in a transient way and elusive the recollection of what youth was, and purity, flashes
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ON ANYTHING
on us in phrases of the poets, and is gone before we can fix it in our minds--oh! my friends, if we could but recall it! Whatever those sounds may be that are beyond our sounds, and whatever are those keen lives which remain alive there under memory--whatever is Youth--Youth came up that valley at evening, borne upon a southern air. If we deserve or attain beatitude, such things shall at last be our settled state; and their now sudden influence upon the soul in short ecstasies is the proof that they stand outside time, and are not subject to decay.
This, then, was the blessing of Sillano, and here was perhaps the highest moment of those seven hundred miles--or more. Do not therefore be astonished, reader, if I now press on much more hurriedly to Rome, for the goal is almost between my hands, and the chief moment has been enjoyed, until I shall see the City.
Now I cry out and deplore me that this next sixty miles of way, but especially the heat of the days and the dank mists of the night, should have to be told as of a real journey in this very repetitive and sui-similar world. How much rather I wish that being free from mundane and wide-awake (that is to say from perilously dusty) considerations and droughty boredoms, I might wander forth at leisure through the air and visit the regions where everything is as the soul chooses: to be dropped at last in the ancient and famous town of Siena, whence comes that kind of common brown paint wherewith men, however wicked, can produce (if they have but the art) very surprising effects of depth in painting: for so I read of it in a book by a fool, at six shillings, and even that was part of a series: but if you wish to know anything further of the matter, go you and read it, for I will do nothing of the kind.
Oh to be free for strange voyages even for a little while! I am tired of the road; and so are you, and small blame to you. Your fathers also tired of the treadmill, and mine of the conquering marches of the Republic. Heaven bless you all!
But I say that if it were not for the incredulity and doubt and agnostico-schismatical hesitation, and very cumbersome air of questioning-and-peering-about, which is the bane of our moderns, very certainly I should now go on to tell of giants as big as cedars, living in mountains of precious stones, and drawn to battle by dragons in cars of gold; or of towns where the customs of men were remote and unexpected; of countries not yet visited, and of the gods returning. For though it is permissible, and a pleasant thing (as Bacon says), to mix a little falsehood with one's truth (so St Louis mixed water with his wine, and so does Sir John Growl mix vinegar with his, unless I am greatly mistaken, for if not,
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THE GARFAGNANA
how does he give it that taste at his dinners? eh? There, I think, is a question that would puzzle him!) yet is it much more delectable, and far worthier of the immortal spirit of man to soar into the empyrean of pure lying--that is, to lay the bridle on the neck of Pegasus and let him go forward, while in the saddle meanwhile one sits well back, grips with the knee, takes the race, and on the energy of that steed visits the wheeling stars.
This much, then, is worth telling of the valley of the Serchio, that it is narrow, garrulous with water brawling, wooded densely, and contained by fantastic mountains. That it has a splendid name, like the clashing of cymbals--Garfagnana; that it leads to the Tuscan plain, and that it is over a day's march long. Also, it is an oven.
Never since the early liars first cooked eggs in the sand was there such heat, and it was made hotter by the consciousness of folly, than which there is no more heating thing; for I think that not old Championnet himself, with his Division of Iron, that fought one to three and crushed the aged enormities of the oppressors as we would crush an empty egg, and that found the summer a good time for fighting in Naples, I say that he himself would not have marched men up the Garfagnana in such a sun. Folly planned it, Pride held to it, and the devils lent their climate. Garfagnana! Garfagnana! to have such a pleasant name, and to be what you are!
Not that there were not old towers on the steep woods of the Apennine, nor glimpses of the higher peaks; towns also: one castle surrounded by a fringe of humble roofs--there were all these things. But it was an oven. So imagine me, after having passed chapels built into rocks, and things most curious, but the
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THE BRIDGES OF CASTEL-NUOVO
whole under the strain of an intolerable sun, coming, something after midday, to a place called Castel-Nuovo, the first town, for Campogiamo is hardly a town.
At Castel-Nuovo I sat upon a bridge and thought, not what good men think (there came into my memory no historical stuff; for all I know, Liberty never went by that valley in arms); no appreciation of beauty filled me; I was indifferent to all save the intolerable heat, when I suddenly recognized the enormous number of bridges that bespattered the town.
'This is an odd thing,' I mused. 'Here is a little worriment of a town up in the hills, and what a powerful lot of bridges!'
I cared not a fig for the thousand things I had been told to expect in Tuscany; everything is in a mind, and as they were not in my mind they did not exist. But the bridges, they indeed were worthy of admiration!
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THE BRIDGE-GOD
Here was a horrible little place on a torrent bank. One bridge was reasonable for by it went the road leading south to Lucca and to Rome; it was common honour to let men escape. But as I sat on that main bridge I counted seven others; indeed there must have been a worship of a bridge-god some time or other to account for such a necklace of bridges in such a neglected borough.
You may say (I am off hard on the road to Borgo, drooping with the heat, but still going strongly), you may say that is explicable enough. First a thing is useful, you say, then it has to become routine; then the habit, being a habit, gets a sacred idea attached to it. So with bridges: e.g. Pontifex; Dervorguilla, our Ballici saint that built a bridge; the devil that will hinder the building of bridges; cf. the Porphyry Bridge in the Malay cosmogony; Amershickel, Brùckengebildung im kult-Historischer. Passenmayer; Durât, Le pont antique, étude sur les origines Toscanes; Mr Dacre's The Command of Bridges in Warfare; Bridges and Empire, by Captain Hole, U.S.A. You may say all this; I shall not reply. If the heat has hindered me from saying a word of the fine open valley on the left, of the little railway and of the last of the hills, do you suppose it will permit me to discuss the sanctity of bridges? If it did, I think there is a little question on 'why should habit turn sacred?' which would somewhat confound and pose you, and pose also, for that matter, every pedant that ever went blind and crook-backed over books, or took ivory for horn. And there is an end of it. Argue it with whom you will. It is evening, and I am at Borgo (for if many towns are called Castel-Nuovo so are many called Borgo in Italy), and I desire to be free of interruption while I eat and sleep and reflect upon the error of that march in that heat, spoiling nearly thirty miles of road, losing so many great and pleasurable emotions, all for haste and from a neglect of the Italian night.
And as I ate, and before I slept, I thought of that annotated Guide Book which is cried out for by all Europe, and which shall tell blunt truths. Look you out 'Garfagnana, district of, Valley of Serchio' in the index. You will be referred to p. 267. Turn to p. 267. You will find there the phrase -
'One can walk from the pretty little village of Sillano, nestling in its chestnut groves, to the flourishing town of Borgo on the new Bagni railway in a day.'
You will find a mark [1] after that phrase. It refers to a footnote. Glance (or look) at the bottom of the page and you will find:
[1] But if one does one is a fool.
So I slept late and uneasily the insufficient sleep of men who have suffered, and in that uneasy sleep I discovered this great truth: that if in a southern
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WHY 'DECIMO'?
summer you do not rest in the day the night will seem intolerably warm, but that, if you rest in the day, you will find coolness and energy at evening.