initial commit of ebook 7373HEADmain

5 files changed, 19345 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/7tptr10.txt b/old/7tptr10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2ea7502
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/7tptr10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9674 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Path to Rome, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Path to Rome
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: January, 2005  [EBook #7373]
+[This file was first posted on April 22, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH TO ROME ***
+
+
+
+
+Eric Eldred
+
+
+
+The Path to Rome
+
+Hilaire Belloc
+
+
+
+
+
+'. .. AMORE ANTIQUI RITUS, ALTO SUB NUMINE ROMAE'
+
+
+
+PRAISE OF THIS BOOK
+
+To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book,
+and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit),
+greeting--and whatever else can be had for nothing.
+
+If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this
+way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley
+where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them
+all--when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great
+lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a
+Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note (after so many
+years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more
+than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and
+new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that
+such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the
+work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this
+shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered,
+and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as
+the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had
+been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's
+soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.
+
+Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed behind the high altar a
+statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so different from all I had
+ever seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that I was quite
+taken out of myself and vowed a vow there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage
+and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved; and I said, 'I
+will start from the place where I served in arms for my sins; I will
+walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep
+rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every
+morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St Peter's on the Feast
+of St Peter and St Paul.'
+
+Then I went out of the church still having that Statue in my mind, and
+I walked again farther into the world, away from my native valley, and
+so ended some months after in a place whence I could fulfil my vow;
+and I started as you shall hear. All my other vows I broke one by one.
+For a faggot must be broken every stick singly. But the strict vow I
+kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, and I heard high
+Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, as many can testify--to wit:
+Monsignor this, and Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of
+_so-and-so--o--polis in partibus infidelium;_ for we were all there
+together.
+
+And why (you will say) is all this put by itself in what Anglo-Saxons
+call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface? Why, it is because I have
+noticed that no book can appear without some such thing tied on before
+it; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, be certain that I read
+some eight or nine thousand of them to be sure of how they were
+written and to be safe from generalizing on too frail a basis.
+
+And having read them and discovered first, that it was the custom of
+my contemporaries to belaud themselves in this prolegomenaical ritual
+(some saying in a few words that they supplied a want, others boasting
+in a hundred that they were too grand to do any such thing, but most
+of them baritoning their apologies and chanting their excuses till one
+knew that their pride was toppling over)--since, I say, it seemed a
+necessity to extol one's work, I wrote simply on the lintel of my
+diary, _Praise of this Book,_ so as to end the matter at a blow. But
+whether there will be praise or blame I really cannot tell, for I am
+riding my pen on the snaffle, and it has a mouth of iron.
+
+Now there is another thing book writers do in their Prefaces, which is
+to introduce a mass of nincompoops of whom no one ever heard, and to
+say 'my thanks are due to such and such' all in a litany, as though
+any one cared a farthing for the rats! If I omit this believe me it is
+but on account of the multitude and splendour of those who have
+attended at the production of this volume. For the stories in it are
+copied straight from the best authors of the Renaissance, the music
+was written by the masters of the eighteenth century, the Latin is
+Erasmus' own; indeed, there is scarcely a word that is mine. I must
+also mention the Nine Muses, the Three Graces; Bacchus, the Maenads,
+the Panthers, the Fauns; and I owe very hearty thanks to Apollo.
+
+Yet again, I see that writers are for ever anxious of their style,
+thinking (not saying)--
+
+'True, I used "and which" on page 47, but Martha Brown the stylist
+gave me leave;' or:
+
+'What if I do end a sentence with a preposition? I always follow the
+rules of Mr Twist in his "'Tis Thus 'Twas Spoke", Odd's Body an' I do
+not!'
+
+Now this is a pusillanimity of theirs (the book writers) that they
+think style power, and yet never say as much in their Prefaces. Come,
+let me do so ... Where are you? Let me marshal you, my regiments of
+words!
+
+Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into
+desecrated earth under the doss-house of the Rue St Paul, or do you
+not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on the
+Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that
+you will not lend us the staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered
+and bashed the invaders of the vineyards, who are but a parable for
+the mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of the world?
+
+Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! See them
+how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering
+fellows!
+
+First come the Neologisms, that are afraid of no man; fresh, young,
+hearty, and for the most part very long-limbed, though some few short
+and strong.  There also are the Misprints to confuse the enemy at his
+onrush. Then see upon the flank a company of picked Ambiguities
+covering what shall be a feint by the squadron of Anachronisms led by
+old Anachronos himself; a terrible chap with nigglers and a great
+murderer of fools.
+
+But here see more deeply massed the ten thousand Egotisms shining in
+their armour and roaring for battle. They care for no one. They
+stormed Convention yesterday and looted the cellar of Good-Manners,
+who died of fear without a wound; so they drank his wine and are
+to-day as strong as lions and as careless (saving only their Captain,
+Monologue, who is lantern-jawed).
+
+Here are the Aposiopaesian Auxiliaries, and Dithyramb that killed
+Punctuation in open fight; Parenthesis the giant and champion of the
+host, and Anacoluthon that never learned to read or write but is very
+handy with his sword; and Metathesis and Hendiadys, two Greeks. And
+last come the noble Gallicisms prancing about on their light horses:
+cavalry so sudden that the enemy sicken at the mere sight of them and
+are overcome without a blow. Come then my hearties, my lads, my
+indefatigable repetitions, seize you each his own trumpet that hangs
+at his side and blow the charge; we shall soon drive them all before
+us headlong, howling down together to the Picrocholian Sea.
+
+So! That was an interlude. Forget the clamour.
+
+But there is another matter; written as yet in no other Preface:
+peculiar to this book. For without rhyme or reason, pictures of an
+uncertain kind stand in the pages of the chronicle. Why?
+
+_Because it has become so cheap to photograph on zinc._
+
+In old time a man that drew ill drew not at all. He did well. Then
+either there were no pictures in his book, or (if there were any) they
+were done by some other man that loved him not a groat and would not
+have walked half a mile to see him hanged. But now it is so easy for a
+man to scratch down what he sees and put it in his book that any fool
+may do it and be none the worse--many others shall follow. This is the
+first.
+
+Before you blame too much, consider the alternative. Shall a man march
+through Europe dragging an artist on a cord? God forbid!
+
+Shall an artist write a book? Why no, the remedy is worse than the
+disease.
+
+Let us agree then, that, if he will, any pilgrim may for the future
+draw (if he likes) that most difficult subject, snow hills beyond a
+grove of trees; that he may draw whatever he comes across in order to
+enliven his mind (for who saw it if not he? And was it not his
+loneliness that enabled him to see it?), and that he may draw what he
+never saw, with as much freedom as you readers so very continually see
+what you never draw. He may draw the morning mist on the Grimsel, six
+months afterwards; when he has forgotten what it was like: and he may
+frame it for a masterpiece to make the good draughtsman rage.
+
+The world has grown a boy again this long time past, and they are
+building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes discovered the
+Water of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes.
+
+Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon
+laugh no longer--and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest
+men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for
+that is only to suffer one another.
+
+Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious fellow that sat down
+dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a fan.
+
+When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by his
+epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton
+appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it he
+was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he launched
+among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, _'Ce n'est que le
+premier pas qui coute'_ and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth
+self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at
+least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five
+hundred and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company
+Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general
+whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up
+and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the
+true breeding soil of Revelation.
+
+For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other blossoms and prides
+of nature, are for lying steady in the shade and letting the Mind
+commune with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking about
+and eager as though it were a duty to force the said Mind to burrow
+and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary
+habitation.
+
+'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing
+something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with
+circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at
+least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.'
+
+Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and the boy takes his
+horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book, alas!); the Poet
+his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the
+Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary
+clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his
+boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and
+Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the
+Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and
+thirsty march. And Authority, when it does this commonly sets to work
+by one of these formulae: as, in England north of Trent, by the
+manifestly false and boastful phrase, 'A thing begun is half ended',
+and in the south by 'The Beginning is half the Battle'; but in France
+by the words I have attributed to the Proverb-Maker, _'Ce n'est que le
+premier pas qui coute'._
+
+By this you may perceive that the Proverb-Maker, like every other
+Demagogue, Energumen, and Disturber, dealt largely in metaphor--but
+this I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection of
+published and unpublished works it is amply evident that he took the
+silly pride of the half-educated in a constant abuse of metaphor.
+There was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully
+explained to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could
+see a metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie. And
+certainly men who know that the mere truth would be distasteful or
+tedious commonly have recourse to metaphor, and so do those false men
+who desire to acquire a subtle and unjust influence over their
+fellows, and chief among them, the Proverb-Maker. For though his name
+is lost in the great space of time that has passed since he
+flourished, yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the
+many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the
+character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in
+foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm--in
+matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a
+poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a
+wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar
+(as, for instance, '_The longest way round is the shortest way
+home_'), a startling miser (as, _'A penny saved is a penny earned'_),
+one ignorant of largesse and human charity (as, '_Waste not, want
+not_'), and a shocking boor in the point of honour (as, _'Hard words
+break no bones'_--he never fought, I see, but with a cudgel).
+
+But he had just that touch of slinking humour which the peasants have,
+and there is in all he said that exasperating quality for which we
+have no name, which certainly is not accuracy, and which is quite the
+opposite of judgement, yet which catches the mind as brambles do our
+clothes, causing us continually to pause and swear. For he mixes up
+unanswerable things with false conclusions, he is perpetually letting
+the cat out of the bag and exposing our tricks, putting a colour to
+our actions, disturbing us with our own memory, indecently revealing
+corners of the soul. He is like those men who say one unpleasant and
+rude thing about a friend, and then take refuge from their disloyal
+and false action by pleading that this single accusation is true; and
+it is perhaps for this abominable logicality of his and for his
+malicious cunning that I chiefly hate him: and since he himself
+evidently hated the human race, he must not complain if he is hated in
+return.
+
+Take, for instance, this phrase that set me writing, _'Ce nest que le
+premier pas qui coute'_. It is false. Much after a beginning is
+difficult, as everybody knows who has crossed the sea, and as for the
+first _step_ a man never so much as remembers it; if there is
+difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the first ten
+pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a sermon, or
+the first mile of a walk. The first step is undertaken lightly,
+pleasantly, and with your soul in the sky; it is the five-hundredth
+that counts. But I know, and you know, and he knew (worse luck) that
+he was saying a thorny and catching thing when he made up that phrase.
+It worries one of set purpose. It is as though one had a voice inside
+one saying:
+
+'I know you, you will never begin anything. Look at what you might
+have done! Here you are, already twenty-one, and you have not yet
+written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? Eh? Nothing: you are
+intolerably lazy--and what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings are
+insuperable barriers to you. What about that great work on The
+National Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you
+thought of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your
+head and not on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind,
+you can't help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at
+Jones! Younger than you by half a year, and already on the _Evening
+Yankee_ taking bribes from Company Promoters! And where are you?' &c.,
+&c.--and so forth.
+
+So this threat about the heavy task of Beginning breeds
+discouragement, anger, vexation, irritability, bad style, pomposity
+and infinitives split from helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as
+the Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain fast in the mind,
+caught, as it were, by one finger.  For all things (you will notice)
+are very difficult in their origin, and why, no one can understand.
+_Omne Trinum_: they are difficult also in the shock of maturity and in
+their ending. Take, for instance, the Life of Man, which is the
+Difficulty of Birth, the Difficulty of Death, and the Difficulty of
+the Grand Climacteric.
+
+LECTOR. What is the Grand Climacteric?
+
+AUCTOR. I have no time to tell you, for it would lead us into a
+discussion on Astrology, and then perhaps to a question of physical
+science, and then you would find I was not orthodox, and perhaps
+denounce me to the authorities.
+
+I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not the year or the
+month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second) when a man is
+grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is, backwards), and
+feels solidly himself. Do I make myself clear? No matter, it is the
+Shock of Maturity, and that must suffice for you.
+
+But perhaps you have been reading little brown books on Evolution, and
+you don't believe in Catastrophes, or Climaxes, or Definitions? Eh?
+Tell me, do you believe in the peak of the Matterhorn, and have you
+doubts on the points of needles? Can the sun be said truly to rise or
+set, and is there any exact meaning in the phrase, 'Done to a turn' as
+applied to omelettes?  You know there is; and so also you must believe
+in Categories, and you must admit differences of kind as well as of
+degree, and you must accept exact definition and believe in all that
+your fathers did, that were wiser men than you, as is easily proved if
+you will but imagine yourself for but one moment introduced into the
+presence of your ancestors, and ask yourself which would look the
+fool. Especially must you believe in moments and their importance, and
+avoid with the utmost care the Comparative Method and the argument of
+the Slowly Accumulating Heap. I hear that some scientists are already
+beginning to admit the reality of Birth and Death--let but some brave
+few make an act of Faith in the Grand Climacteric and all shall yet be
+well.
+
+Well, as I was saying, this Difficulty of Beginning is but one of
+three, and is Inexplicable, and is in the Nature of Things, and it is
+very especially noticeable in the Art of Letters. There is in every
+book the Difficulty of Beginning, the Difficulty of the Turning-Point
+(which is the Grand Climacteric of a Book)--
+
+LECTOR. What is that in a Book?
+
+AUCTOR. Why, it is the point where the reader has caught on, enters
+into the Book and desires to continue reading it.
+
+LECTOR. It comes earlier in some books than in others.
+
+AUCTOR. As you say ... And finally there is the Difficulty of Ending.
+
+LECTOR. I do not see how there can be any difficulty in ending a book.
+
+AUCTOR. That shows very clearly that you have never written one, for
+there is nothing so hard in the writing of a book--no, not even the
+choice of the Dedication--as is the ending of it. On this account only
+the great Poets, who are above custom and can snap their divine
+fingers at forms, are not at the pains of devising careful endings.
+Thus, Homer ends with lines that might as well be in the middle of a
+passage; Hesiod, I know not how; and Mr Bailey, the New Voice from
+Eurasia, does not end at all, but is still going on.
+
+Panurge told me that his great work on Conchology would never have
+been finished had it not been for the Bookseller that threatened law;
+and as it is, the last sentence has no verb in it. There is always
+something more to be said, and it is always so difficult to turn up
+the splice neatly at the edges. On this account there are regular
+models for ending a book or a Poem, as there are for beginning one;
+but, for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to rummage
+about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of Fine Writing
+(no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no
+matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to introduce a
+row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the paper below these the
+piece of Fine Writing one has found.
+
+I knew a man once who always wrote the end of a book first, when his
+mind was fresh, and so worked gradually back to the introductory
+chapter, which (he said) was ever a kind of summary, and could not be
+properly dealt with till a man knew all about his subject. He said
+this was a sovran way to write History.
+
+But it seems to me that this is pure extravagance, for it would lead
+one at last to beginning at the bottom of the last page, like the
+Hebrew Bible, and (if it were fully carried out) to writing one's
+sentences backwards till one had a style like the London School of
+Poets: a very horrible conclusion.
+
+However, I am not concerned here with the ending of a book, but with
+its beginning; and I say that the beginning of any literary thing is
+hard, and that this hardness is difficult to explain. And I say more
+than this--I say that an interminable discussion of the difficulty of
+beginning a book is the worst omen for going on with it, and a trashy
+subterfuge at the best.  In the name of all decent, common, and homely
+things, why not begin and have done with it?
+
+It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset,
+that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going
+straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately
+along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till
+I came to the road that goes up alongside the Moselle. For it was by
+the valley of this river that I was to begin my pilgrimage, since, by
+a happy accident, the valley of the Upper Moselle runs straight
+towards Rome, though it takes you but a short part of the way. What a
+good opening it makes for a direct pilgrimage can be seen from this
+little map, where the dotted line points exactly to Rome. There are
+two bends which take one a little out of one's way, and these bends I
+attempted to avoid, but in general, the valley, about a hundred miles
+from Toul to the source, is an evident gate for any one walking from
+this part of Lorraine into Italy. And this map is also useful to show
+what route I followed for my first three days past Epinal and
+Remiremont up to the source of the river, and up over the great hill,
+the Ballon d'Alsace. I show the river valley like a trench, and the
+hills above it shaded, till the mountainous upper part, the Vosges, is
+put in black. I chose the decline of the day for setting out, because
+of the great heat a little before noon and four hours after it.
+Remembering this, I planned to walk at night and in the mornings and
+evenings, but how this design turned out you shall hear in a moment.
+
+I had not gone far, not a quarter of a mile, along my road leaving the
+town, when I thought I would stop and rest a little and make sure that
+I had started propitiously and that I was really on my way to Rome; so
+I halted by a wall and looked back at the city and the forts, and drew
+what I saw in my book. It was a sight that had taken a firm hold of my
+mind in boyhood, and that will remain in it as long as it can make
+pictures for itself out of the past. I think this must be true of all
+conscripts with regard to the garrison in which they have served, for
+the mind is so fresh at twenty-one and the life so new to every
+recruit as he joins it, he is so cut off from books and all the
+worries of life, that the surroundings of the place bite into him and
+take root, as one's school does or one's first home. And I had been
+especially fortunate since I had been with the gunners (notoriously
+the best kind of men) and not in a big place but in a little town,
+very old and silent, with more soldiers in its surrounding circle than
+there were men, women, and children within its useless ramparts. It is
+known to be very beautiful, and though I had not heard of this
+reputation, I saw it to be so at once when I was first marched in, on
+a November dawn, up to the height of the artillery barracks. I
+remembered seeing then the great hills surrounding it on every side,
+hiding their menace and protection of guns, and in the south and east
+the silent valley where the high forests dominate the Moselle, and the
+town below the road standing in an island or ring of tall trees. All
+this, I say, I had permanently remembered, and I had determined,
+whenever I could go on pilgrimage to Rome, to make this place my
+starting-point, and as I stopped here and looked back, a little way
+outside the gates, I took in again the scene that recalled so much
+laughter and heavy work and servitude and pride of arms.
+
+I was looking straight at the great fort of St Michel, which is the
+strongest thing on the frontier, and which is the key to the circle of
+forts that make up this entrenched camp. One could see little or
+nothing of its batteries, only its hundreds of feet of steep brushwood
+above the vineyards, and at the summit a stunted wood purposely
+planted. Next to it on the left, of equal height, was the hog back of
+the Cote Barine, hiding a battery.  Between the Cote Barine and my
+road and wall, I saw the rising ground and the familiar Barracks that
+are called (I know not why) the Barracks of Justice, but ought more
+properly to be called the Barracks of petty tyrannies and good
+fellowship, in order to show the philosophers that these two things
+are the life of armies; for of all the virtues practised in that old
+compulsory home of mine Justice came second at least if not third,
+while Discipline and Comradeship went first; and the more I think of
+it the more I am convinced that of all the suffering youth that was
+being there annealed and forged into soldiery none can have suffered
+like the lawyers. On the right the high trees that stand outside the
+ramparts of the town went dwindling in perspective like a palisade,
+and above them, here and there, was a roof showing the top of the
+towers of the Cathedral or of St Gengoult. All this I saw looking
+backwards, and, when I had noticed it and drawn it, I turned round
+again and took the road.
+
+I had, in a small bag or pocket slung over my shoulder, a large piece
+of bread, half a pound of smoked ham, a sketch-book, two Nationalist
+papers, and a quart of the wine of Brule--which is the most famous
+wine in the neighbourhood of the garrison, yet very cheap. And Brule
+is a very good omen for men that are battered about and given to
+despairing, since it is only called Brule on account of its having
+been burnt so often by Romans, Frenchmen, Burgundians, Germans,
+Flemings, Huns perhaps, and generally all those who in the last few
+thousand years have taken a short cut at their enemies over the neck
+of the Cote Barine. So you would imagine it to be a tumble-down, weak,
+wretched, and disappearing place; but, so far from this, it is a rich
+and proud village, growing, as I have said, better wine than any in
+the garrison. Though Toul stands in a great cup or ring of hills, very
+high and with steep slopes, and guns on all of them, and all these
+hills grow wine, none is so good as Brule wine. And this reminds me of
+a thing that happened in the Manoeuvres of 1891, _quorum pars magna_;
+for there were two divisions employed in that glorious and fatiguing
+great game, and more than a gross of guns--to be accurate, a hundred
+and fifty-six--and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery
+of the eighth--I wonder where you all are now? I suppose I shall not
+see you again; but you were the best companions in the world, my
+friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one,
+and the worst, having on my Livret the note 'conducteur mediocre'. But
+that is neither here nor there; the story is as follows, and the moral
+is that the commercial mind is illogical.
+
+When we had gone some way, clattering through the dust, and were well
+on on the Commercy road, there was a short halt, and during this halt
+there passed us the largest Tun or Barrel that ever went on wheels.
+You talk of the Great Tun of Heidelburg, or of those monstrous Vats
+that stand in cool sheds in the Napa Valley, or of the vast barrels in
+the Catacombs of Rheims; but all these are built _in situ_ and meant
+to remain steady, and there is no limit to the size of a Barrel that
+has not to travel. The point about this enormous Receptacle of Bacchus
+and cavernous huge Prison of Laughter, was that it could move, though
+cumbrously, and it was drawn very slowly by stupid, patient oxen, who
+would not be hurried. On the top of it sat a strong peasant, with a
+face of determination, as though he were at war with his kind, and he
+kept on calling to his oxen, 'Han', and 'Hu', in the tones of a sullen
+challenge, as he went creaking past. Then the soldiers began calling
+out to him singly, 'Where are you off to, Father, with that battery?'
+and 'Why carry cold water to Commercy? They have only too much as it
+is;' and 'What have you got in the little barrelkin, the barrellet,
+the cantiniere's brandy-flask, the gourd, the firkin?' He stopped his
+oxen fiercely and turned round to us and said: 'I will tell you what I
+have here. I have so many hectolitres of Brule wine which I made
+myself, and which I know to be the best wine there is, and I am taking
+it about to see if I cannot tame and break these proud fellows who are
+for ever beating down prices and mocking me. It is worth eight
+'scutcheons the hectolitre, that is, eight sols the litre; what do I
+say? it is worth a Louis a cup: but I will sell it at the price I
+name, and not a penny less.  But whenever I come to a village the
+innkeeper begins bargaining and chaffering and offering six sols and
+seven sols, and I answer, "Eight sols, take it or leave it", and when
+he seems for haggling again I get up and drive away. I know the worth
+of my wine, and I will not be beaten down though I have to go out of
+Lorraine into the Barrois to sell it.'
+
+So when we caught him up again, as we did shortly after on the road, a
+sergeant cried as we passed, 'I will give you seven, seven and a
+quarter, seven and a half', and we went on laughing and forgot all
+about him.
+
+For many days we marched from this place to that place, and fired and
+played a confused game in the hot sun till the train of sick horses
+was a mile long, and till the recruits were all as deaf as so many
+posts; and at last, one evening, we came to a place called Heiltz le
+Maurupt, which was like heaven after the hot plain and the dust, and
+whose inhabitants are as good and hospitable as Angels; it is just
+where the Champagne begins. When we had groomed and watered our
+horses, and the stable guard had been set, and we had all an hour or
+so's leisure to stroll about in the cool darkness before sleeping in
+the barns, we had a sudden lesson in the smallness of the world, for
+what should come up the village street but that monstrous Barrel, and
+we could see by its movements that it was still quite full.
+
+We gathered round the peasant, and told him how grieved we were at his
+ill fortune, and agreed with him that all the people of the Barrois
+were thieves or madmen not to buy such wine for such a song. He took
+his oxen and his barrel to a very high shed that stood by, and there
+he told us all his pilgrimage and the many assaults his firmness
+suffered, and how he had resisted them all. There was much more anger
+than sorrow in his accent, and I could see that he was of the wood
+from which tyrants and martyrs are carved. Then suddenly he changed
+and became eloquent:
+
+'Oh, the good wine! If only it were known and tasted! ... Here, give
+me a cup, and I will ask some of you to taste it, then at least I
+shall have it praised as it deserves. And this is the wine I have
+carried more than a hundred miles, and everywhere it has been
+refused!'
+
+There was one guttering candle on a little stool. The roof of the shed
+was lost up in the great height of darkness; behind, in the darkness,
+the oxen champed away steadily in the manger. The light from the
+candle flame lit his face strongly from beneath and marked it with
+dark shadows. It flickered on the circle of our faces as we pressed
+round, and it came slantwise and waned and disappeared in the immense
+length of the Barrel. He stood near the tap with his brows knit as
+upon some very important task, and all we, gunners and drivers of the
+battery, began unhooking our mugs and passing them to him.
+
+There were nearly a hundred, and he filled them all; not in jollity,
+but like a man offering up a solemn sacrifice. We also, entering into
+his mood, passed our mugs continually, thanking him in a low tone and
+keeping in the main silent. A few linesmen lounged at the door; he
+asked for their cups and filled them. He bade them fetch as many of
+their comrades as cared to come; and very soon there was a circulating
+crowd of men all getting wine of Brule and murmuring their
+congratulations, and he was willing enough to go on giving, but we
+stopped when we saw fit and the scene ended. I cannot tell what
+prodigious measure of wine he gave away to us all that night, but when
+he struck the roof of the cask it already sounded hollow. And when we
+had made a collection which he had refused, he went to sleep by his
+oxen, and we to our straw in other barns. Next day we started before
+dawn, and I never saw him again.
+
+This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it shows that what men
+love is never money itself but their own way, and that human beings
+love sympathy and pageant above all things. It also teaches us not to
+be hard on the rich.
+
+I walked along the valley of the Moselle, and as I walked the long
+evening of summer began to fall. The sky was empty and its deeps
+infinite; the clearness of the air set me dreaming. I passed the turn
+where we used to halt when we were learning how to ride in front of
+the guns, past the little house where, on rare holidays, the boys
+could eat a matelote, which is fish boiled in wine, and so on to the
+place where the river is held by a weir and opens out into a kind of
+lake.
+
+Here I waited for a moment by the wooden railing, and looked up into
+the hills. So far I had been at home, and I was now poring upon the
+last familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods and began my
+experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and pondered
+instead of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to
+reminiscence and to ease.  A flock of sheep passed me with their
+shepherd, who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that
+pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I
+was 'smoking the enchanted cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of
+reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness
+that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow
+many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were altogether his own
+master and controlled by no necessity, not even the necessity of
+expression, all his life would pass away in these sublime imaginings.
+
+This was a place I remembered very well. The rising river of Lorraine
+is caught and barred, and it spreads in a great sheet of water that
+must be very shallow, but that in its reflections and serenity
+resembles rather a profound and silent mere. The steeps surrounding it
+are nearly mountainous, and are crowned with deep forests in which the
+province reposes, and upon which it depends for its local genius. A
+little village, which we used to call 'St Peter of the Quarries', lies
+up on the right between the steep and the water, and just where the
+hills end a flat that was once marshy and is now half fields, half
+ponds, but broken with luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its
+civilization. Along this flat runs, bordered with rare poplars, the
+road which one can follow on and on into the heart of the Vosges. I
+took from this silence and this vast plain of still water the repose
+that introduces night. It was all consonant with what the peasants
+were about: the return from labour, the bleating folds, and the
+lighting of lamps under the eaves. In such a spirit I passed along the
+upper valley to the spring of the hills.
+
+In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight when a man thinks he
+can still read; when the buildings and the bridges are great masses of
+purple that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, but when
+the night birds, surer than men and less troubled by this illusion of
+memory, have discovered that their darkness has conquered.
+
+The peasants sat outside their houses in the twilight accepting the
+cool air; every one spoke to me as I marched through, and I answered
+them all, nor was there in any of their salutations the omission of
+good fellowship or of the name of God. Saving with one man, who was a
+sergeant of artillery on leave, and who cried out to me in an accent
+that was very familiar and asked me to drink; but I told him I had to
+go up into the forest to take advantage of the night, since the days
+were so warm for walking. As I left the last house of the village I
+was not secure from loneliness, and when the road began to climb up
+the hill into the wild and the trees I was wondering how the night
+would pass.
+
+With every step upward a greater mystery surrounded me. A few stars
+were out, and the brown night mist was creeping along the water below,
+but there was still light enough to see the road, and even to
+distinguish the bracken in the deserted hollows. The highway became
+little better than a lane; at the top of the hill it plunged under
+tall pines, and was vaulted over with darkness. The kingdoms that have
+no walls, and are built up of shadows, began to oppress me as the
+night hardened. Had I had companions, still we would only have spoken
+in a whisper, and in that dungeon of trees even my own self would not
+raise its voice within me.
+
+It was full night when I had reached a vague clearing in the woods,
+right up on the height of that flat hill. This clearing was called
+'The Fountain of Magdalen'. I was so far relieved by the broader sky
+of the open field that I could wait and rest a little, and there, at
+last, separate from men, I thought of a thousand things. The air was
+full of midsummer, and its mixture of exaltation and fear cut me off
+from ordinary living. I now understood why our religion has made
+sacred this season of the year; why we have, a little later, the night
+of St John, the fires in the villages, and the old perception of
+fairies dancing in the rings of the summer grass. A general communion
+of all things conspires at this crisis of summer against us reasoning
+men that should live in the daylight, and something fantastic
+possesses those who are foolish enough to watch upon such nights. So
+I, watching, was cut off. There were huge, vague summits, all wooded,
+peering above the field I sat in, but they merged into a confused
+horizon. I was on a high plateau, yet I felt myself to be alone with
+the immensity that properly belongs to plains alone. I saw the stars,
+and remembered how I had looked up at them on just such a night when I
+was close to the Pacific, bereft of friends and possessed with
+solitude. There was no noise; it was full darkness. The woods before
+and behind me made a square frame of silence, and I was enchased here
+in the clearing, thinking of all things.
+
+Then a little wind passed over the vast forests of Lorraine. It seemed
+to wake an indefinite sly life proper to this seclusion, a life to
+which I was strange, and which thought me an invader. Yet I heard
+nothing. There were no adders in the long grass, nor any frogs in that
+dry square of land, nor crickets on the high part of the hill; but I
+knew that little creatures in league with every nocturnal influence,
+enemies of the sun, occupied the air and the land about me; nor will I
+deny that I felt a rebel, knowing well that men were made to work in
+happy dawns and to sleep in the night, and everything in that short
+and sacred darkness multiplied my attentiveness and my illusion.
+Perhaps the instincts of the sentry, the necessities of guard, come
+back to us out of the ages unawares during such experiments. At any
+rate the night oppressed and exalted me.  Then I suddenly attributed
+such exaltation to the need of food.
+
+'If we must try this bookish plan of sleeping by day and walking by
+night,' I thought, 'at least one must arrange night meals to suit it.'
+
+I therefore, with my mind still full of the forest, sat down and lit a
+match and peered into my sack, taking out therefrom bread and ham and
+chocolate and Brule wine. For seat and table there was a heathery bank
+still full of the warmth and savour of the last daylight, for
+companions these great inimical influences of the night which I had
+met and dreaded, and for occasion or excuse there was hunger. Of the
+Many that debate what shall be done with travellers, it was the best
+and kindest Spirit that prompted me to this salutary act. For as I
+drank the wine and dealt with the ham and bread, I felt more and more
+that I had a right to the road; the stars became familiar and the
+woods a plaything. It is quite clear that the body must be recognized
+and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing food and
+drink can do so much to make a man.
+
+On this repast I jumped up merrily, lit a pipe, and began singing, and
+heard, to my inexpressible joy, some way down the road, the sound of
+other voices. They were singing that old song of the French infantry
+which dates from Louis XIV, and is called 'Aupres de ma blonde'. I
+answered their chorus, so that, by the time we met under the wood, we
+were already acquainted. They told me they had had a forty-eight
+hours' leave into Nancy, the four of them, and had to be in by
+roll-call at a place called Villey the Dry. I remembered it after all
+those years.
+
+It is a village perched on the brow of one of these high hills above
+the river, and it found itself one day surrounded by earthworks, and a
+great fort raised just above the church. Then, before they knew where
+they were, they learnt that (1) no one could go in or out between
+sunset and sunrise without leave of the officer in command; (2) that
+from being a village they had become the 'buildings situate within
+Fort No. 18'; (3) that they were to be deluged with soldiers; and (4)
+that they were liable to evacuate their tenements on mobilization.
+They had become a fort unwittingly as they slept, and all their
+streets were blocked with ramparts. A hard fate; but they should not
+have built their village just on the brow of a round hill.  They did
+this in the old days, when men used stone instead of iron, because the
+top of a hill was a good place to hold against enemies; and so now,
+these 73,426 years after, they find the same advantage catching them
+again to their hurt. And so things go the round.
+
+Anyway Villey the Dry is a fort, and there my four brothers were
+going. It was miles off, and they had to be in by sunrise, so I
+offered them a pull of my wine, which, to my great joy, they refused,
+and we parted courteously. Then I found the road beginning to fall,
+and knew that I had crossed the hills.  As the forest ended and the
+sloping fields began, a dim moon came up late in the east in the bank
+of fog that masked the river. So by a sloping road, now free from the
+woods, and at the mouth of a fine untenanted valley under the moon, I
+came down again to the Moselle, having saved a great elbow by this
+excursion over the high land. As I swung round the bend of the hills
+downwards and looked up the sloping dell, I remembered that these
+heathery hollows were called 'vallons' by the people of Lorraine, and
+this set me singing the song of the hunters, 'Entends tu dans nos
+vallons, le Chasseur sonner du clairon,' which I sang loudly till I
+reached the river bank, and lost the exhilaration of the hills.
+
+I had now come some twelve miles from my starting-place, and it was
+midnight. The plain, the level road (which often rose a little), and
+the dank air of the river began to oppress me with fatigue. I was not
+disturbed by this, for I had intended to break these nights of
+marching by occasional repose, and while I was in the comfort of
+cities--especially in the false hopes that one got by reading books--I
+had imagined that it was a light matter to sleep in the open. Indeed,
+I had often so slept when I had been compelled to it in Manoeuvres,
+but I had forgotten how essential was a rug of some kind, and what a
+difference a fire and comradeship could make.  Thinking over it all,
+feeling my tiredness, and shivering a little in the chill under the
+moon and the clear sky, I was very ready to capitulate and to sleep in
+bed like a Christian at the next opportunity. But there is some
+influence in vows or plans that escapes our power of rejudgement. All
+false calculations must be paid for, and I found, as you will see,
+that having said I would sleep in the open, I had to keep to it in
+spite of all my second thoughts.
+
+I passed one village and then another in which everything was dark,
+and in which I could waken nothing but dogs, who thought me an enemy,
+till at last I saw a great belt of light in the fog above the Moselle.
+Here there was a kind of town or large settlement where there were
+ironworks, and where, as I thought, there would be houses open, even
+after midnight. I first found the old town, where just two men were
+awake at some cooking work or other.  I found them by a chink of light
+streaming through their door; but they gave me no hope, only advising
+me to go across the river and try in the new town where the forges and
+the ironworks were. 'There,' they said, 'I should certainly find a
+bed.'
+
+I crossed the bridge, being now much too weary to notice anything,
+even the shadowy hills, and the first thing I found was a lot of
+waggons that belonged to a caravan or fair. Here some men were awake,
+but when I suggested that they should let me sleep in their little
+houses on wheels, they told me it was never done; that it was all they
+could do to pack in themselves; that they had no straw; that they were
+guarded by dogs; and generally gave me to understand (though without
+violence or unpoliteness) that I looked as though I were the man to
+steal their lions and tigers. They told me, however, that without
+doubt I should find something open in the centre of the workmen's
+quarter, where the great electric lamps now made a glare over the
+factory.
+
+I trudged on unwillingly, and at the very last house of this
+detestable industrial slavery, a high house with a gable, I saw a
+window wide open, and a blonde man smoking a cigarette at a balcony. I
+called to him at once, and asked him to let me a bed. He put to me all
+the questions he could think of. Why was I there? Where had I come
+from? Where (if I was honest) had I intended to sleep? How came I at
+such an hour on foot? and other examinations. I thought a little what
+excuse to give him, and then, determining that I was too tired to make
+up anything plausible, I told him the full truth; that I had meant to
+sleep rough, but had been overcome by fatigue, and that I had walked
+from Toul, starting at evening. I conjured him by our common Faith to
+let me in. He told me that it was impossible, as he had but one room
+in which he and his family slept, and assured me he had asked all
+these questions out of sympathy and charity alone. Then he wished me
+good-night, honestly and kindly, and went in.
+
+By this time I was very much put out, and began to be angry. These
+straggling French towns give no opportunity for a shelter. I saw that
+I should have to get out beyond the market gardens, and that it might
+be a mile or two before I found any rest. A clock struck one. I looked
+up and saw it was from the belfry of one of those new chapels which
+the monks are building everywhere, nor did I forget to curse the monks
+in my heart for building them. I cursed also those who started
+smelting works in the Moselle valley; those who gave false advice to
+travellers; those who kept lions and tigers in caravans, and for a
+small sum I would have cursed the whole human race, when I saw that my
+bile had hurried me out of the street well into the countryside, and
+that above me, on a bank, was a patch of orchard and a lane leading up
+to it. Into this I turned, and, finding a good deal of dry hay lying
+under the trees, I soon made myself an excellent bed, first building a
+little mattress, and then piling on hay as warm as a blanket.
+
+I did not lie awake (as when I planned my pilgrimage I had promised
+myself I would do), looking at the sky through the branches of trees,
+but I slept at once without dreaming, and woke up to find it was broad
+daylight, and the sun ready to rise. Then, stiff and but little rested
+by two hours of exhaustion, I took up my staff and my sack and
+regained the road.
+
+I should very much like to know what those who have an answer to
+everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great
+men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank
+beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we
+used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of
+stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of
+that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial
+meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in
+this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for
+some hours--I mean those who turn out at four in the morning; I could
+give the name of the watch, but that I forget it and will not be
+plagued to look up technicalities. Dogs eat the first thing they come
+across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get
+up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast,
+coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their
+race is the hardiest in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in
+the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all this? Why is
+breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called
+it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way
+knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of
+food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the
+day?
+
+The provocation to this inquiry (which I have here no time to pursue)
+lies in the extraordinary distaste that I conceived that morning for
+Brule wine.  My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed overnight.
+I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of what
+had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and
+sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but
+a bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this,
+nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the
+forest (and was to seem so good again later on by the canal) should
+now repel me. I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment
+convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once let slip in my
+hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. _'Man,'_ said the
+Director of the State, _'man is but the creature of circumstance.'_
+
+As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled blindly along for miles
+under and towards the brightening east. Just before the sun rose I
+turned and looked backward from a high bridge that recrossed the
+river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my way. I was
+out of the familiar region of the garrison. The great forest-hills
+that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new
+light; heavy, drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed
+above them. The valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of
+save as a half mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of
+long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes.
+The main waterway of the valley was now not the river but the canal
+that fed from it.
+
+The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering the river and the
+canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley as a whole was vague, a
+mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the delicate
+slopes bounding it on either side.
+
+Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, that told me I had
+walked thirty-two kilometres--which is twenty miles--from Toul; that
+it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much to a place
+called Charmes.  The sun rose in the mist that lay up the long even
+trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I pushed on
+my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special providence, I
+found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had left me
+wrecked all these early hours.
+
+As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was a place on which a
+book might easily be written, for it had a church built in the
+seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great towns,
+a convent, and a general air of importance that made of it that grand
+and noble thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that
+best of all Christian associations--a large village.
+
+I say a book might be written upon it, and there is no doubt that a
+great many articles and pamphlets must have been written upon it, for
+the French are furiously given to local research and reviews, and to
+glorifying their native places: and when they cannot discover folklore
+they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it.
+
+There was even a man (I forget his name) who wrote a delightful book
+called _Popular and Traditional Songs of my Province,_ which book,
+after he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own invention,
+and not a word of it familiar to the inhabitants of the soil. He was a
+large, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of hair,
+and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends, and
+talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they
+would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes
+that are to be found even in the little villages, and that commemorate
+solemn, whiskered men, pillars of the state.  For surely this is the
+habit of the true poet, and marks the vigour and recurrent origin of
+poetry, that a man should get his head full of rhythms and catches,
+and that they should jumble up somehow into short songs of his own.
+What could more suggest (for instance) a whole troop of dancing words
+and lovely thoughts than this refrain from the Tourdenoise--
+
+  ... Son beau corps est en terre 
+  Son ame en Paradis.
+  Tu ris?
+  Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergere,
+  Ris, ma Bergere, tu ris.
+
+That was the way they set to work in England before the Puritans came,
+when men were not afraid to steal verses from one another, and when no
+one imagined that he could live by letters, but when every poet took a
+patron, or begged or robbed the churches. So much for the poets.
+
+Flavigny then, I say (for I seem to be digressing), is a long street
+of houses all built together as animals build their communities. They
+are all very old, but the people have worked hard since the
+Revolution, and none of them are poor, nor are any of them very rich.
+I saw but one gentleman's house, and that, I am glad to say, was in
+disrepair. Most of the peasants' houses had, for a ground floor,
+cavernous great barns out of which came a delightful smell of
+morning--that is, of hay, litter, oxen, and stored grains and old
+wood; which is the true breath of morning, because it is the scent
+that all the human race worth calling human first meets when it rises,
+and is the association of sunrise in the minds of those who keep the
+world alive: but not in the wretched minds of townsmen, and least of
+all in the minds of journalists, who know nothing of morning save that
+it is a time of jaded emptiness when you have just done prophesying
+(for the hundredth time) the approaching end of the world, when the
+floors are beginning to tremble with machinery, and when, in a weary
+kind of way, one feels hungry and alone: a nasty life and usually a
+short one.
+
+To return to Flavigny. This way of stretching a village all along one
+street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at
+college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on the
+Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and fantastic
+nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent truth,
+that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men
+together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the
+phrase goes, in the woods of a hillside in south England, remember
+that all that is savagery; but when you see a hundred white-washed
+houses in a row along a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, for
+you are in civilization again.
+
+But I continue to wander from Flavigny. The first thing I saw as I
+came into the street and noted how the level sun stood in a haze
+beyond, and how it shadowed and brought out the slight irregularities
+of the road, was a cart drawn by a galloping donkey, which came at and
+passed me with a prodigious clatter as I dragged myself forward. In
+the cart were two nuns, each with a scythe; they were going out
+mowing, and were up the first in the village, as Religious always are.
+Cheered by this happy omen, but not yet heartened, I next met a very
+old man leading out a horse, and asked him if there was anywhere where
+I could find coffee and bread at that hour; but he shook his head
+mournfully and wished me good-morning in a strong accent, for he was
+deaf and probably thought I was begging. So I went on still more
+despondent till I came to a really merry man of about middle age who
+was going to the fields, singing, with a very large rake over his
+shoulder.  When I had asked him the same question he stared at me a
+little and said of course coffee and bread could be had at the
+baker's, and when I asked him how I should know the baker's he was
+still more surprised at my ignorance, and said, 'By the smoke coming
+from the large chimney.' This I saw rising a short way off on my
+right, so I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about
+nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf
+before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and
+meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and
+offered me bread.
+
+It is a matter often discussed why bakers are such excellent citizens
+and good men. For while it is admitted in every country I was ever in
+that cobblers are argumentative and atheists (I except the cobbler
+under Plinlimmon, concerning whom would to heaven I had the space to
+tell you all here, for he knows the legends of the mountain), while it
+is public that barbers are garrulous and servile, that millers are
+cheats (we say in Sussex that every honest miller has a large tuft of
+hair on the palm of his hand), yet--with every trade in the world
+having some bad quality attached to it--bakers alone are exempt, and
+every one takes it for granted that they are sterling: indeed, there
+are some societies in which, no matter how gloomy and churlish the
+conversation may have become, you have but to mention bakers for
+voices to brighten suddenly and for a good influence to pervade every
+one. I say this is known for a fact, but not usually explained; the
+explanation is, that bakers are always up early in the morning and can
+watch the dawn, and that in this occupation they live in lonely
+contemplation enjoying the early hours.
+
+So it was with this baker of mine in Flavigny, who was a boy. When he
+heard that I had served at Toul he was delighted beyond measure; he
+told me of a brother of his that had been in the same regiment, and he
+assured me that he was himself going into the artillery by special
+enlistment, having got his father's leave. You know very little if you
+think I missed the opportunity of making the guns seem terrible and
+glorious in his eyes. I told him stories enough to waken a sentry of
+reserve, and if it had been possible (with my youth so obvious) I
+would have woven in a few anecdotes of active service, and described
+great shells bursting under my horses and the teams shot down, and the
+gunners all the while impassive; but as I saw I should not be believed
+I did not speak of such things, but confined myself to what he would
+see and hear when he joined.
+
+Meanwhile the good warm food and the rising morning had done two
+things; they had put much more vigour into me than I had had when I
+slunk in half-an-hour before, but at the same time (and this is a
+thing that often comes with food and with rest) they had made me feel
+the fatigue of so long a night. I rose up, therefore, determined to
+find some place where I could sleep. I asked this friend of mine how
+much there was to pay, and he said 'fourpence'. Then we exchanged
+ritual salutations, and I took the road. I did not leave the town or
+village without noticing one extraordinary thing at the far end of it,
+which was that, whereas most places in France are proud of their
+town-hall and make a great show of it, here in Flavigny they had taken
+a great house and written over it ECOLE COMMUNALE in great letters,
+and then they had written over a kind of lean-to or out-house of this
+big place the words 'Hotel de ville' in very small letters, so small
+that I had a doubt for a moment if the citizens here were good
+republicans--a treasonable thought on all this frontier.
+
+Then, a mile onward, I saw the road cross the canal and run parallel
+to it.  I saw the canal run another mile or so under a fine bank of
+deep woods. I saw an old bridge leading over it to that inviting
+shade, and as it was now nearly six and the sun was gathering
+strength, I went, with slumber overpowering me and my feet turning
+heavy beneath me, along the tow-path, over the bridge, and lay down on
+the moss under these delightful trees.  Forgetful of the penalty that
+such an early repose would bring, and of the great heat that was to
+follow at midday, I quickly became part of the life of that forest and
+fell asleep.
+
+When I awoke it was full eight o'clock, and the sun had gained great
+power.  I saw him shining at me through the branches of my trees like
+a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through the loopholes
+of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I looked
+below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal
+looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above
+it, and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the
+noise of its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was
+a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope
+slackened into the still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose.
+The rest of the valley was silent except for that under-humming of
+insects which marks the strength of the sun.
+
+Now I saw clearly how difficult it was to turn night into day, for I
+found myself condemned either to waste many hours that ought to be
+consumed on my pilgrimage, or else to march on under the extreme heat;
+and when I had drunk what was left of my Brule wine (which then seemed
+delicious), and had eaten a piece of bread, I stiffly jolted down the
+bank and regained the highway.
+
+In the first village I came to I found that Mass was over, and this
+justly annoyed me; for what is a pilgrimage in which a man cannot hear
+Mass every morning? Of all the things I have read about St Louis which
+make me wish I had known him to speak to, nothing seems to me more
+delightful than his habit of getting Mass daily whenever he marched
+down south, but why this should be so delightful I cannot tell. Of
+course there is a grace and influence belonging to such a custom, but
+it is not of that I am speaking but of the pleasing sensation of order
+and accomplishment which attaches to a day one has opened by Mass; a
+purely temporal, and, for all I know, what the monks back at the
+ironworks would have called a carnal feeling, but a source of
+continual comfort to me. Let them go their way and let me go mine.
+
+This comfort I ascribe to four causes (just above you will find it
+written that I could not tell why this should be so, but what of
+that?), and these causes are:
+
+1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of the day you are silent
+and recollected, and have to put off cares, interests, and passions in
+the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great
+benefit to the body and give it tone.
+
+2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. Now it is the function
+of all ritual (as we see in games, social arrangements and so forth)
+to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to
+catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you
+during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular
+repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and
+judgement.
+
+3. That the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts,
+and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness
+which both working in one's self and received from others is the true
+source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a
+short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds
+come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world.
+
+4. And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is
+that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon
+thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment
+that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried
+right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to
+do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can
+really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what
+is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should
+from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark;
+one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's
+food--and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on
+the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and
+one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God
+put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.
+Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said
+lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should
+do a little work with his hands.
+
+Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if
+rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and
+spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing,
+were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and
+to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I had power for some thirty
+years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their
+inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing,
+dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by
+force.
+
+Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has
+done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have
+the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his
+Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all
+that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship.
+
+From these considerations it is easy to understand how put out I was
+to find Mass over on this first morning of my pilgrimage. And I went
+along the burning road in a very ill-humour till I saw upon my right,
+beyond a low wall and in a kind of park, a house that seemed built on
+some artificial raised ground surrounded by a wall, but this may have
+been an illusion, the house being really only very tall. At any rate I
+drew it, and in the village just beyond it I learnt something curious
+about the man that owned it.
+
+For I had gone into a house to take a third meal of bread and wine and
+to replenish my bottle when the old woman of the house, who was a
+kindly person, told me she had just then no wine. 'But,' said she, 'Mr
+So and So that lives in the big house sells it to any one who cares to
+buy even in the smallest quantities, and you will see his shed
+standing by the side of the road.'
+
+Everything happened just as she had said. I came to the big shed by
+the park wall, and there was a kind of counter made of boards, and
+several big tuns and two men: one in an apron serving, and the other
+in a little box or compartment writing. I was somewhat timid to ask
+for so little as a quart, but the apron man in the most businesslike
+way filled my bottle at a tap and asked for fourpence. He was willing
+to talk, and told me many things: of good years in wine, of the nature
+of their trade, of the influence of the moon on brewing, of the
+importance of spigots, and what not; but when I tried to get out of
+him whether the owner were an eccentric private gentleman or a
+merchant that had the sense to earn little pennies as well as large
+ones, I could not make him understand my meaning; for his idea of rank
+was utterly different from mine and took no account of idleness and
+luxury and daftness, but was based entirely upon money and clothes.
+Moreover we were both of us Republicans, so the matter was of no great
+moment. Courteously saluting ourselves we parted, he remaining to sell
+wine and I hobbling to Rome, now a little painfully and my sack the
+heavier by a quart of wine, which, as you probably know, weighs almost
+exactly two pounds and a half.
+
+It was by this time close upon eleven, and I had long reached the
+stage when some kinds of men begin talking of Dogged Determination,
+Bull-dog pluck, the stubborn spirit of the Island race and so forth,
+but when those who can boast a little of the sacred French blood are
+in a mood of set despair (both kinds march on, and the mobility of
+either infantry is much the same), I say I had long got to this point
+of exhaustion when it occurred to me that I should need an excellent
+and thorough meal at midday.  But on looking at my map I found that
+there was nothing nearer than this town of Charmes that was marked on
+the milestones, and that was the first place I should come to in the
+department of the Vosges.
+
+It would take much too long to describe the dodges that weary men and
+stiff have recourse to when they are at the close of a difficult task:
+how they divide it up in lengths in their minds, how they count
+numbers, how they begin to solve problems in mental arithmetic: I
+tried them all. Then I thought of a new one, which is really
+excellent, and which I recommend to the whole world. It is to vary the
+road, suddenly taking now the fields, now the river, but only
+occasionally the turnpike. This last lap was very well suited for such
+a method. The valley had become more like a wide and shallow trench
+than ever. The hills on either side were low and exactly even. Up the
+middle of it went the river, the canal and the road, and these two
+last had only a field between them; now broad, now narrow.
+
+First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on the grass, then back
+on the tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into Charmes, that
+lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging
+myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon Angelus;
+nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final effort
+of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk
+it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and
+take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.
+
+The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of this name I had indeed
+been thinking as I went along the last miles of that dusty and
+deplorable road--that a town should be called 'Charms'.
+
+Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves and not hurried,
+have a way of settling into right names suited to the hills about them
+and recalling their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as I remember
+it I must, if only for example, set down my roll-call of such names,
+as--Fittleworth, where the Inn has painted panels; Amberley in the
+marshes; delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill; Arundel,
+that is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set
+on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and
+Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in
+the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the
+spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an
+island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant
+sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list,
+would answer: 'There I was on such and such a day; this I came to
+after such and such a run; and that other is my home.' But it is not
+his recollection alone which moves him, it is sound of the names.  He
+feels the accent of them, and all the men who live between Hind-head
+and the Channel know these names stand for Eden; the noise is enough
+to prove it. So it is also with the hidden valleys of the lie de
+France; and when you say Jouy or Chevreuse to a man that was born in
+those shadows he grows dreamy--yet they are within a walk of Paris.
+
+But the wonderful thing about a name like Charmes is that it hands
+down the dead. For some dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from
+his own immediate delight, and made general what had been a private
+pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town. They say
+the Arabs do this; calling one place 'the rest of the warriors', and
+another 'the end', and another 'the surprise of the horses': let those
+who know them speak for it.  I at least know that in the west of the
+Cotentin (a sea-garden) old Danes married to Gaulish women discovered
+the just epithet, and that you have 'St Mary on the Hill' and 'High
+Town under the Wind' and 'The Borough over the Heath', which are
+to-day exactly what their name describes them. If you doubt that
+England has such descriptive names, consider the great Truth that at
+one junction on a railway where a mournful desolation of stagnant
+waters and treeless, stonewalled fields threatens you with experience
+and awe, a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into your
+carriage and to chant like Charon, 'Change here for Ashton under the
+Wood, Moreton on the Marsh, Bourton on the Water, and Stow in the
+Wold.'
+
+Charmes does not fulfil its name nor preserve what its forgotten son
+found so wonderful in it. For at luncheon there a great commercial
+traveller told me fiercely that it was chiefly known for its
+breweries, and that he thought it of little account. Still even in
+Charmes I found one marvellous corner of a renaissance house, which I
+drew; but as I have lost the drawing, let it go.
+
+When I came out from the inn of Charmes the heat was more terrible
+than ever, and the prospect of a march in it more intolerable. My head
+hung, I went very slowly, and I played with cowardly thoughts, which
+were really (had I known it) good angels. I began to look out
+anxiously for woods, but saw only long whitened wall glaring in the
+sun, or, if ever there were trees, they were surrounded by wooden
+palisades which the owners had put there. But in a little time (now I
+had definitely yielded to temptation) I found a thicket.
+
+You must know that if you yield to entertaining a temptation, there is
+the opportunity presented to you like lightning. A theologian told me
+this, and it is partly true: but not of Mammon or Belphegor, or
+whatever Devil it is that overlooks the Currency (I can see his face
+from here): for how many have yielded to the Desire of Riches and
+professed themselves very willing to revel in them, yet did not get an
+opportunity worth a farthing till they died? Like those two beggars
+that Rabelais tells of, one of whom wished for all the gold that would
+pay for all the merchandise that had ever been sold in Paris since its
+first foundation, and the other for as much gold as would go into all
+the sacks that could be sewn by all the needles (and those of the
+smallest size) that could be crammed into Notre-Dame from the floor to
+the ceiling, filling the smallest crannies. Yet neither had a crust
+that night to rub his gums with.
+
+Whatever Devil it is, however, that tempts men to repose--and for my
+part I believe him to be rather an Aeon than a Devil: that is, a
+good-natured fellow working on his own account neither good nor
+ill--whatever being it is, it certainly suits one's mood, for I never
+yet knew a man determined to be lazy that had not ample opportunity
+afforded him, though he were poorer than the cure of Maigre, who
+formed a syndicate to sell at a scutcheon a gross such souls as were
+too insignificant to sell singly. A man can always find a chance for
+doing nothing as amply and with as ecstatic a satisfaction as the
+world allows, and so to me (whether it was there before I cannot tell,
+and if it came miraculously, so much the more amusing) appeared this
+thicket. It was to the left of the road; a stream ran through it in a
+little ravine; the undergrowth was thick beneath its birches, and just
+beyond, on the plain that bordered it, were reapers reaping in a
+field. I went into it contentedly and slept till evening my third
+sleep; then, refreshed by the cool wind that went before the twilight,
+I rose and took the road again, but I knew I could not go far.
+
+I was now past my fortieth mile, and though the heat had gone, yet my
+dead slumber had raised a thousand evils. I had stiffened to lameness,
+and had fallen into the mood when a man desires companionship and the
+talk of travellers rather than the open plain. But (unless I went
+backward, which was out of the question) there was nowhere to rest in
+for a long time to come. The next considerable village was Thayon,
+which is called 'Thayon of the Vosges', because one is nearing the big
+hills, and thither therefore I crawled mile after mile.
+
+But my heart sank. First my foot limped, and then my left knee
+oppressed me with a sudden pain. I attempted to relieve it by leaning
+on my right leg, and so discovered a singular new law in medicine
+which I will propose to the scientists. For when those excellent men
+have done investigating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where
+the soul is, let them consider this much more practical matter, that
+you cannot relieve the pain in one limb without driving it into some
+other; and so I exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible
+great pain in the right. I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw
+before me hundreds upon hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and
+I asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage. (But, as you
+shall hear, a pilgrimage is not wholly subject to material laws, for
+when I came to Epinal next day I went into a shop which, whatever it
+was to the profane, appeared to me as a chemist's shop, where I bought
+a bottle of some stuff called 'balm', and rubbing myself with it was
+instantly cured.)
+
+Then I looked down from the bridge across the plain, and saw, a long
+way off beyond the railway, the very ugly factory village of Thayon,
+and reached it at last, not without noticing that the people were
+standing branches of trees before their doors, and the little children
+noisily helping to tread the stems firmly into the earth. They told me
+it was for the coming of Corpus Christi, and so proved to me that
+religion, which is as old as these valleys, would last out their
+inhabiting men. Even here, in a place made by a great laundry, a
+modern industrial row of tenements, all the world was putting out
+green branches to welcome the Procession and the Sacrament and the
+Priest. Comforted by this evident refutation of the sad nonsense I had
+read in Cities from the pen of intellectuals--nonsense I had known to
+be nonsense, but that had none the less tarnished my mind--I happily
+entered the inn, ate and drank, praised God, and lay down to sleep in
+a great bed. I mingled with my prayers a firm intention of doing the
+ordinary things, and not attempting impossibilities, such as marching
+by night, nor following out any other vanities of this world. Then,
+having cast away all theories of how a pilgrimage should be conducted,
+and broken five or six vows, I slept steadily till the middle of the
+morning. I had covered fifty miles in twenty-five hours, and if you
+imagine this to be but two miles an hour, you must have a very
+mathematical mind, and know little of the realities of living. I woke
+and threw my shutters open to the bright morning and the masterful
+sun, took my coffee, and set out once more towards Epinal, the
+stronghold a few miles away--delighted to see that my shadow was so
+short and the road so hot to the feet and eyes. For I said, 'This at
+least proves that I am doing like all the world, and walking during
+the day.' It was but a couple of hours to the great garrison. In a
+little time I passed a battery. Then a captain went by on a horse,
+with his orderly behind him.  Where the deep lock stands by the
+roadside--the only suggestion of coolness--I first heard the bugles;
+then I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and
+to cast aside all haste and folly.
+
+There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for instance, that it
+was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds
+of the Gauls, an island city. For the rivers of France are full of
+long, habitable islands, and these were once the rallying-places of
+clans. Then there are the forts which are placed on high hills round
+the town and make it even stronger than Toul; for Epinal stands just
+where the hills begin to be very high. Again, it is the capital of a
+mountain district, and this character always does something peculiar
+and impressive to a town. You may watch its effect in Grenoble, in
+little Aubusson, and, rather less, in Geneva.
+
+For in such towns three quite different kinds of men meet. First there
+are the old plain-men, who despise the highlanders and think
+themselves much grander and more civilized; these are the burgesses.
+Then there are the peasants and wood-cutters, who come in from the
+hill-country to market, and who are suspicious of the plain-men and
+yet proud to depend upon a real town with a bishop and paved streets.
+Lastly, there are the travellers, who come there to enjoy the
+mountains and to make the city a base for their excursions, and these
+love the hill-men and think they understand them, and they despise the
+plain-men for being so middle-class as to lord it over the hill-men:
+but in truth this third class, being outsiders, are equally hated and
+despised by both the others, and there is a combination against them
+and they are exploited.
+
+And there are many other things in which Epinal is wonderful, but in
+nothing is it more wonderful than in its great church.
+
+I suppose that the high Dukes of Burgundy and Lorraine and the rich
+men from Flanders and the House of Luxemburg and the rest, going to
+Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass up this valley of the
+Moselle, which (as I have said) is a road leading to Rome, and would
+halt at fipinal and would at times give money for its church; with
+this result, that the church belongs to every imaginable period and is
+built anyhow, in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most enduring
+record of past forms and of what has pleased the changing mind when it
+has attempted to worship in stone.
+
+Thus the transept is simply an old square barn of rough stone, older,
+I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower
+courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers,
+northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof,
+the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow for
+bells.
+
+Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century,
+with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory
+is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le
+Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to
+our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans
+came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the
+transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to
+be a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is
+purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round
+door. To match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and
+rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and
+this again is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as
+you sometimes see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle.
+Finally, there is a central tower which is neither Gothic nor
+Romanesque but pure Italian, a loggia, with splendid round airy
+windows taking up all its walls, and with a flat roof and eaves. This
+some one straight from the south must have put on as a memory of his
+wanderings.
+
+The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, the Romanesque porches
+are red, like Strasburg, the Gothic apse is old white as our
+cathedrals are, the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just
+quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are mingled up and
+different in this astonishing building.
+
+I drew it from that point of view in the market-place to the
+north-east which shows most of these contrasts at once, and you must
+excuse the extreme shakiness of the sketch, for it was taken as best I
+could on an apple-cart with my book resting on the apples--there was
+no other desk. Nor did the apple-seller mind my doing it, but on the
+contrary gave me advice and praise saying such things as--
+
+'Excellent; you have caught the angle of the apse ... Come now, darken
+the edge of that pillar ... I fear you have made the tower a little
+confused,' and so forth.
+
+I offered to buy a few apples off him, but he gave me three instead,
+and these, as they incommoded me, I gave later to a little child.
+
+Indeed the people of Epinal, not taking me for a traveller but simply
+for a wandering poor man, were very genial to me, and the best good
+they did me was curing my lameness. For, seeing an apothecary's shop
+as I was leaving the town, I went in and said to the apothecary--
+
+'My knee has swelled and is very painful, and I have to walk far;
+perhaps you can tell me how to cure it, or give me something that
+will.'
+
+'There is nothing easier,' he said; 'I have here a specific for the
+very thing you complain of.'
+
+With this he pulled out a round bottle, on the label of which was
+printed in great letters, 'BALM'.
+
+'You have but to rub your knee strongly and long with this ointment of
+mine,' he said, 'and you will be cured.' Nor did he mention any
+special form of words to be repeated as one did it.
+
+Everything happened just as he had said. When I was some little way
+above the town I sat down on a low wall and rubbed my knee strongly
+and long with this balm, and the pain instantly disappeared. Then,
+with a heart renewed by this prodigy, I took the road again and began
+walking very rapidly and high, swinging on to Rome.
+
+The Moselle above fipinal takes a bend outwards, and it seemed to me
+that a much shorter way to the next village (which is called
+Archettes, or 'the very little arches', because there are no arches
+there) would be right over the hill round which the river curved. This
+error came from following private judgement and not heeding tradition,
+here represented by the highroad which closely follows the river. For
+though a straight tunnel to Archettes would have saved distance, yet a
+climb over that high hill and through the pathless wood on its summit
+was folly.
+
+I went at first over wide, sloping fields, and some hundred feet above
+the valley I crossed a little canal. It was made on a very good
+system, and I recommend it to the riparian owners of the Upper Wye,
+which needs it. They take the water from the Moselle (which is here
+broad and torrential and falls in steps, running over a stony bed with
+little swirls and rapids), and they lead it along at an even gradient,
+averaging, as it were, the uneven descent of the river. In this way
+they have a continuous stream running through fields that would
+otherwise be bare and dry, but that are thus nourished into excellent
+pastures.
+
+Above these fields the forest went up steeply. I had not pushed two
+hundred yards into its gloom and confusion when I discovered that I
+had lost my way. It was necessary to take the only guide I had and to
+go straight upwards wherever the line of greatest inclination seemed
+to lie, for that at least would take me to a summit and probably to a
+view of the valley; whereas if I tried to make for the shoulder of the
+hill (which had been my first intention) I might have wandered about
+till nightfall.
+
+It was an old man in a valley called the Curicante in Colorado that
+taught me this, if one lost one's way going _upwards_ to make at once
+along the steepest line, but if one lost it going _downwards_, to
+listen for water and reach it and follow it. I wish I had space to
+tell all about this old man, who gave me hospitality out there. He was
+from New England and was lonely, and had brought out at great expense
+a musical box to cheer him. Of this he was very proud, and though it
+only played four silly hymn tunes, yet, as he and I listened to it,
+heavy tears came into his eyes and light tears into mine, because
+these tunes reminded him of his home. But I have no time to do more
+than mention him, and must return to my forest.
+
+I climbed, then, over slippery pine needles and under the charged air
+of those trees, which was full of dim, slanting light from the
+afternoon sun, till, nearly at the summit, I came upon a clearing
+which I at once recognized as a military road, leading to what we used
+to call a 'false battery', that is, a dug-out with embrasures into
+which guns could be placed but in which no guns were. For ever since
+the French managed to produce a really mobile heavy gun they have
+constructed any amount of such auxiliary works between the permanent
+forts. These need no fixed guns to be emplaced, since the French can
+use now one such parapet, now another, as occasion serves, and the
+advantage is that your guns are never useless, but can always be
+brought round where they are needed, and that thus six guns will do
+more work than twenty used to do.
+
+This false battery was on the brow of the hill, and when I reached it
+I looked down the slope, over the brushwood that hid the wire
+entanglements, and there was the whole valley of the Moselle at my
+feet.
+
+As this was the first really great height, so this was the first
+really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew it
+carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining
+sun and noting all I saw.  Archettes, just below; the flat valley with
+the river winding from side to side; the straight rows of poplar
+trees; the dark pines on the hills, and the rounded mountains rising
+farther and higher into the distance until the last I saw, far off to
+the south-east, must have been the Ballon d'Alsace at the sources of
+the Moselle--the hill that marked the first full stage in my journey
+and that overlooked Switzerland.
+
+Indeed, this is the peculiar virtue of walking to a far place, and
+especially of walking there in a straight line, that one gets these
+visions of the world from hill-tops.
+
+When I call up for myself this great march I see it all mapped out in
+landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of
+which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece
+together the whole road. The view here from the Hill of Archettes, the
+view from the Ballon d'Alsace, from Glovelier Hill, from the
+Weissenstein, from the Brienzer Grat, from the Grimsel, from above
+Bellinzona, from the Princi-pessa, from Tizzano, from the ridge of the
+Apennines, from the Wall of Siena, from San Quirico, from Radicofani,
+from San Lorenzo, from Monte-fiascone, from above Viterbo, from
+Roncigleone, and at last from that lift in the Via Cassia, whence one
+suddenly perceives the City. They unroll themselves all in their order
+till I can see Europe, and Rome shining at the end.
+
+But you who go in railways are necessarily shut up in long valleys and
+even sometimes by the walls of the earth. Even those who bicycle or
+drive see these sights but rarely and with no consecution, since roads
+also avoid climbing save where they are forced to it, as over certain
+passes. It is only by following the straight line onwards that any one
+can pass from ridge to ridge and have this full picture of the way he
+has been.
+
+So much for views. I clambered down the hill to Archettes and saw,
+almost the first house, a swinging board 'At the sign of the Trout of
+the Vosges', and as it was now evening I turned in there to dine.
+
+Two things I noticed at once when I sat down to meat. First, that the
+people seated at that inn table were of the middle-class of society,
+and secondly, that I, though of their rank, was an impediment to their
+enjoyment. For to sleep in woods, to march some seventy miles, the
+latter part in a dazzling sun, and to end by sliding down an earthy
+steep into the road, stamps a man with all that this kind of people
+least desire to have thrust upon them. And those who blame the
+middle-class for their conventions in such matters, and who profess to
+be above the care for cleanliness and clothes and social ritual which
+marks the middle-class, are either anarchists by nature, or fools who
+take what is but an effect of their wealth for a natural virtue.
+
+I say it roundly; if it were not for the punctiliousness of the
+middle-class in these matters all our civilization would go to pieces.
+They are the conservators and the maintainers of the standard, the
+moderators of Europe, the salt of society. For the kind of man who
+boasts that he does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a
+man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up and who
+rather hates it, or else (and this is much more common) he is a rich
+man, or accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford to waste
+energy and stuff because he feels in a vague way that more clothes can
+always be bought, that at the end of his vagabondism he can get
+excellent dinners, and that London and Paris are full of luxurious
+baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting effects of wealth there
+is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy (and their
+parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of
+the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious
+living. Heaven keep us all from great riches--I mean from very great
+riches.
+
+Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new clothes whenever they
+feel inclined, neither can they end up a jaunt by a Turkish bath and a
+great feast with wine. So their care is always to preserve intact what
+they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to study cleanliness,
+order, decency, sobriety, and a steady temper, and they fence all this
+round and preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to wit,
+with conventions, and they are quite right.
+
+I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of these my colleagues,
+but I recognize that they are on the just side in the quarrel; let
+none of them go about pretending that I have not defended them in this
+book.
+
+So I thought of how I should put myself right with these people. I saw
+that an elaborate story (as, that I had been set upon by a tramp who
+forced me to change clothes: that I dressed thus for a bet: that I was
+an officer employed as a spy, and was about to cross the frontier into
+Germany in the guise of a labourer: that my doctor forbade me to
+shave--or any other such rhodo-montade): I saw, I say, that by
+venturing upon any such excuses I might unwittingly offend some other
+unknown canon of theirs deeper and more sacred than their rule on
+clothes; it had happened to me before now to do this in the course of
+explanations.
+
+So I took another method, and said, as I sat down--
+
+'Pray excuse this appearance of mine. I have had a most unfortunate
+adventure in the hills, losing my way and being compelled to sleep out
+all night, nor can I remain to get tidy, as it is essential that I
+should reach my luggage (which is at Remiremont) before midnight.'
+
+I took great care to pay for my glass of white wine before dinner with
+a bank-note, and I showed my sketches to my neighbour to make an
+impression.  I also talked of foreign politics, of the countries I had
+seen, of England especially, with such minute exactitude that their
+disgust was soon turned to admiration.
+
+The hostess of this inn was delicate and courteous to a degree, and at
+every point attempting to overreach her guests, who, as regularly as
+she attacked, countered with astonishing dexterity.
+
+Thus she would say: 'Perhaps the joint would taste better if it were
+carved on the table; or do the gentlemen prefer it carved aside?'
+
+To which a banker opposite me said in a deep voice: 'We prefer, madam,
+to have it carved aside.'
+
+Or she would put her head in and say: 'I can recommend our excellent
+beer.  It is really preferable to this local wine.'
+
+And my neighbour, a tourist, answered with decision: 'Madame, we find
+your wine excellent. It could not be bettered.'
+
+Nor could she get round them on a single point, and I pitied her so
+much that I bought bread and wine off her to console her, and I let
+her overcharge me, and went out into the afterglow with her
+benediction, followed also by the farewells of the middle-class, who
+were now taking their coffee at little tables outside the house.
+
+I went hard up the road to Remiremont. The night darkened. I reached
+Remiremont at midnight, and feeling very wakeful I pushed on up the
+valley under great woods of pines; and at last, diverging up a little
+path, I settled on a clump of trees sheltered and, as I thought, warm,
+and lay down there to sleep till morning; but, on the contrary, I lay
+awake a full hour in the fragrance and on the level carpet of the pine
+needles looking up through the dark branches at the waning moon, which
+had just risen, and thinking of how suitable were pine-trees for a man
+to sleep under.
+
+'The beech,' I thought, 'is a good tree to sleep under, for nothing
+will grow there, and there is always dry beech-mast; the yew would be
+good if it did not grow so low, but, all in all, pine-trees are the
+best.' I also considered that the worst tree to sleep under would be
+the upas tree. These thoughts so nearly bordered on nothing that,
+though I was not sleepy, yet I fell asleep. Long before day, the moon
+being still lustrous against a sky that yet contained a few faint
+stars, I awoke shivering with cold.
+
+In sleep there is something diminishes us. This every one has noticed;
+for who ever suffered a nightmare awake, or felt in full consciousness
+those awful impotencies which lie on the other side of slumber? When
+we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, yet by the force of nature,
+to powers before which we melt and are nothing. And among the strange
+frailties of sleep I have noticed cold.
+
+Here was a warm place under the pines where I could rest in great
+comfort on pine needles still full of the day; a covering for the
+beasts underground that love an even heat--the best of floors for a
+tired man.  Even the slight wind that blew under the waning moon was
+warm, and the stars were languid and not brilliant, as though
+everything were full of summer, and I knew that the night would be
+short; a midsummer night; and I had lived half of it before attempting
+repose. Yet, I say, I woke shivering and also disconsolate, needing
+companionship. I pushed down through tall, rank grass, drenched with
+dew, and made my way across the road to the bank of the river. By the
+time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.
+
+For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of
+trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day,
+because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.
+
+The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so much to shine through
+the air as to be part of it, took all colour out of the woods and
+fields and the high slopes above me, leaving them planes of grey and
+deeper grey. The woods near me were a silhouette, black and
+motionless, emphasizing the east beyond.  The river was white and
+dead, not even a steam rose from it, but out of the further pastures a
+gentle mist had lifted up and lay all even along the flanks of the
+hills, so that they rose out of it, indistinct at their bases,
+clear-cut above against the brightening sky; and the farther they were
+the more their mouldings showed in the early light, and the most
+distant edges of all caught the morning.
+
+At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an-hour without moving,
+and took in vigour from it as a man takes in food and wine. When I
+stirred and looked about me it had become easy to see the separate
+grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted chirrups in the
+bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the silence,
+the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared. In a
+solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the
+neighbouring sources of the river.
+
+I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I was approaching the
+end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had become part of my
+adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small stream,
+mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow.
+There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible
+accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers
+(however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain
+roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their
+stone cottages and their lonely paths off the road.
+
+So it was here. The hills had grown much higher and come closer to the
+river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and then an aged and
+uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring stone: part of
+the hills.  Then again there were present here and there on the spurs
+lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the
+mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be
+so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but
+especially in the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said,
+here in the upper parts of valleys in the great hills. In such shrines
+Mass is to be said but rarely, sometimes but once a year in a special
+commemoration. The rest of the time they stand empty, and some of the
+older or simpler, one might take for ruins. They mark everywhere some
+strong emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and they anchor
+these wild places to their own past, making them up in memories what
+they lack in multitudinous life.
+
+I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place where the road crosses
+the river, and then I determined I would have hot coffee as well, and
+seeing in front of me a village called Rupt, which means 'the cleft'
+(for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it and
+had my coffee.  Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of
+the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar
+baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have
+noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and
+have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great
+crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock,
+glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my
+way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown
+impatient as he wandered on about 'leaving on your left the stone we
+call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you
+come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and so forth. Long-shoremen
+and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely rivers near the
+sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's eye now a short
+stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, yet they
+all have names, and are called 'The House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot,
+Mall, and the Patch.'
+
+But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment, there was no such
+universal and human instinct. For I said to the old man who poured me
+out my coffee under the trellis (it was full morning, the sun was well
+up, and the clouds were all dappled high above the tops of the
+mountains): 'Father, what do you call this hill?' And with that I
+pointed to a very remarkable hill and summit that lie sheer above the
+village.
+
+'That,' he said, 'is called the hill over above Rupt.'
+
+'Yes, of course,' I said, 'but what is its name?'
+
+'That is its name,' he answered.
+
+And he was quite right, for when I looked at my map, there it was
+printed, 'Hill above Rupt'. I thought how wearisome it would be if
+this became a common way of doing things, and if one should call the
+Thames 'the River of London', and Essex 'the North side', and Kent
+'the South side'; but considering that this fantastic method was only
+indulged in by one wretched village, I released myself from fear,
+relegated such horrors to the colonies, and took the road again.
+
+All this upper corner of the valley is a garden. It is bound in on
+every side from the winds, it is closed at the end by the great mass
+of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness is
+used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow about it as
+though they had been planted to please the eye.
+
+Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their character of
+isolation and repose. Here what are afterwards to become the
+influences of the plains are nurtured and tended as though in an
+orchard, and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with its regal
+towns is determined. Something about these places prevents ingress or
+spoliation. They will endure no settlements save of peasants; the
+waters are too young to be harnessed; the hills forbid an easy
+commerce with neighbours. Throughout the world I have found the heads
+of rivers to be secure places of silence and content. And as they are
+themselves a kind of youth, the early home of all that rivers must at
+last become--I mean special ways of building and a separate state of
+living, a local air and a tradition of history, for rivers are always
+the makers of provinces--so they bring extreme youth back to one, and
+these upper glens of the world steep one in simplicity and childhood.
+
+It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road and to draw what I
+saw before me, which was the tender stream of the Moselle slipping
+through fields quite flat and even and undivided by fences; its banks
+had here a strange effect of Nature copying man's art: they seemed a
+park, and the river wound through it full of the positive innocence
+that attaches to virgins: it nourished and was guarded by trees.
+
+There was about that scene something of creation and of a beginning,
+and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness of the first
+experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs. I mused
+upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a
+name--were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how
+at last they reached the sea.
+
+But while I was thinking of these things, and seeing in my mind a kind
+of picture of The River Valley, and of men clustering around their
+home stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on either side, and of
+the white line of the sea beyond all, a woman passed me. She was very
+ugly, and was dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and shining, and,
+as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand a book known to the
+French as 'The Roman Parishioner', which is a prayer-book. Her hair
+was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet; she walked rapidly, with her eyes
+on the ground. When I saw this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I
+cried out profanely, 'Devil take me!  It is Corpus Christi, and my
+third day out. It would be a wicked pilgrimage if I did not get Mass
+at last.' For my first day (if you remember) I had slept in a wood
+beyond Mass-time, and my second (if you remember) I had slept in a
+bed. But this third day, a great Feast into the bargain, I was bound
+to hear Mass, and this woman hurrying along to the next village proved
+that I was not too late.
+
+So I hurried in her wake and came to the village, and went into the
+church, which was very full, and came down out of it (the Mass was low
+and short--they are a Christian people) through an avenue of small
+trees and large branches set up in front of the houses to welcome the
+procession that was to be held near noon. At the foot of the street
+was an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there another man--I
+take him to have been a shopkeeper--I determined to talk politics, and
+began as follows:
+
+'Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?'
+
+'It is not my town,' he said, 'but there is anti-Semitism. It
+flourishes.'
+
+'Why then?' I asked. 'How many Jews have you in your town?'
+
+He said there were seven.
+
+'But,' said I, 'seven families of Jews--'
+
+'There are not seven families,' he interrupted; 'there are seven Jews
+all told. There are but two families, and I am reckoning in the
+children. The servants are Christians.'
+
+'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that the Jewish families
+from beyond the frontier should have local Christian people to wait on
+them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say was that so
+very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the
+anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'
+
+'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men
+for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus
+brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the
+ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed
+their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.'
+
+When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the
+politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the
+following remarkable phrase--
+
+'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each go his own way: the
+Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.'
+
+I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley
+road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this
+remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it
+was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends.
+
+I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, at the sources of
+the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the Ballon
+d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For
+some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either
+side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now
+stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine
+that forbid a passage south.  Up through these the main road has been
+pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very
+top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is
+impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of
+Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain
+with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block the end
+of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and out
+of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road
+over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the
+country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the dark
+stands for the valley and the light for the high places, will show
+better than a long description. Not that this map is of the Ballon
+d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I mean.
+
+Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to find a low point
+suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are rare, but when one
+does get them they are the finest travel in the world, for they
+furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads
+going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From
+their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey
+to be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite
+step from one province and people to another.
+
+I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags of the road, which
+had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy slope. I went along
+the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a little path
+that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was marked
+by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I saw
+the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from
+the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees
+took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced
+me--for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army
+arrested upon a downward march--seemed something unusual and
+gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe than the extreme
+darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in the sky that
+introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple.
+Great clouds, so charged with rain that you would have thought them
+lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering
+me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day
+waned suddenly in their shade: it seemed suddenly as though summer was
+over or as though the mountains demanded an uncertain summer of their
+own, and shot the sunshine with the chill of their heights. A little
+wind ran along the grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of
+the first trees, rain was falling.
+
+The silence of the interior wood was enhanced by a bare drip of water
+from the boughs that stood out straight and tangled I know not how far
+above me.  Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by the half-light
+and lowering of the sky which the ceiling of branches concealed.
+Height, stillness, and a sort of expectancy controlled the memories of
+the place, and I passed silently and lightly between the high columns
+of the trees from night (as it seemed) through a kind of twilight
+forward to a near night beyond. On every side the perspective of these
+bare innumerable shafts, each standing apart in order, purple and
+fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light
+disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded
+me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my
+feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making
+distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees been so much greater and
+more enduring than my own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by
+their regard, I should have felt afraid. As it was I pushed upward
+through their immovable host in some such catching of the breath as
+men have when they walk at night straining for a sound, and I felt
+myself to be continually in a hidden companionship.
+
+When I came to the edge of this haunted forest it ceased as suddenly
+as it had begun. I left behind me such a rank of trees aligned as I
+had entered thousands of feet below, and I saw before me, stretching
+shapely up to the sky, the round dome-like summit of the mountain--a
+great field of grass. It was already evening; and, as though the tall
+trees had withdrawn their virtue from me, my fatigue suddenly came
+upon me. My feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the last
+hundred feet and looked down under the rolling clouds, lit from
+beneath by the level light of evening, to the three countries that met
+at my feet.
+
+For the Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering
+up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men.
+To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of
+Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls,
+who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They
+stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saone and are
+vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they
+go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the
+peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide
+homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.
+
+Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused
+and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen
+for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again
+and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from
+visions.
+
+Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to
+Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to
+see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all
+feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the
+Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by
+us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the
+horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled,
+lit from beneath with evening.
+
+I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken
+than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the
+slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones
+of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To this I
+addressed myself.
+
+It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant
+woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of
+great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of
+Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was
+a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner,
+until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great
+placard was framed in the three colours which once brought a little
+hope to the oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black letters
+were the three words, 'Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'.
+Underneath these was the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to
+be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again was printed in enormous
+italics--
+
+  Quand ce coq chantera 
+  Ici credit l'on fera.
+
+Which means--
+
+  When you hear him crowing 
+  Then's the time for owing.  
+  Till that day--Pay.
+
+While I was still wondering at this epitome of the French people, and
+was attempting to combine the French military tradition with the
+French temper in the affairs of economics; while I was also delighting
+in the memory of the solid coin that I carried in a little leathern
+bag in my pocket, the hard-working, God-fearing, and honest woman that
+governs the little house and the three great daughters, within a yard
+of the frontier, and on the top of this huge hill, had brought back
+all her troops into line and had the time to attend to me. This she
+did with the utmost politeness, though cold by race, and through her
+politeness ran a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once
+have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world,
+and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue.
+
+She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle
+valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic--(she had a little
+tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion
+is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each
+other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So
+once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by
+the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so
+much love his own nation as hate his neighbours, and even the twilight
+of chivalry is mixed up with a detestable patronage of the poor. But
+as I was saying--) she also was a Catholic, and I knew myself to be
+with friends. She was moreover not exactly of--what shall I say? the
+words Celtic and Latin mean nothing--not of those who delight in a
+delicate manner; and her good heart prompted her to say, very loudly--
+
+'What do you want?'
+
+'I want a bed,' I said, and I pulled out a silver coin. 'I must lie
+down at once.'
+
+Then I added, 'Can you make omelettes?'
+
+Now it is a curious thing, and one I will not dwell on--
+
+LECTOR. You do nothing but dwell.
+
+AUCTOR. It is the essence of lonely travel; and if you have come to
+this book for literature you have come to the wrong booth and counter.
+As I was saying: it is a curious thing that some people (or races)
+jump from one subject to another naturally, as some animals (I mean
+the noble deer) go by bounds. While there are other races (or
+individuals--heaven forgive me, I am no ethnologist) who think you a
+criminal or a lunatic unless you carefully plod along from step to
+step like a hippopotamus out of water.  When, therefore, I asked this
+family-drilling, house-managing, mountain-living woman whether she
+could make omelettes, she shook her head at me slowly, keeping her
+eyes fixed on mine, and said in what was the corpse of French with a
+German ghost in it, 'The bed is a franc.'
+
+'Motherkin,' I answered, 'what I mean is that I would sleep until I
+wake, for I have come a prodigious distance and have last slept in the
+woods. But when I wake I shall need food, for which,' I added, pulling
+out yet another coin, 'I will pay whatever your charge may be; for a
+more delightful house I have rarely met with. I know most people do
+not sleep before sunset, but I am particularly tired and broken.'
+
+She showed me my bed then much more kindly, and when I woke, which was
+long after dusk, she gave me in the living room of the hut eggs beaten
+up with ham, and I ate brown bread and said grace.
+
+Then (my wine was not yet finished, but it is an abominable thing to
+drink your own wine in another person's house) I asked whether I could
+have something to drink.
+
+'What you like,' she said.
+
+'What have you?' said I.
+
+'Beer,' said she.
+
+'Anything else?' said I.
+
+'No,' said she.
+
+'Why, then, give me some of that excellent beer.'
+
+I drank this with delight, paid all my bill (which was that of a
+labourer), and said good-night to them.
+
+In good-nights they had a ceremony; for they all rose together and
+curtsied. Upon my soul I believe such people to be the salt of the
+earth. I bowed with real contrition, for at several moments I had
+believed myself better than they. Then I went to my bed and they to
+theirs. The wind howled outside; my boots were stiff like wood and I
+could hardly take them off; my feet were so martyrized that I doubted
+if I could walk at all on the morrow.  Nevertheless I was so wrapped
+round with the repose of this family's virtues that I fell asleep at
+once. Next day the sun was rising in angry glory over the very distant
+hills of Germany, his new light running between the pinnacles of the
+clouds as the commands of a conqueror might come trumpeted down the
+defiles of mountains, when I fearlessly forced my boots on to my feet
+and left their doors.
+
+The morning outside came living and sharp after the gale--almost
+chilly.  Under a scattered but clearing sky I first limped, then, as
+my blood warmed, strode down the path that led between the trees of
+the farther vale and was soon following a stream that leaped from one
+fall to another till it should lead me to the main road, to Belfort,
+to the Jura, to the Swiss whom I had never known, and at last to
+Italy.
+
+But before I call up the recollection of that hidden valley, I must
+describe with a map the curious features of the road that lay before
+me into Switzerland. I was standing on the summit of that knot of
+hills which rise up from every side to form the Ballon d'Alsace, and
+make an abrupt ending to the Vosges. Before me, southward and
+eastward, was a great plain with the fortress of Belfort in the midst
+of it. This plain is called by soldiers 'the Gap of Belfort', and is
+the only break in the hill frontier that covers France all the way
+from the Mediterranean to Flanders. On the farther side of this plain
+ran the Jura mountains, which are like a northern wall to Switzerland,
+and just before you reach them is the Frontier. The Jura are fold on
+fold of high limestone ridges, thousands of feet high, all parallel,
+with deep valleys, thousands of feet deep, between them; and beyond
+their last abrupt escarpment is the wide plain of the river Aar.
+
+Now the straight line to Rome ran from where I stood, right across
+that plain of Belfort, right across the ridges of the Jura, and cut
+the plain of the Aar a few miles to the west of a town called
+Solothurn or Soleure, which stands upon that river.
+
+It was impossible to follow that line exactly, but one could average
+it closely enough by following the high road down the mountain through
+Belfort to a Swiss town called Porrentruy or Portrut--so far one was a
+little to the west of the direct line.
+
+From Portrut, by picking one's way through forests, up steep banks,
+over open downs, along mule paths, and so forth, one could cross the
+first ridge called the 'Terrible Hill', and so reach the profound
+gorge of the river Doubs, and a town called St Ursanne. From St
+Ursanne, by following a mountain road and then climbing some rocks and
+tracking through a wood, one could get straight over the second ridge
+to Glovelier. From Glovelier a highroad took one through a gap to
+Undervelier and on to a town called Moutier or Munster. Then from
+Munster, the road, still following more or less the line to Rome but
+now somewhat to the east of it, went on southward till an abrupt turn
+in it forced one to leave it. Then there was another rough climb by a
+difficult path up over the last ridge, called the Weissenstein, and
+from its high edge and summit it was but a straight fall of a mile or
+two on to Soleure.
+
+So much my map told me, and this mixture of roads and paths and rock
+climbs that I had planned out, I exactly followed, so as to march on
+as directly as possible towards Rome, which was my goal. For if I had
+not so planned it, but had followed the highroads, I should have been
+compelled to zig-zag enormously for days, since these ridges of the
+Jura are but little broken, and the roads do not rise above the
+crests, but follow the parallel valleys, taking advantage only here
+and there of the rare gaps to pass from one to another.
+
+Here is a sketch of the way I went, where my track is a white line,
+and the round spots in it are the towns and villages whose names are
+written at the side. In this sketch the plains and low valleys are
+marked dark, and the crests of the mountains left white. The shading
+is lighter according to the height, and the contour lines (which are
+very far from accurate) represent, I suppose, about a thousand feet
+between each, or perhaps a little more; and as for the distance, from
+the Ballon d'Alsace to Soleure might be two long days' march on a flat
+road, but over mountains and up rocks it was all but three, and even
+that was very good going. My first stage was across the plain of
+Belfort, and I had determined to sleep that night in Switzerland.
+
+I wandered down the mountain. A little secret path, one of many, saved
+me the long windings of the road. It followed down the central hollow
+of the great cleft and accompanied the stream. All the way for miles
+the water tumbled in fall after fall over a hundred steps of rock, and
+its noise mixed with the freshness of the air, and its splashing
+weighted the overhanging branches of the trees. A little rain that
+fell from time to time through the clear morning seemed like a sister
+to the spray of the waterfalls; and what with all this moisture and
+greenery, and the surrounding silence, all the valley was inspired
+with content. It was a repose to descend through its leaves and
+grasses, and find the lovely pastures at the foot of the descent, a
+narrow floor between the hills. Here there were the first houses of
+men; and, from one, smoke was already going up thinly into the
+morning. The air was very pure and cold; it was made more nourishing
+and human by the presence and noise of the waters, by the shining wet
+grasses and the beaded leaves all through that umbrageous valley. The
+shreds of clouds which, high above the calm, ran swiftly in the upper
+air, fed it also with soft rains from time to time as fine as dew; and
+through those clear and momentary showers one could see the sunlight.
+
+When I had enjoyed the descent through this place for but a few miles,
+everything changed. The road in front ran straight and bordered--it
+led out and onwards over a great flat, set here and there with
+hillocks. The Vosges ended abruptly. Houses came more thickly, and by
+the ceaseless culture of the fields, by the flat slate roofs, the
+white-washed walls, and the voices, and the glare, I knew myself to be
+once more in France of the plains; and the first town I came to was
+Giromagny.
+
+Here, as I heard a bell, I thought I would go up and hear Mass; and I
+did so, but my attention at the holy office was distracted by the
+enormous number of priests that I found in the church, and I have
+wondered painfully ever since how so many came to be in a little place
+like Giromagny. There were three priests at the high altar, and nearly
+one for each chapel, and there was such a buzz of Masses going on,
+beginning and ending, that I am sure I need not have gone without my
+breakfast in my hurry to get one. With all this there were few people
+at Mass so early; nothing but these priests going in and out, and
+continual little bells. I am still wondering.  Giromagny is no place
+for relics or for a pilgrimage, it cures no one, and has nothing of a
+holy look about it, and all these priests--
+
+LECTOR. Pray dwell less on your religion, and--
+
+AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel.
+For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you
+expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always
+find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far
+more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And
+that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can explain these
+priests---
+
+LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and they were swarming.
+
+AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of what interests me,
+I see no reason for setting down with minute care what interests you,
+and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only speak
+German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of
+Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally
+entertaining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an
+open quarrel. You must imagine for yourself about six miles of road,
+and then--then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in spite of the
+morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the sound of
+bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums.
+
+It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from one great garrison
+to another all the way down the frontier. I had started from the busy
+order of Toul; I had passed through the silence and peace of all that
+Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to the
+guns and the tramp of Epinal. I had left Epinal and counted the miles
+and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the great hills and
+come down into quite another plain draining to another sea, and I
+heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking
+backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new
+system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an
+army, the ungarnished gaps between.
+
+As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going at a trot down a
+side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my right, a long way
+off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety of the
+French line.  The sun here and there glinted on the ends of
+rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their
+tramp loud and thudding. They were singing a song.
+
+I had already passed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the
+road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly
+suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle
+houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw written
+up the words,
+
+Wine; shut or open.
+
+As it is a great rule to examine every new thing, and to suck honey
+out of every flower, I did not--as some would--think the phrase odd
+and pass on. I stood stock-still gazing at the house and imagining a
+hundred explanations.  I had never in my life heard wine divided into
+shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more great
+experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as
+the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and
+standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed
+labels, '30', '40', and '50', and they were brimming with wine. I
+spoke to the woman, and pointing at the tin cans, said--
+
+'Is this what you call open wine?'
+
+'Why, yes,' said she. 'Cannot you see for yourself that it is open?'
+
+That was true enough, and it explained a great deal. But it did not
+explain how--seeing that if you leave a bottle of wine uncorked for
+ten minutes you spoil it--you can keep gallons of it in a great wide
+can, for all the world like so much milk, milked from the Panthers of
+the God. I determined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing
+the middle price, at fourpence a quart, I said--
+
+'Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug.'
+
+This the woman at once did, and when I came to drink it, it was
+delicious.  Sweet, cool, strong, lifting the heart, satisfying, and
+full of all those things wine-merchants talk of, bouquet, and body,
+and flavour. It was what I have heard called a very pretty wine.
+
+I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel, but accepted it as one
+of those mysteries of which this pilgrimage was already giving me
+examples, and of which more were to come--(wait till you hear about
+the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself--
+
+'When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and away from the strong and
+excellent government of the Republic, when I am lost in the Jura Hills
+to-morrow there will be no such wine as this.'
+
+So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very tight, put it in my sack,
+and held it in store against the wineless places on the flanks of the
+hill called Terrible, where there are no soldiers, and where Swiss is
+the current language. Then I went on into the centre of the town.
+
+As I passed over the old bridge into the market-place, where I
+proposed to lunch (the sun was terrible--it was close upon eleven), I
+saw them building parallel with that old bridge a new one to replace
+it. And the way they build a bridge in Belfort is so wonderfully
+simple, and yet so new, that it is well worth telling.
+
+In most places when a bridge has to be made, there is an infinite
+pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven
+knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and
+some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a
+thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water
+has run away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down into the dry
+bed of the river and dig the foundations feverishly, and begin
+building the piers in great haste. Soon the water comes back, but the
+piers are already above it, and the rest of the work is done from
+boats. This is absolutely true. Not only did I see the men in the bed
+of the river, but a man whom I asked told me that it seemed to him the
+most natural way to build bridges, and doubted if they were ever made
+in any other fashion.
+
+There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in rock to commemorate
+the siege of 1870. This lion is part of the precipice under the
+castle, and is of enormous size--- how large I do not know, but I saw
+that a man looked quite small by one of his paws. The precipice was
+first smoothed like a stone slab or tablet, and then this lion was
+carved into and out of it in high relief by Bartholdi, the same man
+that made the statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.
+
+The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history in yet another way, and
+one that shows you how the Church works on from one stem continually.
+For there is a little church somewhere near or in Belfort (I do not
+know where, I only heard of it) which, a local mason and painter being
+told to decorate for so much, he amused himself by painting all round
+it little pictures of the siege--of the cold, and the wounds, and the
+heroism. This is indeed the way such things should be done, I mean by
+men doing them for pleasure and of their own thought. And I have a
+number of friends who agree with me in thinking this, that art should
+not be competitive or industrial, but most of them go on to the very
+strange conclusion that one should not own one's garden, nor one's
+beehive, nor one's great noble house, nor one's pigsty, nor one's
+railway shares, nor the very boots on one's feet. I say, out upon such
+nonsense. Then they say to me, what about the concentration of the
+means of production? And I say to them, what about the distribution of
+the ownership of the concentrated means of production? And they shake
+their heads sadly, and say it would never endure; and I say, try it
+first and see. Then they fly into a rage.
+
+When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by the way, a poor man asked
+me to use _all my influence_ for his son, who was an engineer in the
+navy, and this he did because I had been boasting of my travels,
+experiences, and grand acquaintances throughout the world)--when, I
+say, I had lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set out again on
+my road, and was very much put out to find that showers still kept on
+falling.
+
+In the early morning, under such delightful trees, up in the
+mountains, the branches had given me a roof, the wild surroundings
+made me part of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to marry
+itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. But here, on a road and
+in a town, all its tradition of discomfort came upon me. I was angry,
+therefore, with the weather and the road for some miles, till two
+things came to comfort me. First it cleared, and a glorious sun showed
+me from a little eminence the plain of Alsace and the mountains of the
+Vosges all in line; secondly, I came to a vast powder-magazine.
+
+To most people there is nothing more subtle or pleasing in a
+powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the same in
+the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides
+and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my
+part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with
+two very good feelings--- laughter and companionship. For it was my
+good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two
+men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been
+some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots--and for
+the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the
+anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty
+cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous
+noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the
+over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two
+friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a
+loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders
+to challenge once and then to fire.
+
+Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a
+conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than
+an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night
+they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of
+a growing tree.
+
+This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached
+it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking
+eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became
+quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt,
+and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its
+carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to
+explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the
+seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were
+longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.
+
+Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I
+went down the road.
+
+Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
+and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
+even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
+always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
+with the lapse of time.  At last I found a side road going off from
+the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
+the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
+because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
+wide turnpike.
+
+Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and
+at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses--
+
+_Ave Crux Spes Unica._
+
+I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I
+looked backward along the road I had come.
+
+There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the
+plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they
+stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent. The mind
+of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily overleap even
+the high hills.
+
+Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a kind of farewell to
+the influences that had followed me for so many miles--the solemn
+quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of
+Lorraine--1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk, and
+pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages.
+
+The afternoon and the evening followed as I put one mile after another
+behind me. The frontier seemed so close that I would not rest. I left
+my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, untasted, and I
+plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment
+for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer the
+last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to
+a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my
+fourth day.
+
+The light still fell, and my resolution stood, though my exhaustion
+undermined it. The line of the mountains rose higher against the sky,
+and there entered into my pilgrimage for the first time the loneliness
+and the mystery of meres. Something of what a man feels in East
+England belonged to this last of the plain under the guardian hills.
+Everywhere I passed ponds and reeds, and saw the level streaks of
+sunset reflected in stagnant waters.
+
+The marshy valley kept its character when I had left the lane and
+regained the highroad. Its isolation dominated the last effort with
+which I made for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight, and as
+I blundered on my whole spirit was caught or lifted in the influence
+of the waste waters and of the birds of evening.
+
+I wished, as I had often wished in such opportunities of recollection
+and of silence, for a complete barrier that might isolate the mind.
+With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a
+pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved
+and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men
+have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose
+holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are
+incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover,
+there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with
+the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same
+thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus.
+But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning
+of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union
+between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms,
+revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of
+pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know
+nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether
+they could make the matter clearer in Rome.
+
+But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good spirit in me that is
+so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of things, that is a
+very different story. _That_, I do indeed desire to have to myself at
+whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of autumn
+closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one, as
+one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from
+without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some
+mystery it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more
+desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So
+also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the
+songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in
+by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than
+these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial
+there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that
+our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert
+and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.
+
+As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely
+ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of
+evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling
+slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my
+sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the
+miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half
+round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open
+Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat
+down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little
+thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had
+carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful
+march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth
+drinking after I had passed the frontier.
+
+I consoled myself more or less by thinking about torments and evils to
+which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then I rose to go on
+into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a
+wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched
+jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the
+Mount Terrible.  It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.
+
+So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to
+cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know where the point
+came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last French
+town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I had
+covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis
+and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and
+said--
+
+'Am I in Switzerland?'
+
+A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a Bavarian commercial
+traveller, and a colleague of his from Marseilles, all said together
+in varying accents: 'Yes.'
+
+'Why then,' I said, 'I will come in and drink.'
+
+This book would never end if I were to attempt to write down so much
+as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things that I saw and
+heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least mention the
+Commercial Traveller from Marseilles.
+
+He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He had seen all the
+cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was
+extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large,
+his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of
+the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar god. He
+came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent
+of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in
+dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions);
+then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the
+memory of such a revelation.
+
+For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my
+wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the
+Phocean.  He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black;
+slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small,
+black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid
+gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet
+lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.
+
+That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of
+France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls.
+It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught
+the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.
+
+I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three
+thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains
+talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and
+travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the
+changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.
+
+When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned
+off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing
+water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this:
+
+'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So
+on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such
+and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of
+St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so
+many years and so many yards, ...' &c., and so forth ... exactly like
+a mill.
+
+I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the
+Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the
+villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man.
+
+He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he had arranged with
+the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most
+unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next morning I was
+off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the table such
+money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper.
+
+It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were watery thin clouds
+left here and there from the day before, a cold wind drove them) when,
+with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other and resting
+continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road, and
+pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France,
+and I was fairly in a strange country.
+
+The valley through which I was now passing resembled that of the
+lovely river Jed where it runs down from the Cheviots, and leads like
+a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as there,
+steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale, all green grass
+and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with perpetual
+woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and
+upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this
+winding cleft was a natural passage through the first ridge of the
+Jura; the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm.
+
+I had, as I passed on along this turning way, all the pleasures of
+novelty; it was quite another country from the governed and ordered
+France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less carefully
+tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old, and
+marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything.
+Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees.
+I did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through
+the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French
+neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as
+hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds
+and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the
+Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once 'Slow
+Water'.
+
+I was wondering what its name might be, and how far I stood from
+Porrentruy (which I knew to be close by), when I saw a tunnel across
+the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills that the
+river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I had
+been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short
+cut up through the forest over a spur of hill--a short cut most
+legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used--and I
+walked up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods
+and beneath small, dripping trees. When this short silence of the
+forest was over, I saw an excellent sight.
+
+There, below me, where the lane began to fall, was the first of the
+German cities.
+
+LECTOR. How 'German'?
+
+AUCTOR. Let me explain. There is a race that stretches vaguely,
+without defined boundaries, from the Baltic into the high hills of the
+south. I will not include the Scandinavians among them, for the
+Scandinavians (from whom we English also in part descend) are
+long-headed, lean, and fierce, with a light of adventure in their pale
+eyes. But beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic to the
+high hills a race which has a curious unity. Yes; I know that great
+patches of it are Catholic, and that other great patches hold varying
+philosophies; I know also that within them are counted long-headed and
+round-headed men, dark and fair, violent and silent; I know also that
+they have continually fought among themselves and called in Welch
+allies; still I go somewhat by the language, for I am concerned here
+with the development of a modern European people, and I say that the
+Germans run from the high hills to the northern sea. In all of them
+you find (it is not race, it is something much more than race, it is
+the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of ease. In all of them
+you find music. They are those Germans whose countries I had seen a
+long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose language and
+traditions I now first touched in the town that stood before me.
+
+LECTOR. But in Porrentruy they talk French!
+
+AUCTOR. They are welcome; it is an excellent tongue. Nevertheless,
+they are Germans. Who but Germans would so preserve--would so rebuild
+the past? Who but Germans would so feel the mystery of the hills, and
+so fit their town to the mountains? I was to pass through but a narrow
+wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They began at Porrentruy,
+they ended at the watershed of the Adriatic, in the high passes of the
+Alps; but in that little space of four days I made acquaintance with
+their influence, and I owe them a perpetual gratitude for their
+architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is full of
+an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger plains of
+Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in
+Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and
+barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin
+tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic
+dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them
+neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were
+contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort.
+
+The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with
+Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this
+gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have
+seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it
+was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told
+later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can
+believe it. The Germans hate to destroy.  It overwhelmed me as visions
+overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see
+the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and
+propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing.
+
+As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed under its deep
+gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main
+street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began
+to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house
+I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said
+that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me
+nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do
+very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of
+the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin,
+when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I
+remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the
+bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and
+estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double.  God
+rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or
+twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine.
+
+I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But,
+oh!  my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous,
+introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant
+friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an
+idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the god?
+Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and
+kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that
+lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz
+le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get
+no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the
+genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little
+attendant gods by name that will come to the festival.
+
+What a wine!
+
+I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a
+good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I see there is a
+providence for pilgrims.'
+
+So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle of this wonderful
+stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth, desirable, and
+went up on my way to Rome.
+
+Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was infinite, I would tell
+you about the shifty priest whom I met on the platform of the church
+where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the anarchist whom I met
+when I recovered the highroad--- he was a sad, good man, who had
+committed some sudden crime and so had left France, and his hankering
+for France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he
+wished there were no property, no armies, and no governments.
+
+But I said that we live as parts of a nation, and that there was no
+fate so wretched as to be without a country of one's own--what else
+was exile which so many noble men have thought worse than death, and
+which all have feared?  I also told him that armies fighting in a just
+cause were the happiest places for living, and that a good battle for
+justice was the beginning of all great songs; and that as for
+property, a man on his own land was the nearest to God.
+
+He therefore not convinced, and I loving and pitying him, we
+separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him
+instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him
+brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying
+God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would
+certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in
+Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not
+(as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.
+What is more, nothing makes property run into a few hands but the
+worst of the capital sins, and you who say it is 'the modern
+facilities of distribution' are like men who cannot read large print
+without spectacles; or again, you are like men who should say that
+their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was caused by
+matches.
+
+But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way over so many hills to
+talk economics? Very far from it! I will pray for all poor men when I
+get to St Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what capital St Peter
+had in that highly capitalistic first century), and, meanwhile, do you
+discuss the margin of production while I go on the open way; there are
+no landlords here, and if you would learn at least one foreign
+language, and travel but five miles off a railway, you town-talkers,
+you would find how much landlordism has to do with your 'necessities'
+and your 'laws'.
+
+LECTOR. I thought you said you were not going to talk economics?
+
+AUCTOR. Neither am I. It is but the backwash of a wave ... Well, then,
+I went up the open way, and came in a few miles of that hot afternoon
+to the second ridge of the Jura, which they call 'the Terrible Hill',
+or 'the Mount Terrible'--and, in truth, it is very jagged. A steep,
+long crest of very many miles lies here between the vale of Porrentruy
+and the deep gorge of the Doubs. The highroad goes off a long way
+westward, seeking for a pass or neck in the chain, but I determined to
+find a straight road across, and spoke to some wood-cutters who were
+felling trees just where the road began to climb. They gave me this
+curious indication. They said--
+
+'Go you up this muddy track that has been made athwart the woods and
+over the pastures by our sliding logs' (for they had cut their trunks
+higher up the mountains), 'and you will come to the summit easily.
+From thence you will see the Doubs running below you in a very deep
+and dark ravine.'
+
+I thanked them, and soon found that they had told me right. There,
+unmistakable, a gash in the forest and across the intervening fields
+of grass, was the run of the timber.
+
+When I had climbed almost to the top, I looked behind me to take my
+last view of the north. I saw just before me a high isolated rock;
+between me and it was the forest. I saw beyond it the infinite plain
+of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff of limestone that bounded
+that height fell sheer upon the tree-tops; its sublimity arrested me,
+and compelled me to record it.
+
+'Surely,' I said, 'if Switzerland has any gates on the north they are
+these.' Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of what I had seen, I
+went up, panting, to the summit, and, resting there, discovered
+beneath me the curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a dark gulf
+thousands of feet below. The shape of this extraordinary turn I will
+describe in a moment.  Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no
+precipice or rock between me and the river, only a down, down, down
+through other trees and pastures, not too steep for a man to walk, but
+steeper than our steep downs and fells in England, where a man
+hesitates and picks his way. It was so much of a descent, and so long,
+that one looked above the tree-tops. It was a place where no one would
+care to ride.
+
+I found a kind of path, sideways on the face of the mountain, and
+followed it till I came to a platform with a hut perched thereon, and
+men building.  Here a good woman told me just how to go. I was not to
+attempt the road to Brune-Farine--that is, 'Whole-Meal Farm'--as I had
+first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take a gully she
+would show me, and follow it till I reached the river. She came out,
+and led me steeply across a hanging pasture; all the while she had
+knitting in her hands, and I noticed that on the levels she went on
+with her knitting. Then, when we got to the gully, she said I had but
+to follow it. I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home.
+
+This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down
+it--thousands of feet--warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very
+gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or
+village.  It was St Ursanne.
+
+The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary
+shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran
+along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but
+much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach
+that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as
+though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows
+out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a
+man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way,
+others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say--
+
+LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of
+a window?
+
+AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are
+everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building
+takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is
+framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town,
+a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have
+such luck!), would you not call your architect up before you and say--
+
+'Sir, see that the windows of my house are _tall, narrow, thick_, and
+have a _round top to them'?_
+
+Of course you would, for thus you would best catch in separate
+pictures the sunlit things outside your home.
+
+Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that many fall to their
+deaths. By windows love often enters. Through a window went the bolt
+that killed King Richard. King William's father spied Arlette from a
+window (I have looked through it myself, but not a soul did I see
+washing below).  When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and
+when a patriot would save her, he taxes them. Out of windows we walk
+on to lawns in summer and meet men and women, and in winter windows
+are drums for the splendid music of storms that makes us feel so
+masterly round our fires. The windows of the great cathedrals are all
+their meaning. But for windows we should have to go out-of-doors to
+see daylight. After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing so
+beneficent as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful man that has no
+window-god in his house, and thinks himself too great a philosopher to
+bow down to windows! May he live in a place without windows for a
+while to teach him the value of windows. As for me, I will keep up the
+high worship of windows till I come to the windowless grave. Talk to
+me of windows!
+
+Yes. There are other things in St Ursanne. It is a little tiny town,
+and yet has gates. It is full of very old houses, people, and speech.
+It was founded (or named) by a Bear Saint, and the statue of the saint
+with his bear is carved on the top of a column in the market-place.
+But the chief thing about it, so it seemed to me, was its remoteness.
+
+The gorge of the Doubs, of which I said a word or two above, is of
+that very rare shape which isolates whatever may be found in such
+valleys. It turns right back upon itself, like a very narrow U, and
+thus cannot by any possibility lead any one anywhere; for though in
+all times travellers have had to follow river valleys, yet when they
+come to such a long and sharp turn as this, they have always cut
+across the intervening bend.
+
+Here is the shape of this valley with the high hills round it and in
+its core, which will show better than description what I mean. The
+little picture also shows what the gorge looked like as I came down on
+it from the heights above.
+
+In the map the small white 'A' shows where the railway bridge was, and
+in this map, as in the others, the dark is for the depth and the light
+is for the heights. As for the picture, it is what one sees when one
+is coming over the ridge at the north or top of the map, and when one
+first catches the river beneath one.
+
+I thought a good deal about what the Romans did to get through the
+Mont Terrible, and how they negotiated this crook in the Doubs (for
+they certainly passed into Gaul through the gates of Porrentruy, and
+by that obvious valley below it). I decided that they probably came
+round eastward by Delemont. But for my part, I was on a straight path
+to Rome, and as that line lay just along the top of the river bend I
+was bound to take it.
+
+Now outside St Ursanne, if one would go along the top of the river
+bend and so up to the other side of the gorge, is a kind of subsidiary
+ravine--awful, deep, and narrow--and this was crossed, I could see, by
+a very high railway bridge.
+
+Not suspecting any evil, and desiring to avoid the long descent into
+the ravine, the looking for a bridge or ford, and the steep climb up
+the other side, I made in my folly for the station which stood just
+where the railway left solid ground to go over this high, high bridge.
+I asked leave of the stationmaster to cross it, who said it was
+strictly forbidden, but that he was not a policeman, and that I might
+do it at my own risk. Thanking him, therefore, and considering how
+charming was the loose habit of small uncentralized societies, I went
+merrily on to the bridge, meaning to walk across it by stepping from
+sleeper to sleeper. But it was not to be so simple. The powers of the
+air, that hate to have their kingdom disturbed, watched me as I began.
+
+I had not been engaged upon it a dozen yards when I was seized with
+terror.
+
+I have much to say further on in this book concerning terror: the
+panic that haunts high places and the spell of many angry men. This
+horrible affection of the mind is the delight of our modern
+scribblers; it is half the plot of their insane 'short stories', and
+is at the root of their worship of what they call 'strength', a
+cowardly craving for protection, or the much more despicable
+fascination of brutality. For my part I have always disregarded it as
+something impure and devilish, unworthy of a Christian. Fear I think,
+indeed, to be in the nature of things, and it is as much part of my
+experience to be afraid of the sea or of an untried horse as it is to
+eat and sleep; but terror, which is a sudden madness and paralysis of
+the soul, that I say is from hell, and not to be played with or
+considered or put in pictures or described in stories. All this I say
+to preface what happened, and especially to point out how terror is in
+the nature of a possession and is unreasonable.
+
+For in the crossing of this bridge there was nothing in itself
+perilous.  The sleepers lay very close together--I doubt if a man
+could have slipped between them; but, I know not how many hundred feet
+below, was the flashing of the torrent, and it turned my brain. For
+the only parapet there was a light line or pipe, quite slender and low
+down, running from one spare iron upright to another. These rather
+emphasized than encouraged my mood. And still as I resolutely put one
+foot in front of the other, and resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss
+and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was
+diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught
+half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went
+uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height
+with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I could
+bear.
+
+I dared not turn round and I dared not stop. Words and phrases began
+repeating themselves in my head as they will under a strain: so I know
+at sea a man perilously hanging on to the tiller makes a kind of
+litany of his instructions. The central part was passed, the
+three-quarters; the tension of that enduring effort had grown
+intolerable, and I doubted my ability to complete the task. Why? What
+could prevent me? I cannot say; it was all a bundle of imaginaries.
+Perhaps at bottom what I feared was sudden giddiness and the fall--
+
+At any rate at this last supreme part I vowed one candle to Our Lady
+of Perpetual Succour if she would see that all went well, and this
+candle I later paid in Rome; finding Our Lady of Succour not hung up
+in a public place and known to all, as I thought She would be, but
+peculiar to a little church belonging to a Scotchman and standing
+above his high altar. Yet it is a very famous picture, and extremely
+old.
+
+Well, then, having made this vow I still went on, with panic aiding
+me, till I saw that the bank beneath had risen to within a few feet of
+the bridge, and that dry land was not twenty yards away. Then my
+resolution left me and I ran, or rather stumbled, rapidly from sleeper
+to sleeper till I could take a deep breath on the solid earth beyond.
+
+I stood and gazed back over the abyss; I saw the little horrible strip
+between heaven and hell--the perspective of its rails. I was made ill
+by the relief from terror. Yet I suppose railway-men cross and recross
+it twenty times a day. Better for them than for me!
+
+There is the story of the awful bridge of the Mont Terrible, and it
+lies to a yard upon the straight line--_quid dicam_--the segment of
+the Great Circle uniting Toul and Rome.
+
+The high bank or hillside before me was that which ends the gorge of
+the Doubs and looks down either limb of the sharp bend. I had here not
+to climb but to follow at one height round the curve. My way ran by a
+rather ill-made lane and passed a village. Then it was my business to
+make straight up the farther wall of the gorge, and as there was wood
+upon this, it looked an easy matter.
+
+But when I came to it, it was not easy. The wood grew in loose rocks
+and the slope was much too steep for anything but hands and knees, and
+far too soft and broken for true climbing. And no wonder this ridge
+seemed a wall for steepness and difficulty, since it was the watershed
+between the Mediterranean and the cold North Sea. But I did not know
+this at the time.  It must have taken me close on an hour before I had
+covered the last thousand feet or so that brought me to the top of the
+ridge, and there, to my great astonishment, was a road. Where could
+such a road lead, and why did it follow right along the highest edge
+of the mountains? The Jura with their unique parallels provide twenty
+such problems.
+
+Wherever it led, however, this road was plainly perpendicular to my
+true route, and I had but to press on my straight line. So I crossed
+it, saw for a last time through the trees the gorge of the Doubs, and
+then got upon a path which led down through a field more or less in
+the direction of my pilgrimage.
+
+Here the country was so broken that one could make out but little of
+its general features, but of course, on the whole, I was following
+down yet another southern slope, the southern slope of the _third_
+chain of the Jura, when, after passing through many glades and along a
+stony path, I found a kind of gate between two high rocks, and emerged
+somewhat suddenly upon a wide down studded with old trees and also
+many stunted yews, and this sank down to a noble valley which lay all
+before me.
+
+The open down or prairie on which I stood I afterwards found to be
+called the 'Pasturage of Common Right', a very fine name; and, as a
+gallery will command a great hall, so this field like a platform
+commanded the wide and fading valley below.
+
+It was a very glad surprise to see this sight suddenly unrolled as I
+stood on the crest of the down. The Jura had hitherto been either
+lonely, or somewhat awful, or naked and rocky, but here was a true
+vale in which one could imagine a spirit of its own; there were corn
+lands and no rocks. The mountains on either side did not rise so high
+as three thousand feet. Though of limestone they were rounded in form,
+and the slanting sun of the late afternoon (all the storm had left the
+sky) took them full and warm. The valley remaining wide and fruitful
+went on out eastward till the hills became mixed up with brume and
+distance. As I did not know its name I called it after the village
+immediately below me for which I was making; and I still remember it
+as the Valley of Glovelier, and it lies between the third and fourth
+ridges of the Jura.
+
+Before leaving the field I drew what I saw but I was much too tired by
+the double and prodigious climb of the past hours to draw definitely
+or clearly. Such as it is, there it is. Then I went down over the
+smooth field.
+
+There is something that distinguishes the rugged from the gracious in
+landscape, and in our Europe this something corresponds to the use and
+presence of men, especially in mountainous places. For men's habits
+and civilization fill the valleys and wash up the base of the hills,
+making, as it were, a tide mark. Into this zone I had already passed.
+The turf was trodden fine, and was set firm as it can only become by
+thousands of years of pasturing. The moisture that oozed out of the
+earth was not the random bog of the high places but a human spring,
+caught in a stone trough.  Attention had been given to the trees.
+Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard
+thing men pile up in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of
+chosen stones, and these bound together with mortar.  On my right was
+a deep little dale with children playing in it--and this' I afterwards
+learned was called a 'combe': delightful memory! All our deeper
+hollows are called the same at home, and even the Welsh have the word,
+but they spell it _cwm_; it is their mountain way. Well, as I was
+saying, everything surrounding me was domestic and grateful, and I was
+therefore in a mood for charity and companionship when I came down the
+last dip and entered Glovelier. But Glovelier is a place of no
+excellence whatever, and if the thought did not seem extravagant I
+should be for putting it to the sword and burning it all down.
+
+For just as I was going along full of kindly thoughts, and had turned
+into the sign of (I think it was) the 'Sun' to drink wine and leave
+them my benediction--
+
+LECTOR. Why your benediction?
+
+AUCTOR. Who else can give benedictions if people cannot when they are
+on pilgrimage? Learn that there are three avenues by which blessing
+can be bestowed, and three kinds of men who can bestow it.
+
+(1) There is the good man, whose goodness makes him of himself a giver
+of blessings. His power is not conferred or of office, but is
+_inhaerens persona_; part of the stuff of his mind. This kind can
+confer the solemn benediction, or _Benedictio major_, if they choose;
+but besides this their every kind thought, word, or action is a
+_Benedictio generalise_ and even their frowns, curses, angry looks and
+irritable gestures may be called _Benedictiones minores vel incerti_.
+I believe I am within the definitions.  I avoid heresy. All this is
+sound theology. I do not smell of the faggot.  And this kind of
+Benedictory Power is the fount or type or natural origin, as it were,
+of all others.
+
+(2) There is the Official of Religion who, in the exercise of his
+office--
+
+LECTOR. For Heaven's sake--
+
+AUCTOR. Who began it? You protested my power to give benediction, and
+I must now prove it at length; otherwise I should fall under the
+accusation of lesser Simony--that is, the false assumption of
+particular powers. Well, then, there is the Official who _ex officio_,
+and when he makes it quite clear that it is _qua sponsus_ and not
+_sicut ut ipse_, can give formal benediction. This power belongs
+certainly to all Bishops, mitred Abbots, and Archimandrates; to
+Patriarchs of course, and _a fortiori_ to the Pope.  In Rome they will
+have it that Monsignores also can so bless, and I have heard it
+debated whether or no the same were not true in some rustic way of
+parish priests. However this may be, all their power proceeds, not
+from themselves, but from the accumulation of goodness left as a
+deposit by the multitudes of exceptionally good men who have lived in
+times past, and who have now no use for it.
+
+(3) Thirdly--and this is my point--any one, good or bad, official or
+non-official, who is for the moment engaged in an _opusfaustum_ can
+act certainly as a conductor or medium, and the influence of what he
+is touching or doing passes to you from him. This is admitted by every
+one who worships trees, wells, and stones; and indeed it stands to
+reason, for it is but a branch of the well-known _'Sanctificatio ex
+loco, opere, tactu vel conditione.'_ I will admit that this power is
+but vague, slight, tenuous, and dissipatory, still there it is: though
+of course its poor effect is to that of the _Benedictio major_ what a
+cat's-paw in the Solent is to a north-east snorter on Lindsey Deeps.
+
+I am sorry to have been at such length, but it is necessary to have
+these things thrashed out once for all. So now you see how I, being on
+pilgrimage, could give a kind of little creeping blessing to the
+people on the way, though, as St Louis said to the Hascisch-eaters,
+_'May it be a long time before you can kiss my bones.'_
+
+So I entered the 'Sun' inn and saw there a woman sewing, a great
+dull-faced man like an ox, and a youth writing down figures in a
+little book. I said--
+
+'Good morning, madam, and sirs, and the company. Could you give me a
+little red wine?' Not a head moved.
+
+True I was very dirty and tired, and they may have thought me a
+beggar, to whom, like good sensible Christians who had no nonsense
+about them, they would rather have given a handsome kick than a cup of
+cold water. However, I think it was not only my poverty but a native
+churlishness which bound their bovine souls in that valley.
+
+I sat down at a very clean table. I notice that those whom the Devil
+has made his own are always spick and span, just as firemen who have
+to go into great furnaces have to keep all their gear highly polished.
+I sat down at it, and said again, still gently--
+
+'It is, indeed, a fine country this of yours. Could you give me a
+little red wine?'
+
+Then the ox-faced man who had his back turned to me, and was the worst
+of the lot, said sulkily, not to me, but to the woman--
+
+'He wants wine.'
+
+The woman as sulkily said to me, not looking me in the eyes--
+
+'How much will you pay?'
+
+I said, 'Bring the wine. Set it here. See me drink it. Charge me your
+due.'
+
+I found that this brutal way of speaking was just what was needed for
+the kine and cattle of this pen. She skipped off to a cupboard, and
+set wine before me, and a glass. I drank quite quietly till I had had
+enough, and asked what there was to pay. She said 'Threepence,' and I
+said 'Too much,' as I paid it. At this the ox-faced man grunted and
+frowned, and I was afraid; but hiding my fear I walked out boldly and
+slowly, and made a noise with my stick upon the floor of the hall
+without. Neither did I bid them farewell. But I made a sign at the
+house as I left it. Whether it suffered from this as did the house at
+Dorchester which the man in the boat caused to wither in one night, is
+more than I can tell.
+
+The road led straight across the valley and approached the further
+wall of hills. These I saw were pierced by one of the curious gaps
+which are peculiar to limestone ranges. Water cuts them, and a torrent
+ran through this one also. The road through it, gap though it was,
+went up steeply, and the further valley was evidently higher than the
+one I was leaving. It was already evening as I entered this narrow
+ravine; the sun only caught the tops of the rock-walls. My fatigue was
+very great, and my walking painful to an extreme, when, having come to
+a place where the gorge was narrowest and where the two sides were
+like the posts of a giant's stile, where also the fifth ridge of the
+Jura stood up beyond me in the further valley, a vast shadow, I sat
+down wearily and drew what not even my exhaustion could render
+unremarkable.
+
+While I was occupied sketching the slabs of limestone, I heard wheels
+coming up behind me, and a boy in a waggon stopped and hailed me.
+
+What the boy wanted to know was whether I would take a lift, and this
+he said in such curious French that I shuddered to think how far I had
+pierced into the heart of the hills, and how soon I might come to
+quite strange people. I was greatly tempted to get into his cart, but
+though I had broken so many of my vows one remained yet whole and
+sound, which was that I would ride upon no wheeled thing. Remembering
+this, therefore, and considering that the Faith is rich in
+interpretation, I clung on to the waggon in such a manner that it did
+all my work for me, and yet could not be said to be actually carrying
+me. _Distinguo_. The essence of a vow is its literal meaning. The
+spirit and intention are for the major morality, and concern Natural
+Religion, but when upon a point of ritual or of dedication or special
+worship a man talks to you of the Spirit and Intention, and complains
+of the dryness of the Word, look at him askance. He is not far removed
+from Heresy.
+
+I knew a man once that was given to drinking, and I made up this rule
+for him to distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil. To wit: that he
+should never drink what has been made and sold since the
+Reformation--I mean especially spirits and champagne. Let him (said I)
+drink red wine and white, good beer and mead--if he could get
+it--liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding,
+fortifying, and confirming beverages that our fathers drank in old
+time; but not whisky, nor brandy, nor sparkling wines, not absinthe,
+nor the kind of drink called gin. This he promised to do, and all went
+well. He became a merry companion, and began to write odes. His prose
+clarified and set, that had before been very mixed and cloudy. He
+slept well; he comprehended divine things; he was already half a
+republican, when one fatal day--it was the feast of the eleven
+thousand virgins, and they were too busy up in heaven to consider the
+needs of us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of
+men--I went with him to the Society for the Prevention of Annoyances
+to the Rich, where a certain usurer's son was to read a paper on the
+cruelty of Spaniards to their mules. As we were all seated there round
+a table with a staring green cloth on it, and a damnable gas pendant
+above, the host of that evening offered him whisky and water, and, my
+back being turned, he took it. Then when I would have taken it from
+him he used these words--
+
+'After all, it is the intention of a pledge that matters;' and I saw
+that all was over, for he had abandoned definition, and was plunged
+back into the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural Religion.
+
+What do you think, then, was the consequence? Why, he had to take some
+nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever, and become a
+spectacle and a judgement, whereas if he had kept his exact word he
+might by this time have been a happy man.
+
+Remembering him and pondering upon the advantage of strict rule, I
+hung on to my cart, taking care to let my feet still feel the road,
+and so passed through the high limestone gates of the gorge, and was
+in the fourth valley of the Jura, with the fifth ridge standing up
+black and huge before me against the last of the daylight. There were
+as yet no stars.
+
+There, in this silent place, was the little village of Undervelier,
+and I thanked the boy, withdrew from his cart, and painfully
+approached the inn, where I asked the woman if she could give me
+something to eat, and she said that she could in about an hour, using,
+however, with regard to what it was I was to have, words which I did
+not understand. For the French had become quite barbaric, and I was
+now indeed lost in one of the inner places of the world.
+
+A cigar is, however, even in Undervelier, a cigar; and the best cost a
+penny. One of these, therefore, I bought, and then I went out smoking
+it into the village square, and, finding a low wall, leaned over it
+and contemplated the glorious clear green water tumbling and roaring
+along beneath it on the other side; for a little river ran through the
+village.
+
+As I leaned there resting and communing I noticed how their church,
+close at hand, was built along the low banks of the torrent. I admired
+the luxuriance of the grass these waters fed, and the generous arch of
+the trees beside it. The graves seemed set in a natural place of rest
+and home, and just beyond this churchyard was that marriage of hewn
+stone and water which is the source of so peculiar a satisfaction; for
+the church tower was built boldly right out into the stream and the
+current went eddying round it. But why it is that strong human
+building when it dips into water should thus affect the mind I cannot
+say, only I know that it is an emotion apart to see our device and
+structure where it is most enduring come up against and challenge that
+element which we cannot conquer, and which has always in it something
+of danger for men. It is therefore well to put strong mouldings on to
+piers and quays, and to make an architecture of them, and so it was a
+splendid thought of the Romans to build their villas right out to sea;
+so they say does Venice enthrall one, but where I have most noticed
+this thing is at the Mont St Michel--only one must take care to shut
+one's eyes or sleep during all the low tide.
+
+As I was watching that stream against those old stones, my cigar being
+now half smoked, a bell began tolling, and it seemed as if the whole
+village were pouring into the church. At this I was very much
+surprised, not having been used at any time of my life to the
+unanimous devotion of an entire population, but having always thought
+of the Faith as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity
+only in places where some sham religion or other glozed over our
+tragedies and excused our sins. Certainly to see all the men, women,
+and children of a place taking Catholicism for granted was a new
+sight, and so I put my cigar carefully down under a stone on the top
+of the wall and went in with them. I then saw that what they were at
+was vespers.
+
+All the village sang, knowing the psalms very well, and I noticed that
+their Latin was nearer German than French; but what was most pleasing
+of all was to hear from all the men and women together that very noble
+good-night and salutation to God which begins--
+
+_Te, lucis ante terminum._
+
+My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by this collective act,
+and I saw for a moment the Catholic Church quite plain, and I
+remembered Europe, and the centuries. Then there left me altogether
+that attitude of difficulty and combat which, for us others, is always
+associated with the Faith. The cities dwindled in my imagination, and
+I took less heed of the modern noise. I went out with them into the
+clear evening and the cool. I found my cigar and lit it again, and
+musing much more deeply than before, not without tears, I considered
+the nature of Belief.
+
+Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an indifference. Those who
+believe nothing but only think and judge cannot understand this. Of
+its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth is full on
+us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight content with
+natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down
+the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and
+forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look
+back and see our home.
+
+What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the
+problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a
+solution.  That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme
+which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again ... But
+I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I
+know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf
+between us and many companions.  We are perpetually thrust into
+minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we
+are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman
+revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger
+of violent decisions.
+
+And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old
+way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We
+see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a
+salt or leaven.  The very nature of social force seems changed to us.
+And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only
+with his fellows.
+
+And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful
+struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in
+spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is
+certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We
+are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the
+duty of that wrestling.
+
+But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a
+command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no
+keener joy known to man.
+
+I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this
+deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and
+accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes
+upon the ground ...
+
+There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in
+historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which
+never cloyed.  A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a
+term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of
+judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the
+vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable
+life--all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely
+to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no
+longer entirely to be admired.
+
+The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no
+comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that
+see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion of
+our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things.
+
+By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a
+great love. There came back into my mind a relic that I have in my
+house. It is a panel of the old door of my college, having carved on
+it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield, _Haec fuit,
+Haec almae janua sacra domus._ Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as
+first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.
+
+It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a child, and it is a
+good thing not to have to return to the Faith.
+
+They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the
+possible exception of Omaha, Neb.
+
+LECTOR. Why do you use phrases like _'possible exception'?_
+
+AUCTOR. Why not? I see that all the religion I have stuck into the
+book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry Maine.
+You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would avoid the
+_cliche_ and the commonplace, and the _phrase toute faite_. Why? Not
+because you naturally write odd prose--contrariwise, left to yourself
+you write pure journalese; but simply because you are swelled and
+puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown school
+calls 'distinction' in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done,
+and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed,
+putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as
+pale as a film of dirty wax--sometimes even they dictate to a
+typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully
+transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and
+take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and
+generally put the Queen's English--yes, the Queen's English--on the
+rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no
+real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique
+meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the
+cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can
+understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written
+by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and
+are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being
+on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel'--a good word.
+
+Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward
+English!  Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men who write
+twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but _their_ honesty is
+proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you higglers
+and sticklers? Perhaps a bad triolet every six months, and a book of
+criticism on something thoroughly threadbare once in five years. If I
+had my way--
+
+LECTOR. I am sorry to have provoked all this.
+
+AUCTOR. Not at all! Not at all! I trust I have made myself clear.
+
+Well, as I was saying, they cook worse at Undervelier than any place I
+was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb. However, I
+forgave them, because they were such good people, and after a short
+and bitter night I went out in the morning before the sun rose and
+took the Moutier road.
+
+The valley in which I was now engaged--the phrase seems familiar--was
+more or less like an H. That is, there were two high parallel ranges
+bounding it, but across the middle a low ridge of perhaps a thousand
+feet. The road slowly climbed this ridge through pastures where cows
+with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and where
+one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All
+the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the
+night before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread
+or coffee, which was a folly.
+
+When I got to the top of the ridge there was a young man chopping wood
+outside a house, and I asked him in French how far it was to Moutier.
+He answered in German, and I startled him by a loud cry, such as
+sailors give when they see land, for at last I had struck the boundary
+of the languages, and was with pure foreigners for the first time in
+my life. I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him
+to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all
+such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over
+me and grew deeper as I descended.
+
+And my first verse was--
+
+  Heretics all, whoever you be, 
+  In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
+  You never shall have good words from me.  
+  _Caritas non conturbat me._
+
+If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end, it was because I had
+to show that it was a song connected with the Universal Fountain and
+with European culture, and with all that Heresy combats. I sang it to
+a lively hymn-tune that I had invented for the occasion.
+
+I then thought what a fine fellow I was, and how pleasant were my
+friends when I agreed with them. I made up this second verse, which I
+sang even more loudly than the first; and the forest grew deeper,
+sending back echoes--
+
+  But Catholic men that live upon wine 
+  Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine; 
+  Wherever I travel I find it so, 
+  _Benedicamus Domino._
+
+There is no doubt, however, that if one is really doing a catholic
+work, and expressing one's attitude to the world, charity, pity, and a
+great sense of fear should possess one, or, at least, appear. So I
+made up this third verse and sang it to suit--
+
+  On childing women that are forlorn, 
+  And men that sweat in nothing but scorn: 
+  That is on all that ever were born, 
+  _Miserere Domine._
+
+Then, as everything ends in death, and as that is just what Heretics
+least like to be reminded of, I ended thus--
+
+  To my poor self on my deathbed, 
+  And all my dear companions dead,
+  Because of the love that I bore them, 
+  _Dona Eis Requiem._
+
+I say 'I ended.' But I did not really end there, for I also wrote in
+the spirit of the rest a verse of Mea Culpa and Confession of Sin, but
+I shall not print it here.
+
+So my song over and the woods now left behind, I passed up a dusty
+piece of road into Moutier, a detestable town, all whitewashed and
+orderly, down under the hills.
+
+I was tired, for the sun was now long risen and somewhat warm, and I
+had walked ten miles, and that over a high ridge; and I had written a
+canticle and sung it--- and all that without a sup or a bite. I
+therefore took bread, coffee, and soup in Moutier, and then going a
+little way out of the town I crossed a stream off the road, climbed a
+knoll, and, lying under a tree, I slept.
+
+I awoke and took the road.
+
+The road after Moutier was not a thing for lyrics; it stirred me in no
+way.  It was bare in the sunlight, had fields on either side; and in
+the fields stood houses. In the houses were articulately-speaking
+mortal men.
+
+There is a school of Poets (I cannot read them myself) who treat of
+common things, and their admirers tell us that these men raise the
+things of everyday life to the plane of the supernatural. Note that
+phrase, for it is a shaft of light through a cloud revealing their
+disgusting minds.
+
+Everyday life! As _La Croix_ said in a famous leading article: _'La
+Presse?'_ POOH!' I know that everyday life. It goes with sandals and
+pictures of lean ugly people all just like one another in browny
+photographs on the wall, and these pictures are called, one 'The House
+of Life', or another, 'The Place Beautiful', or yet again a third,
+'The Lamp of the Valley', and when you complain and shift about
+uneasily before these pictures, the scrub-minded and dusty-souled
+owners of them tell you that of course in photographs you lose the
+marvellous colour of the original. This everyday life has mantelpieces
+made of the same stuff as cafe-tables, so that by instinct I try to
+make rings on them with my wine-glass, and the people who suffer this
+life get up every morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the house
+slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and
+more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to
+local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether
+this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins
+crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no
+simplicity, and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of
+that life where they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or
+Pietas.
+
+LECTOR. Then--
+
+AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest
+dust.  Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from
+one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss
+Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which
+makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts,
+they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their
+souls.
+
+LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?
+
+AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I
+will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this
+road from Moutier.
+
+LECTOR. By all means.
+
+AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly
+bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!
+
+LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!
+
+AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night.
+
+LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman.
+
+AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction.
+
+LECTOR. Yes, indeed.
+
+AUCTOR. Indeed, yes.
+
+LECTOR. I cannot go on like this.
+
+AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One cannot treat of
+common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I were the
+editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of
+dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would
+count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some
+quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to
+pad out their work.
+
+So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next time I come to a bit
+of road about which there is nothing to say, I will tell a story or
+sing a song, and to that I pledge myself.
+
+By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you know those books and
+stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no words at all?
+Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I wonder what
+the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn a mint of money,
+for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this--
+
+There. That seems to me worth a good deal more money than all the
+modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense ever written.
+What verve!  What terseness! And yet how clear!
+
+LECTOR. Let us be getting on.
+
+AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more enduring things.
+
+After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed through another gap
+in the hills and--
+
+LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon that little tragedy
+of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess?
+
+AUCTOR. Well, it was a short play and modern, was it not?
+
+LECTOR. Yes. And therefore, of course, you must have a title in it. I
+know that. I do not object to it. What I want to know is, why a
+duchess?
+
+AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the concentration of the
+thing. You see in the full play there would have been a lord, two
+baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable words
+into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the
+element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one
+startling moment. Do you follow?  Is it not art?
+
+I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of
+great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic
+nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of
+Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him
+into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the
+youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting
+beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even
+going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich
+in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with
+another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him
+out of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or
+Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to
+stray dogs.
+
+When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing like a pagan, and
+asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the gallows as well as
+a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son very
+humbly and contritely said--
+
+'It is not my fault but the contact with the things of the Church that
+makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil they say is a good enough
+fellow left to himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you put
+him into holy water all the world is witness how he hisses and boils.'
+
+The boy then taking a little lamb which happened to be in the
+drawing-room, said--
+
+'Father, see this little lamb; how demure he is and how simple and
+innocent, and how foolish and how tractable. Yet observe!' With that
+he whipped the cassock from his arm where he was carrying it and threw
+it all over the lamb, covering his head and body; and the lamb began
+plunging and kicking and bucking and rolling and heaving and sliding
+and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical
+and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all
+the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the
+great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on
+All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock
+again, the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became
+quite gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed.
+
+'There, father,' said the boy, 'is proof to you of how the meekest may
+be driven to desperation by the shackles I speak of, and which I pray
+you never lay upon me again.'
+
+His father finding him so practical and wise made over his whole
+fortune and business to him, and thus escaped the very heavy Heriot
+and Death Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant of St Remi in
+Double Burgage. But we stopped all that here in England by the statute
+of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark
+catches me.
+
+As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and there was there a
+house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses was an inn.
+Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very
+last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before
+me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line
+against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather
+misleading, and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein.
+
+So before that last effort which should lead me over those thousands
+of feet, and to nourish Instinct (which would be of use to me when I
+got into that impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn for wine.
+
+A very old woman having the appearance of a witch sat at a dark table
+by the little criss-cross window of the dark room. She was crooning to
+herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and asked her in French
+for wine; but French she did not understand. Catching, however, two
+words which sounded like the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw'
+after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly
+good red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily.
+
+Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of
+small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one
+Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up
+angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal
+with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse
+which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his
+now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian
+twaddle of accents I intoned to her--and so left her astounded to
+repentance or to shame.
+
+Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing over running water put
+myself out of her power.
+
+The wood went up darkly and the path branched here and there so that I
+was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally what seemed to
+me the most southerly course, and so came at last up steeply through a
+dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge.
+
+Just as I came to the end of the rise, after perhaps an hour, perhaps
+two, of that great curtain of forest which had held the mountain side,
+the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a gate, and then the path
+was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very top of the Jura and
+the coping of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. I had
+crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning out of my way.
+
+It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a moment to breathe
+and look about me.
+
+It was evident that nothing higher remained, for though a new line of
+wood--firs and beeches--stood before me, yet nothing appeared above
+them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. I
+approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence of
+post and rails bounding it, and as I was looking for the entry of a
+path (for my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp
+grass of the little down) there came to me one of those great
+revelations which betray to us suddenly the higher things and stand
+afterwards firm in our minds.
+
+There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the
+ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.
+
+What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I
+am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.
+
+I saw between the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the
+sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great
+surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop
+breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something
+I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the
+branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.
+
+I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the
+fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees
+stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a
+tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply
+below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast
+cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further,
+beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God.
+For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an
+illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the
+dim bluish sky that overhangs an horizon.
+
+There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge
+of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up--a belt in
+that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote,
+remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a
+steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the
+immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away,
+they stood up like the walls of Eden.  I say it again, they stopped my
+breath. I had seen them.
+
+So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed in our muddy and
+immediate interests that we think, by numbers and recitals, to
+comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting infinities. Here
+were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now
+for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and because they
+were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two
+high, they were become something different from us others, and could
+strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in
+the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling
+colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the
+things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of
+summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their
+quality as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown
+array) they occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things
+proper to the sky were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed.
+
+To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment? So, in first love
+one finds that _this_ can belong to _me._
+
+Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my
+adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky,
+but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing
+creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow
+movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at
+home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and
+that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to
+interpret them for others.
+
+These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one's
+immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those
+few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more.
+Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it
+were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of
+height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of
+reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration
+also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I
+know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and
+it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of
+merriment in the soul of a sane man.
+
+Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in
+my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I
+felt.
+
+This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not
+me, for I am afraid of slipping down.
+
+Then you will say, if I felt all this, why do I draw it, and put it in
+my book, seeing that my drawings are only for fun? My jest drags down
+such a memory and makes it ludicrous. Well, I said in my beginning
+that I would note down whatever most impressed me, except figures,
+which I cannot draw (I mean figures of human beings, for mathematical
+figures I can draw well enough), and I have never failed in this
+promise, except where, as in the case of Porrentruy, my drawing was
+blown away by the wind and lost--- if anything ever is lost. So I put
+down here this extraordinary drawing of what I saw, which is about as
+much like it as a printed song full of misprints is to that same song
+sung by an army on the march. And I am consoled by remembering that if
+I could draw infinitely well, then it would become sacrilege to
+attempt to draw that sight. Moreover, I am not going to waste any more
+time discussing why I put in this little drawing. If it disturbs your
+conception of what it was I saw, paste over it a little bit of paper.
+I have made it small for the purpose; but remember that the paper
+should be thin and opaque, for thick paper will interfere with the
+shape of this book, and transparent paper will disturb you with a
+memory of the picture.
+
+It was all full of this, as a man is full of music just after hearing
+it, that I plunged down into the steep forest that led towards the
+great plain; then, having found a path, I worked zig-zag down it by a
+kind of gully that led through to a place where the limestone cliffs
+were broken, and (so my map told me) to the town of Soleure, which
+stands at the edge of the plain upon the river Aar.
+
+I was an hour or more going down the enormous face of the Jura, which
+is here an escarpment, a cliff of great height, and contains but few
+such breaks by which men can pick their way. It was when I was about
+half-way down the mountain side that its vastness most impressed me.
+And yet it had been but a platform as it were, from which to view the
+Alps and their much greater sublimity.
+
+This vastness, even of these limestone mountains, took me especially
+at a place where the path bordered a steep, or rather precipitous,
+lift of white rock to which only here and there a tree could cling.
+
+I was still very high up, but looking somewhat more eastward than
+before, and the plain went on inimitably towards some low vague hills;
+nor in that direction could any snow be seen in the sky. Then at last
+I came to the slopes which make a little bank under the mountains, and
+there, finding a highroad, and oppressed somewhat suddenly by the
+afternoon heat of those low places, I went on more slowly towards
+Soleure.
+
+Beside me, on the road, were many houses, shaded by great trees, built
+of wood, and standing apart. To each of them almost was a little
+water-wheel, run by the spring which came down out of the ravine. The
+water-wheel in most cases worked a simple little machine for sawing
+planks, but in other cases it seemed used for some purpose inside the
+house, which I could not divine; perhaps for spinning.
+
+All this place was full of working, and the men sang and spoke at
+their work in German, which I could not understand. I did indeed find
+one man, a young hay-making man carrying a scythe, who knew a little
+French and was going my way. I asked him, therefore, to teach me
+German, but he had not taught me much before we were at the gates of
+the old town and then I left him. It is thus, you will see, that for
+my next four days or five, which were passed among the German-speaking
+Swiss, I was utterly alone.
+
+This book must not go on for ever; therefore I cannot say very much
+about Soleure, although there is a great deal to be said about it. It
+is distinguished by an impression of unity, and of civic life, which I
+had already discovered in all these Swiss towns; for though men talk
+of finding the Middle Ages here or there, I for my part never find it,
+save where there has been democracy to preserve it. Thus I have seen
+the Middle Ages especially alive in the small towns of Northern
+France, and I have seen the Middle Ages in the University of Paris.
+Here also in Switzerland. As I had seen it at St Ursanne, so I found
+it now at Soleure. There were huge gates flanking the town, and there
+was that evening a continual noise of rifles, at which the Swiss are
+for ever practising. Over the church, however, I saw something
+terribly seventeenth century, namely, Jaweh in great Hebrew letters
+upon its front.
+
+Well, dining there of the best they had to give me (for this was
+another milestone in my pilgrimage), I became foolishly refreshed and
+valiant, and instead of sleeping in Soleure, as a wise man would have
+done, I determined, though it was now nearly dark, to push on upon the
+road to Burgdorf.
+
+I therefore crossed the river Aar, which is here magnificently broad
+and strong, and has bastions jutting out into it in a very bold
+fashion. I saw the last colourless light of evening making its waters
+seem like dull metal between the gloomy banks; I felt the beginnings
+of fatigue, and half regretted my determination. But as it is quite
+certain that one should never go back, I went on in the darkness, I do
+not know how many miles, till I reached some cross roads and an inn.
+
+This inn was very poor, and the people had never heard in their lives,
+apparently, that a poor man on foot might not be able to talk German,
+which seemed to me an astonishing thing; and as I sat there ordering
+beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for this would
+have me their butt, and even as it was found something monstrous in
+me), I pondered during my continual attempts to converse with them
+(for I had picked up some ten words of their language) upon the folly
+of those who imagine the world to be grown smaller by railways.
+
+I suppose this place was more untouched, as the phrase goes, that is,
+more living, more intense, and more powerful to affect others,
+whenever it may be called to do so, than are even the dear villages of
+Sussex that lie under my downs. For those are haunted by a nearly
+cosmopolitan class of gentry, who will have actors, financiers, and
+what not to come and stay with them, and who read the paper, and from
+time to time address their village folk upon matters of politics. But
+here, in this broad plain by the banks of the Emmen, they knew of
+nothing but themselves and the Church which is the common bond of
+Europe, and they were in the right way. Hence it was doubly hard on me
+that they should think me such a stranger.
+
+When I had become a little morose at their perpetual laughter, I asked
+for a bed, and the landlady, a woman of some talent, showed me on her
+fingers that the beds were 50c., 75c., and a franc. I determined upon
+the best, and was given indeed a very pleasant room, having in it the
+statue of a saint, and full of a country air. But I had done too much
+in this night march, as you will presently learn, for my next day was
+a day without salt, and in it appreciation left me. And this breakdown
+of appreciation was due to what I did not know at the time to be
+fatigue, but to what was undoubtedly a deep inner exhaustion.
+
+When I awoke next morning it was as it always is: no one was awake,
+and I had the field to myself, to slip out as I chose. I looked out of
+the window into the dawn. The race had made its own surroundings.
+
+These people who suffocated with laughter at the idea of one's knowing
+no German, had produced, as it were, a German picture by the mere
+influence of years and years of similar thoughts.
+
+Out of my window I saw the eaves coming low down. I saw an apple-tree
+against the grey light. The tangled grass in the little garden, the
+dog-kennel, and the standing butt were all what I had seen in those
+German pictures which they put into books for children, and which are
+drawn in thick black lines: nor did I see any reason why tame faces
+should not appear in that framework. I expected the light lank hair
+and the heavy unlifting step of the people whose only emotions are in
+music.
+
+But it was too early for any one to be about, and my German garden,
+_si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi,_ had to suffice me for an impression of
+the Central Europeans. I gazed at it a little while as it grew
+lighter. Then I went downstairs and slipped the latch (which, being
+German, was of a quaint design). I went out into the road and sighed
+profoundly.
+
+All that day was destined to be covered, so far as my spirit was
+concerned, with a motionless lethargy. Nothing seemed properly to
+interest or to concern me, and not till evening was I visited by any
+muse. Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a
+subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation
+that had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind. I had
+the feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that
+their language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men
+who travel, I had never felt before.
+
+The reason being this: that if a man has English thoroughly he can
+wander over a great part of the world familiarly, and meet men with
+whom he can talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy, and I
+suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to him. Not perhaps that he
+will understand what he hears or will be understood of others, but
+that the order and nature of the words and the gestures accompanying
+them are his own. Here, however, I, to whom English and French were
+the same, was to spend (it seemed) whole days among a people who put
+their verbs at the end, where the curses or the endearments come in
+French and English, and many of whose words stand for ideas we have
+not got. I had no room for good-fellowship. I could not sit at tables
+and expand the air with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about
+their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or sadness by my tales.
+It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken among dumb men.
+
+Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality,
+for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with
+which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such
+frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it
+saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights
+had I been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed in the open.
+Seven great heights had I climbed: the Forest, Archettes, the Ballon,
+the Mont Terrible, the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, the
+Weissenstein. Seven depths had I fallen to: twice to the Moselle, the
+gap of Belfort, the gorge of the Doubs, Glovelier valley, the hole of
+Moutier, and now this plain of the Aar. I had marched 180 miles. It
+was no wonder that on this eighth day I was oppressed and that all the
+light long I drank no good wine, met no one to remember well, nor sang
+any songs. All this part of my way was full of what they call Duty,
+and I was sustained only by my knowledge that the vast mountains
+(which had disappeared) would be part of my life very soon if I still
+went on steadily towards Rome.
+
+The sun had risen when I reached Burgdorf, and I there went to a
+railway station, and outside of it drank coffee and ate bread. I also
+bought old newspapers in French, and looked at everything wearily and
+with sad eyes.  There was nothing to draw. How can a man draw pain in
+the foot and knee?  And that was all there was remarkable at that
+moment.
+
+I watched a train come in. It was full of tourists, who (it may have
+been a subjective illusion) seemed to me common and worthless people,
+and sad into the bargain. It was going to Interlaken; and I felt a
+languid contempt for people who went to Interlaken instead of driving
+right across the great hills to Rome.
+
+After an hour, or so of this melancholy dawdling, I put a map before
+me on a little marble table, ordered some more coffee, and blew into
+my tepid life a moment of warmth by the effort of coming to a
+necessary decision. I had (for the first time since I had left
+Lorraine) the choice of two roads; and why this was so the following
+map will make clear.
+
+Here you see that there is no possibility of following the straight
+way to Rome, but that one must go a few miles east or west of it. From
+Burgundy one has to strike a point on the sources of the Emmen, and
+Burgdorf is on the Emmen. Therefore one might follow the Emmen all the
+way up. But it seemed that the road climbed up above a gorge that way,
+whereas by the other (which is just as straight) the road is good (it
+seemed) and fairly level.  So I chose this latter Eastern way, which,
+at the bifurcation, takes one up a tributary of the Emmen, then over a
+rise to the Upper Emmen again.
+
+Do you want it made plainer than that? I should think not. And, tell
+me--what can it profit you to know these geographical details? Believe
+me, I write them down for my own gratification, not yours.
+
+I say a day without salt. A trudge. The air was ordinary, the colours
+common; men, animals, and trees indifferent. Something had stopped
+working.
+
+Our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it, even
+if we can cover thirty miles day after day (as I can), or bend a peony
+in one's hand as could Frocot, the driver in my piece--a man you never
+knew--or write bad verse very rapidly as can so many moderns. I say
+our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it as
+though it were from ourselves, but we should accept it as a kind of
+present, and we should be thankful for it; just as a man should thank
+God for his reason, as did the madman in the Story of the Rose, who
+thanked God that he at least was sane though all the rest of the world
+had recently lost their reason.
+
+Indeed, this defaillance and breakdown which comes from time to time
+over the mind is a very sad thing, but it can be made of great use to
+us if we will draw from it the lesson that we ourselves are nothing.
+Perhaps it is a grace. Perhaps in these moments our minds repose ...
+Anyhow, a day without salt.
+
+You understand that under (or in) these circumstances--
+
+When I was at Oxford there was a great and terrible debate that shook
+the Empire, and that intensely exercised the men whom we send out to
+govern the Empire, and which, therefore, must have had its effect upon
+the Empire, as to whether one should say 'under these circumstances'
+or 'in these circumstances'; nor did I settle matters by calling a
+conclave and suggesting _Quae quum ita sint_ as a common formula,
+because a new debate arose upon when you should say _sint_ and when
+you should say _sunt,_ and they all wrangled like kittens in a basket.
+
+Until there rose a deep-voiced man from an outlying college, who said,
+'For my part I will say that under these circumstances, or in these
+circumstances, or in spite of these circumstances, or hovering
+playfully above these circumstances, or--
+
+I take you all for Fools and Pedants, in the Chief, in the Chevron,
+and in the quarter Fess. Fools absolute, and Pedants lordless. Free
+Fools, unlanded Fools, and Fools incommensurable, and Pedants
+displayed and rampant of the Tierce Major. Fools incalculable and
+Pedants irreparable; indeed, the arch Fool-pedants in a universe of
+pedantic folly and foolish pedantry, O you pedant-fools of the world!'
+
+But by this time he was alone, and thus was this great question never
+properly decided.
+
+Under these circumstances, then (or in these circumstances), it would
+profit you but little if I were to attempt the description of the
+Valley of the Emmen, of the first foot-hills of the Alps, and of the
+very uninteresting valley which runs on from Langnau.
+
+I had best employ my time in telling the story of the Hungry Student.
+
+LECTOR. And if you are so worn-out and bereft of all emotions, how can
+you tell a story?
+
+AUCTOR. These two conditions permit me. First, that I am writing some
+time after, and that I have recovered; secondly, that the story is not
+mine, but taken straight out of that nationalist newspaper which had
+served me so long to wrap up my bread and bacon in my haversack. This
+is the story, and I will tell it you.
+
+Now, I think of it, it would be a great waste of time. Here am I no
+farther than perhaps a third of my journey, and I have already
+admitted so much digression that my pilgrimage is like the story of a
+man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and
+straightforward narrative of fact. I will therefore postpone the Story
+of the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the
+barren hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of
+Tuscany, or in some other place where a little padding will do neither
+you nor me any great harm.
+
+On the other hand, do not imagine that I am going to give you any kind
+of description of this intolerable day's march. If you want some kind
+of visual Concept (pretty word), take all these little chalets which
+were beginning and make what you can of them.
+
+LECTOR. Where are they?
+
+AUCTOR. They are still in Switzerland; not here. They were
+overnumerous as I maundered up from where at last the road leaves the
+valley and makes over a little pass for a place called Schangnau. But
+though it is not a story, on the contrary, an exact incident and the
+truth--a thing that I would swear to in the court of justice, or quite
+willingly and cheerfully believe if another man told it to me; or even
+take as historical if I found it in a modern English history of the
+Anglo-Saxon Church--though, I repeat, it is a thing actually lived,
+yet I will tell it you.
+
+It was at the very end of the road, and when an enormous weariness had
+begun to add some kind of interest to this stuffless episode of the
+dull day, that a peasant with a brutal face, driving a cart very
+rapidly, came up with me. I said to him nothing, but he said to me
+some words in German which I did not understand. We were at that
+moment just opposite a little inn upon the right hand of the road, and
+the peasant began making signs to me to hold his horse for him while
+he went in and drank.
+
+How willing I was to do this you will not perhaps understand, unless
+you have that delicate and subtle pleasure in the holding of horses'
+heads, which is the boast and glory of some rare minds. And I was the
+more willing to do it from the fact that I have the habit of this kind
+of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a horse
+for no less a person than a General of Division, who gave me a franc
+for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery,
+purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher said
+when he published the popular edition of _Pamela,_ I held the horse
+for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit understanding
+that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink, which I, of
+course, expected him to bring in his own hands.
+
+Far from it. I can understand the anger which some people feel against
+the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold
+that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord,
+and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is
+Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen
+that you find there.
+
+Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the peasant sat in
+there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters of an hour.
+Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and cough and
+spit and turn round again and say something to the people within in
+German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I
+held this horse.
+
+I was already in a very angry and irritable mood, for the horse was
+restive and smelt his stable, and wished to break away from me. And
+all angry and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if this man
+were coming to relieve me; but I saw him laughing and joking with the
+people inside; and they were all looking my way out of their window as
+they laughed. I may have been wrong, but I thought they were laughing
+at me. A man who knows the Swiss intimately, and who has written a
+book upon 'The Drink Traffic: The Example of Switzerland', tells me
+they certainly were not laughing at me; at any rate, I thought they
+were, and moved by a sudden anger I let go the reins, gave the horse a
+great clout, and set him off careering and galloping like a whirlwind
+down the road from which he had come, with the bit in his teeth and
+all the storms of heaven in his four feet. Instantly, as you may
+imagine, all the scoffers came tumbling out of the inn, hullabooling,
+gesticulating, and running like madmen after the horse, and one old
+man even turned to protest to me. But I, setting my teeth, grasping my
+staff, and remembering the purpose of my great journey, set on up the
+road again with my face towards Rome.
+
+I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will
+not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to
+me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot
+seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all
+the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going
+to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.
+
+Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living!
+For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be
+skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and
+eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of
+his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing--
+
+  Can fix the high elusive hour 
+  And stand in things divine.
+
+And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the
+way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash
+of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad
+master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills.
+
+So. It was already evening. I was coming, more tired than ever, to a
+kind of little pass by which my road would bring me back again to the
+Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope down the other side of
+the little pass (three or four hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a
+village, called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was a large
+school on my right and a great number of children there dancing round
+in a ring and singing songs.  The sight so cheered me that I
+determined to press on up the valley, though with no definite goal for
+the night. It was a foolish decision, for I was really in the heart of
+an unknown country, at the end of roads, at the sources of rivers,
+beyond help. I knew that straight before me, not five miles away, was
+the Brienzer Grat, the huge high wall which it was my duty to cross
+right over from side to side. I did not know whether or not there was
+an inn between me and that vast barrier.
+
+The light was failing. I had perhaps some vague idea of sleeping out,
+but that would have killed me, for a heavy mist that covered all the
+tops of the hills and that made a roof over the valley, began to drop
+down a fine rain; and, as they sing in church on Christmas Eve, 'the
+heavens sent down their dews upon a just man'. But that was written in
+Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing; there and then in the cold
+evening they would have done better to have warmed the righteous.
+There is no controlling them; they mean well, but they bungle
+terribly.
+
+The road stopped being a road, and became like a Californian trail. I
+approached enormous gates in the hills, high, precipitous, and narrow.
+The mist rolled over them, hiding their summits and making them seem
+infinitely lifted up and reaching endlessly into the thick sky; the
+straight, tenuous lines of the rain made them seem narrower still.
+Just as I neared them, hobbling, I met a man driving two cows, and
+said to him the word, 'Guest-house?' to which he said 'Yaw!' and
+pointed out a clump of trees to me just under the precipice and right
+in the gates I speak of. So I went there over an old bridge, and found
+a wooden house and went in.
+
+It was a house which one entered without ceremony. The door was open,
+and one walked straight into a great room. There sat three men playing
+at cards. I saluted them loudly in French, English, and Latin, but
+they did not understand me, and what seemed remarkable in an hotel
+(for it was an hotel rather than an inn), no one in the house
+understood me--neither the servants nor any one; but the servants did
+not laugh at me as had the poor people near Burgdorf, they only stood
+round me looking at me patiently in wonder as cows do at trains. Then
+they brought me food, and as I did not know the names of the different
+kinds of food, I had to eat what they chose; and the angel of that
+valley protected me from boiled mutton. I knew, however, the word
+Wein, which is the same in all languages, and so drank a quart of it
+consciously and of a set purpose. Then I slept, and next morning at
+dawn I rose up, put on my thin, wet linen clothes, and went
+downstairs. No one was about. I looked around for something to fill my
+sack. I picked up a great hunk of bread from the dining-room table,
+and went out shivering into the cold drizzle that was still falling
+from a shrouded sky. Before me, a great forbidding wall, growing
+blacker as it went upwards and ending in a level line of mist, stood
+the Brienzer Grat.
+
+To understand what I next had to do it is necessary to look back at
+the little map on page 105.
+
+You will observe that the straight way to Rome cuts the Lake of Brienz
+rather to the eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over
+Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen.
+That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in
+Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some
+old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for
+instance, the bones of the Dodo....  But I digress. The point is that
+the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and
+then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever
+of it was possible had to be done, and among the possible things was
+clambering over the high ridge of the Brienzer Grat instead of going
+round like a coward by Interlaken. After I had clambered over it,
+however, needs must I should have to take a pass called the Grimsel
+Pass and reach the Rhone Valley that way. It was with such a
+determination that I had come here to the upper waters of the Emmen,
+and stood now on a moist morning in the basin where that stream rises,
+at the foot of the mountain range that divided me from the lake.
+
+The Brienzer Grat is an extraordinary thing. It is quite straight; its
+summits are, of course, of different heights, but from below they seem
+even, like a ridge: and, indeed, the whole mountain is more like a
+ridge than any other I have seen. At one end is a peak called the 'Red
+Horn', the other end falls suddenly above Interlaken, and wherever you
+should cut it you would get a section like this, for it is as steep as
+anything can be short of sheer rock. There are no precipices on it,
+though there are nasty slabs quite high enough to kill a man--I saw
+several of three or four hundred feet. It is about five or six
+thousand feet high, and it stands right up and along the northern
+shore of the lake of Brienz. I began the ascent.
+
+Spongy meads, that soughed under the feet and grew steeper as one
+rose, took up the first few hundred feet. Little rivulets of mere
+dampness ran in among the under moss, and such very small hidden
+flowers as there were drooped with the surfeit of moisture. The rain
+was now indistinguishable from a mist, and indeed I had come so near
+to the level belt of cloud, that already its gloom was exchanged for
+that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them
+their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me,
+clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many
+turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped
+me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive
+drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to gauge one's progress.
+
+Now and then a higher mass of rock, a peak on the ridge, would showr
+clear through a corridor of cloud and be hidden again; also at times I
+would stand hesitating before a sharp wall or slab, and wait for a
+shifting of the fog to make sure of the best way round. I struck what
+might have been a loose path or perhaps only a gully; lost it again
+and found it again. In one place I climbed up a jagged surface for
+fifty feet, only to find when it cleared that it was no part of the
+general ascent, but a mere obstacle which might have been outflanked.
+At another time I stopped for a good quarter of an hour at an edge
+that might have been an indefinite fall of smooth rock, but that
+turned out to be a short drop, easy for a man, and not much longer
+than my body. So I went upwards always, drenched and doubting, and not
+sure of the height I had reached at any time.
+
+At last I came to a place where a smooth stone lay between two
+pillared monoliths, as though it had been put there for a bench.
+Though all around me was dense mist, yet I could see above me the
+vague shape of a summit looming quite near. So I said to myself--
+
+'I will sit here and wait till it grows lighter and clearer, for I
+must now be within two or three hundred feet of the top of the ridge,
+and as anything at all may be on the other side, I had best go
+carefully and knowing my way.'
+
+So I sat down facing the way I had to go and looking upwards, till
+perhaps a movement of the air might show me against a clear sky the
+line of the ridge, and so let me estimate the work that remained to
+do. I kept my eyes fixed on the point where I judged that sky line to
+lie, lest I should miss some sudden gleam revealing it; and as I sat
+there I grew mournful and began to consider the folly of climbing this
+great height on an empty stomach. The soldiers of the Republic fought
+their battles often before breakfast, but never, I think, without
+having drunk warm coffee, and no one should attempt great efforts
+without some such refreshment before starting.  Indeed, my fasting,
+and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and the dampness that
+had soaked my thin clothes through and through, quite lowered my blood
+and left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered and demanded
+the sun.
+
+Then I bethought me of the hunk of bread I had stolen, and pulling it
+out of my haversack I began to munch that ungrateful breakfast. It was
+hard and stale, and gave me little sustenance; I still gazed upwards
+into the uniform meaningless light fog, looking for the ridge.
+
+Suddenly, with no warning to prepare the mind, a faint but distinct
+wind blew upon me, the mist rose in a wreath backward and upward, and
+I was looking through clear immensity, not at any ridge, but over an
+awful gulf at great white fields of death. The Alps were right upon me
+and before me, overwhelming and commanding empty downward distances of
+air. Between them and me was a narrow dreadful space of nothingness
+and silence, and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that
+prodigious hollow, lay the little lake.
+
+My stone had not been a halting-place at all, but was itself the
+summit of the ridge, and those two rocks on either side of it framed a
+notch upon the very edge and skyline of the high hills of Brienz.
+
+Surprise and wonder had not time to form in my spirit before both were
+swallowed up by fear. The proximity of that immense wall of cold, the
+Alps, seen thus full from the level of its middle height and
+comprehended as it cannot be from the depths; its suggestion of
+something never changing throughout eternity--yet dead--was a threat
+to the eager mind. They, the vast Alps, all wrapped round in ice,
+frozen, and their immobility enhanced by the delicate, roaming veils
+which (as from an attraction) hovered in their hollows, seemed to halt
+the process of living. And the living soul whom they thus perturbed
+was supported by no companionship. There were no trees or blades of
+grass around me, only the uneven and primal stones of that height.
+There were no birds in the gulf; there was no sound. And the whiteness
+of the glaciers, the blackness of the snow-streaked rocks beyond, was
+glistening and unsoftened. There had come something evil into their
+sublimity. I was afraid.
+
+Nor could I bear to look downwards. The slope was in no way a danger.
+A man could walk up it without often using his hands, and a man could
+go down it slowly without any direct fall, though here and there he
+would have to turn round at each dip or step and hold with his hands
+and feel a little for his foothold. I suppose the general slope, down,
+down, to where the green began was not sixty degrees, but have you
+ever tried looking down five thousand feet at sixty degrees? It drags
+the mind after it, and I could not bear to begin the descent.
+
+However I reasoned with myself. I said to myself that a man should
+only be afraid of real dangers. That nightmare was not for the
+daylight. That there was now no mist but a warm sun. Then choosing a
+gully where water sometimes ran, but now dry, I warily began to
+descend, using my staff and leaning well backwards.
+
+There was this disturbing thing about the gully, that it went in
+steps, and before each step one saw the sky just a yard or two ahead:
+one lost the comforting sight of earth. One knew of course that it
+would only be a little drop, and that the slope would begin again, but
+it disturbed one.  And it is a trial to drop or clamber down, say
+fourteen or fifteen feet, sometimes twenty, and then to find no flat
+foothold but that eternal steep beginning again. And this outline in
+which I have somewhat, but not much, exaggerated the slope, will show
+what I mean. The dotted line is the line of vision just as one got to
+a 'step'. The little figure is AUCTOR. LECTOR is up in the air looking
+at him. Observe the perspective of the lake below, but make no
+comments.
+
+I went very slowly. When I was about half-way down and had come to a
+place where a shoulder of heaped rock stood on my left and where
+little parallel ledges led up to it, having grown accustomed to the
+descent and easier in my mind, I sat down on a slab and drew
+imperfectly the things I saw: the lake below me, the first forests
+clinging to the foot of the Alps beyond, their higher slopes of snow,
+and the clouds that had now begun to gather round them and that
+altogether hid the last third of their enormous height.
+
+Then I saw a steamer on the lake. I felt in touch with men. The slope
+grew easier. I snapped my fingers at the great devils that haunt high
+mountains.  I sniffed the gross and comfortable air of the lower
+valleys, I entered the belt of wood and was soon going quite a pace
+through the trees, for I had found a path, and was now able to sing.
+So I did.
+
+At last I saw through the trunks, but a few hundred feet below me, the
+highroad that skirts the lake. I left the path and scrambled straight
+down to it. I came to a wall which I climbed, and found myself in
+somebody's garden. Crossing this and admiring its wealth and order (I
+was careful not to walk on the lawns), I opened a little private gate
+and came on to the road, and from there to Brienz was but a short way
+along a fine hard surface in a hot morning sun, with the gentle lake
+on my right hand not five yards away, and with delightful trees upon
+my left, caressing and sometimes even covering me with their shade.
+
+I was therefore dry, ready and contented when I entered by mid morning
+the curious town of Brienz, which is all one long street, and of which
+the population is Protestant. I say dry, ready and contented; dry in
+my clothes, ready for food, contented with men and nature. But as I
+entered I squinted up that interminable slope, I saw the fog wreathing
+again along the ridge so infinitely above me, and I considered myself
+a fool to have crossed the Brienzer Grat without breakfast. But I
+could get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no one thought I
+had done it, though several people there could talk French.
+
+The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar; it is also the eastern
+flank of that great _massif,_ or bulk and mass of mountains called the
+Bernese Oberland. Western Switzerland, you must know, is not (as I
+first thought it was when I gazed down from the Weissenstein) a plain
+surrounded by a ring of mountains, but rather it is a plain in its
+northern half (the plain of the lower Aar), and in its southern half
+it is two enormous parallel lumps of mountains. I call them 'lumps',
+because they are so very broad and tortuous in their plan that they
+are hardly ranges. Now these two lumps are the Bernese Oberland and
+the Pennine Alps, and between them runs a deep trench called the
+valley of the Rhone. Take Mont Blanc in the west and a peak called the
+Crystal Peak over the Val Bavona on the east, and they are the
+flanking bastions of one great wall, the Pennine Alps. Take the
+Diablerets on the west, and the Wetterhorn on the east, and they are
+the flanking bastions of another great wall, the Bernese Oberland. And
+these two walls are parallel, with the Rhone in between.
+
+Now these two walls converge at a point where there is a sort of knot
+of mountain ridges, and this point may be taken as being on the
+boundary between Eastern and Western Switzerland. At this wonderful
+point the Ticino, the Rhone, the Aar, and the Reuss all begin, and it
+is here that the simple arrangement of the Alps to the west turns into
+the confused jumble of the Alps to the east.
+
+When you are high up on either wall you can catch the plan of all
+this, but to avoid a confused description and to help you to follow
+the marvellous, Hannibalian and never-before-attempted charge and
+march which I made, and which, alas! ended only in a glorious
+defeat--to help you to picture faintly to yourselves the mirific and
+horripilant adventure whereby I nearly achieved superhuman success in
+spite of all the powers of the air, I append a little map which is
+rough but clear and plain, and which I beg you to study closely, for
+it will make it easy for you to understand what next happened in my
+pilgrimage.
+
+The dark strips are the deep cloven valleys, the shaded belt is that
+higher land which is yet passable by any ordinary man. The part left
+white you may take to be the very high fields of ice and snow with
+great peaks which an ordinary man must regard as impassable, unless,
+indeed, he can wait for his weather and take guides and go on as a
+tourist instead of a pilgrim.
+
+You will observe that I have marked five clefts or valleys. A is that
+of the _Aar,_ and the little white patch at the beginning is the lake
+of Brienz. B is that of the _Reuss._ C is that of the _Rhone;_ and all
+these three are _north_ of the great watershed or main chain, and all
+three are full of German-speaking people.
+
+On the other hand, D is the valley of the _Toccia,_ E of the _Maggia,_
+and F of the _Ticino._ All these three are _south_ of the great
+watershed, and are inhabited by Italian-speaking people. All these
+three lead down at last to Lake Major, and so to Milan and so to Rome.
+
+The straight line to Rome is marked on my map by a dotted line ending
+in an arrow, and you will see that it was just my luck that it should
+cross slap over that knot or tangle of ranges where all the rivers
+spring. The problem was how to negotiate a passage from the valley of
+the Aar to one of the three Italian valleys, without departing too far
+from my straight line. To explain my track I must give the names of
+all the high passes between the valleys. That between A and C is
+called the _Grimsel;_ that between B and C the _Furka._ That between D
+and C is the _Gries_ Pass, that between F and C the _Nufenen,_ and
+that between E and F is not the easy thing it looks on the map; indeed
+it is hardly a pass at all but a scramble over very high peaks, and it
+is called the Crystalline Mountain. Finally, on the far right of my
+map, you see a high passage between B and F. This is the famous St
+Gothard.
+
+The straightest way of all was (1) over the _Grimsel,_ then, the
+moment I got into the valley of the Rhone (2), up out of it again over
+the _Nufenen,_ then the moment I was down into the valley of the
+_Ticino_ (F), up out of it again (3) over the Crystalline to the
+valley of the _Maggia_ (E). Once in the Maggia valley (the top of it
+is called the _Val Bavona),_ it is a straight path for the lakes and
+Rome. There were also these advantages: that I should be in a place
+very rarely visited--all the guide-books are doubtful on it; that I
+should be going quite straight; that I should be accomplishing a feat,
+viz. the crossing of those high passes one after the other (and you
+must remember that over the Nufenen there is no road at all).
+
+But every one I asked told me that thus early in the year (it was not
+the middle of June) I could not hope to scramble over the Crystalline.
+No one (they said) could do it and live. It was all ice and snow and
+cold mist and verglas, and the precipices were smooth--a man would
+never get across; so it was not worth while crossing the Nufenen Pass
+if I was to be balked at the Crystal, and I determined on the Gries
+Pass. I said to myself: 'I will go on over the Grimsel, and once in
+the valley of the Rhone, I will walk a mile or two down to where the
+Gries Pass opens, and I will go over it into Italy.' For the Gries
+Pass, though not quite in the straight line, had this advantage, that
+once over it you are really in Italy. In the Ticino valley or in the
+Val Bavona, though the people are as Italian as Catullus, yet
+politically they count as part of Switzerland; and therefore if you
+enter Italy thereby, you are not suddenly introduced to that country,
+but, as it were, inoculated, and led on by degrees, which is a pity.
+For good things should come suddenly, like the demise of that wicked
+man, Mr _(deleted by the censor),_ who had oppressed the poor for some
+forty years, when he was shot dead from behind a hedge, and died in
+about the time it takes to boil an egg, and there was an end of him.
+
+Having made myself quite clear that I had a formed plan to go over the
+Grimsel by the new road, then up over the Gries, where there is no
+road at all, and so down into the vale of the Tosa, and having
+calculated that on the morrow I should be in Italy, I started out from
+Brienz after eating a great meal, it being then about midday, and I
+having already, as you know, crossed the Brienzer Grat since dawn.
+
+The task of that afternoon was more than I could properly undertake,
+nor did I fulfil it. From Brienz to the top of the Grimsel is, as the
+crow flies, quite twenty miles, and by the road a good twenty-seven.
+It is true I had only come from over the high hills; perhaps six miles
+in a straight line. But what a six miles! and all without food. Not
+certain, therefore, how much of the pass I could really do that day,
+but aiming at crossing it, like a fool, I went on up the first miles.
+
+For an hour or more after Brienz the road runs round the base of and
+then away from a fine great rock. There is here an alluvial plain like
+a continuation of the lake, and the Aar runs through it, canalized and
+banked and straight, and at last the road also becomes straight. On
+either side rise gigantic cliffs enclosing the valley, and (on the day
+I passed there) going up into the clouds, which, though high, yet made
+a roof for the valley. From the great mountains on the left the noble
+rock jutted out alone and dominated the little plain; on the right the
+buttresses of the main Alps all stood in a row, and between them went
+whorls of vapour high, high up--just above the places where snow still
+clung to the slopes. These whorls made the utmost steeps more and more
+misty, till at last they were lost in a kind of great darkness, in
+which the last and highest banks of ice seemed to be swallowed up. I
+often stopped to gaze straight above me, and I marvelled at the
+silence.
+
+It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called
+Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little
+more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a
+yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it
+was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has
+given them a chance of living in awe and worship.
+
+For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and
+tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that
+way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the
+never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my
+illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very
+quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as
+to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this
+vulgarity and beastliness.
+
+If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be
+good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I
+drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean
+Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on
+banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.'
+Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their
+recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters
+and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it
+goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches
+that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even
+by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag.
+All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me
+leave to keep off them.
+
+Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La Delivrande (next time I
+should be passing there) because I was delivered from being a tourist,
+and because all this horrible noise was not being dinned at me (who
+was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no kind of prey for these cabmen,
+and busmen, and guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad,
+jaded tourists that had come in by a train.
+
+Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed the first step upwards
+in the valley, going round a rock on the other side of which the Aar
+had cut itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids. Then the road
+went on and on weary mile after weary mile, and I stuck to it, and it
+rose slowly all the time, and all the time the Aar went dashing by,
+roaring and filling the higher valley with echoes.
+
+I got beyond the villages. The light shining suffused through the
+upper mist began to be the light of evening. Rain, very fine and
+slight, began to fall. It was cold. There met and passed me, going
+down the road, a carriage with a hood up, driving at full speed. It
+could not be from over the pass, for I knew that it was not yet open
+for carriages or carts. It was therefore from a hotel somewhere, and
+if there was a hotel I should find it. I looked back to ask the
+distance, but they were beyond earshot, and so I went on.
+
+My boots in which I had sworn to walk to Rome were ruinous. Already
+since the Weissenstein they had gaped, and now the Brienzer Grat had
+made the sole of one of them quite free at the toe. It flapped as I
+walked. Very soon I should be walking on my uppers. I limped also, and
+I hated the wet cold rain. But I had to go on. Instead of flourishing
+my staff and singing, I leant on it painfully and thought of duty, and
+death, and dereliction, and every other horrible thing that begins
+with a D. I had to go on. If I had gone back there was nothing for
+miles.
+
+Before it was dark--indeed one could still read--I saw a group of
+houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass
+them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first,
+saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep
+here.'
+
+There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they
+were French-speaking, from the Vaud country. They had faces like
+Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, being Calvinist. I said,
+'Have you any beans?' They said, 'Yes.' I suggested they should make
+me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle of wine, while I
+dried myself at their great stove. All this they readily did for me,
+and I ate heartily and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards to
+stop the night and pay them for it; but I was so set up by my food and
+wine that I excused myself and went out again and took the road. It
+was not yet dark.
+
+By some reflection from the fields of snow, which were now quite near
+at hand through the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late.
+The cold grew bitter as I went on through the gloaming. There were no
+trees save rare and stunted pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling
+torrent, thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse grass grew on
+the rocks sparsely; there were no flowers. The mist overhead was now
+quite near, and I still went on and steadily up through the
+half-light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of
+the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which
+hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind--I felt it
+growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered me. The occasional steeps
+beside the road, one especially beneath a high bridge where a
+tributary falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me. They were
+like the emptiness of dreams. At last it being now dark, and I having
+long since entered the upper mist, or rather cloud (for I was now as
+high as the clouds), I saw a light gleaming through the fog, just off
+the road, through pine-trees. It was time. I could not have gone much
+farther.
+
+To this I turned and found there one of those new hotels, not very
+large, but very expensive. They knew me at once for what I was, and
+welcomed me with joy. They gave me hot rum and sugar, a fine warm bed,
+told me I was the first that had yet stopped there that year, and left
+me to sleep very deep and yet in pain, as men sleep who are stunned.
+But twice that night I woke suddenly, staring at darkness. I had
+outworn the physical network upon which the soul depends, and I was
+full of terrors.
+
+Next morning I had fine coffee and bread and butter and the rest, like
+a rich man; in a gilded dining-room all set out for the rich, and
+served by a fellow that bowed and scraped. Also they made me pay a
+great deal, and kept their eyes off my boots, and were still courteous
+to me, and I to them.  Then I bought wine of them--the first wine not
+of the country that I had drunk on this march, a Burgundy--and putting
+it in my haversack with a nice white roll, left them to wait for the
+next man whom the hills might send them.
+
+The clouds, the mist, were denser than ever in that early morning; one
+could only see the immediate road. The cold was very great; my clothes
+were not quite dried, but my heart was high, and I pushed along well
+enough, though stiffly, till I came to what they call the Hospice,
+which was once a monk-house, I suppose, but is now an inn. I had
+brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood at the foot of a
+sharp ridge which was the true Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the
+Bernese Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. This ridge or
+neck was steep like a pitched roof--very high I found it, and all of
+black glassy rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, sloping
+sheets just holding to it. I could see but little of it at a time on
+account of the mist.
+
+Hitherto for all these miles the Aar had been my companion, and the
+road, though rising always, had risen evenly and not steeply. Now the
+Aar was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and the road went
+in an artificial and carefully built set of zig-zags up the face of
+the cliff.  There is a short cut, but I could not find it in the mist.
+It is the old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was possible to
+cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and
+smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out
+around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the
+Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had
+destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to
+the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible.  The road
+ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks
+were solid snow.
+
+Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed
+the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped
+all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen
+water, then--as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as
+on the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted
+and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been
+fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear
+hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and
+thousands of feet below.
+
+LECTOR. Pray are we to have any more of that fine writing?
+
+AUCTOR. I saw there as in a cup things that I had thought (when I
+first studied the map at home) far too spacious and spread apart to go
+into the view. Yet here they were all quite contained and close
+together, on so vast a scale was the whole place conceived. It was the
+comb of mountains of which I have written; the meeting of all the
+valleys.
+
+There, from the height of a steep bank, as it were (but a bank many
+thousands of feet high), one looked down into a whole district or
+little world. On the map, I say, it had seemed so great that I had
+thought one would command but this or that portion of it; as it was,
+one saw it all.
+
+And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have
+never been able to understand--- namely, that if you draw a plan or
+section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing.
+One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to
+feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in
+one's hand--yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to
+us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at
+the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its
+greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in
+theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the
+distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such effect, and
+that they can produce that effect is related to another thing--the way
+in which they exaggerate their own steepness.
+
+For instance, those noble hills, my downs in Sussex, when you are upon
+them overlooking the weald, from Chanctonbury say, feel like this--or
+even lower.  Indeed, it is impossible to give them truly, so
+insignificant are they; if the stretch of the Weald were made nearly a
+yard long, Chanctonbury would not, in proportion, be more than a fifth
+of an inch high! And yet, from the top of Chanctonbury, how one seems
+to overlook it and possess it all!
+
+Well, so it was here from the Grimsel when I overlooked the springs of
+the Rhone. In true proportion the valley I gazed into and over must
+have been somewhat like this--
+
+It felt for all the world as deep and utterly below me as this other--
+
+Moreover, where there was no mist, the air was so surprisingly clear
+that I could see everything clean and sharp wherever I turned my eyes.
+The mountains forbade any very far horizons to the view, and all that
+I could see was as neat and vivid as those coloured photographs they
+sell with bright green grass and bright white snow, and blue glaciers
+like precious stones.
+
+I scrambled down the mountain, for here, on the south side of the
+pass, there was no snow or ice, and it was quite easy to leave the
+road and take the old path cutting off the zig-zags. As the air got
+heavier, I became hungry, and at the very end of my descent, two
+hundred feet or so above the young Rhone, I saw a great hotel. I went
+round to their front door and asked them whether I could eat, and at
+what price. 'Four francs,' they said.
+
+'What!' said I, 'four francs for a meal! Come, let me eat in the
+kitchen, and charge me one.' But they became rude and obstinate, being
+used only to deal with rich people, so I cursed them, and went down
+the road. But I was very hungry.
+
+The road falls quite steeply, and the Rhone, which it accompanies in
+that valley, leaps in little falls. On a bridge I passed a sad
+Englishman reading a book, and a little lower down, two American women
+in a carriage, and after that a priest (it was lucky I did not see him
+first. Anyhow, I touched iron at once, to wit, a key in my pocket),
+and after that a child minding a goat. Altogether I felt myself in the
+world again, and as I was on a good road, all down hill, I thought
+myself capable of pushing on to the next village. But my hunger was
+really excessive, my right boot almost gone, and my left boot nothing
+to exhibit or boast of, when I came to a point where at last one
+looked down the Rhone valley for miles. It is like a straight trench,
+and at intervals there are little villages, built of most filthy
+chalets, the said chalets raised on great stones. There are pine-trees
+up, up on either slope, into the clouds, and beyond the clouds I could
+not see. I left on my left a village called 'Between the Waters'. I
+passed through another called 'Ehringen', but it has no inn. At last,
+two miles farther, faint from lack of food, I got into Ulrichen, a
+village a little larger than the rest, and the place where I believed
+one should start to go either over the Gries or Nufenen Pass. In
+Ulrichen was a warm, wooden, deep-eaved, frousty, comfortable,
+ramshackle, dark, anyhow kind of a little inn called 'The Bear'. And
+entering, I saw one of the women whom god loves.
+
+She was of middle age, very honest and simple in the face, kindly and
+good.  She was messing about with cooking and stuff, and she came up
+to me stooping a little, her eyes wide and innocent, and a great spoon
+in her hand. Her face was extremely broad and flat, and I have never
+seen eyes set so far apart. Her whole gait, manner, and accent proved
+her to be extremely good, and on the straight road to heaven. I
+saluted her in the French tongue. She answered me in the same, but
+very broken and rustic, for her natural speech was a kind of mountain
+German. She spoke very slowly, and had a nice soft voice, and she did
+what only good people do, I mean, looked you in the eyes as she spoke
+to you.
+
+Beware of shifty-eyed people. It is not only nervousness, it is also a
+kind of wickedness. Such people come to no good. I have three of them
+now in my mind as I write. One is a Professor.
+
+And, by the way, would you like to know why universities suffer from
+this curse of nervous disease? Why the great personages stammer or
+have St Vitus' dance, or jabber at the lips, or hop in their walk, or
+have their heads screwed round, or tremble in the fingers, or go
+through life with great goggles like a motor car? Eh? I will tell you.
+It is the punishment of their _intellectual pride,_ than which no sin
+is more offensive to the angels.
+
+What! here are we with the jolly world of God all round us, able to
+sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses,
+to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and
+memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty,
+our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned,
+underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or
+analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell
+till it eats up every other function? Away with such foolery.
+
+LECTOR. When shall we get on to ...
+
+AUCTOR. Wait a moment. I say, away with such foolery. Note that
+pedants lose all proportion. They never can keep sane in a discussion.
+They will go wild on matters they are wholly unable to judge, such as
+Armenian Religion or the Politics of Paris or what not. Never do they
+use one of those three phrases which keep a man steady and balance his
+mind, I mean the words (1) _After all it is not my business. (2) Tut!
+tut! You don't say so! and (3) _Credo in Unum Deum Patrem
+Omnipotentem, Factorem omnium visibilium atque invisibilium;_ in which
+last there is a power of synthesis that can jam all their analytical
+dust-heap into such a fine, tight, and compact body as would make them
+stare to see. I understand that they need six months' holiday a year.
+Had I my way they should take twelve, and an extra day on leap years.
+
+LECTOR. Pray, pray return to the woman at the inn.
+
+AUCTOR. I will, and by this road: to say that on the day of Judgement,
+when St Michael weighs souls in his scales, and the wicked are led off
+by the Devil with a great rope, as you may see them over the main
+porch of Notre Dame (I will heave a stone after them myself I hope),
+all the souls of the pedants together will not weigh as heavy and
+sound as the one soul of this good woman at the inn.
+
+She put food before me and wine. The wine was good, but in the food
+was some fearful herb or other I had never tasted before--a pure spice
+or scent, and a nasty one. One could taste nothing else, and it was
+revolting; but I ate it for her sake.
+
+Then, very much refreshed, I rose, seized my great staff, shook myself
+and said, 'Now it is about noon, and I am off for the frontier.'
+
+At this she made a most fearful clamour, saying that it was madness,
+and imploring me not to think of it, and running out fetched from the
+stable a tall, sad, pale-eyed man who saluted me profoundly and told
+me that he knew more of the mountains than any one for miles. And this
+by asking many afterwards I found out to be true. He said that he had
+crossed the Nufenen and the Gries whenever they could be crossed since
+he was a child, and that if I attempted it that day I should sleep
+that night in Paradise. The clouds on the mountain, the soft snow
+recently fallen, the rain that now occupied the valleys, the glacier
+on the Gries, and the pathless snow in the mist on the Nufenen would
+make it sheer suicide for him, an experienced guide, and for me a
+worse madness. Also he spoke of my boots and wondered at my poor coat
+and trousers, and threatened me with intolerable cold.
+
+It seems that the books I had read at home, when they said that the
+Nufenen had no snow on it, spoke of a later season of the year; it was
+all snow now, and soft snow, and hidden by a full mist in such a day
+from the first third of the ascent. As for the Gries, there was a
+glacier on the top which needed some kind of clearness in the weather.
+Hearing all this I said I would remain--but it was with a heavy heart.
+Already I felt a shadow of defeat over me. The loss of time was a
+thorn. I was already short of cash, and my next money was Milan. My
+return to England was fixed for a certain date, and stronger than
+either of these motives against delay was a burning restlessness that
+always takes men when they are on the way to great adventures.
+
+I made him promise to wake me next morning at three o'clock, and,
+short of a tempest, to try and get me across the Gries. As for the
+Nufenen and Crystalline passes which I had desired to attempt, and
+which were (as I have said) the straight line to Rome, he said (and he
+was right), that let alone the impassability of the Nufenen just then,
+to climb the Crystal Mountain in that season would be as easy as
+flying to the moon. Now, to cross the Nufenen alone, would simply land
+me in the upper valley of the Ticino, and take me a great bend out of
+my way by Bellinzona. Hence my bargain that at least he should show me
+over the Gries Pass, and this he said, if man could do it, he would do
+the next day; and I, sending my boots to be cobbled (and thereby
+breaking another vow), crept up to bed, and all afternoon read the
+school-books of the children. They were in French, from lower down the
+valley, and very Genevese and heretical for so devout a household. But
+the Genevese civilization is the standard for these people, and they
+combat the Calvinism of it with missions, and have statues in their
+rooms, not to speak of holy water stoups.
+
+The rain beat on my window, the clouds came lower still down the
+mountain.  Then (as is finely written in the Song of Roland), 'the day
+passed and the night came, and I slept.' But with the coming of the
+small hours, and with my waking, prepare yourselves for the most
+extraordinary and terrible adventure that befell me out of all the
+marvels and perils of this pilgrimage, the most momentous and the most
+worthy of perpetual record, I think, of all that has ever happened
+since the beginning of the world.
+
+At three o'clock the guide knocked at my door, and I rose and came out
+to him. We drank coffee and ate bread. We put into our sacks ham and
+bread, and he white wine and I brandy. Then we set out. The rain had
+dropped to a drizzle, and there was no wind. The sky was obscured for
+the most part, but here and there was a star. The hills hung awfully
+above us in the night as we crossed the spongy valley. A little wooden
+bridge took us over the young Rhone, here only a stream, and we
+followed a path up into the tributary ravine which leads to the
+Nufenen and the Gries. In a mile or two it was a little lighter, and
+this was as well, for some weeks before a great avalanche had fallen,
+and we had to cross it gingerly. Beneath the wide cap of frozen snow
+ran a torrent roaring. I remembered Colorado, and how I had crossed
+the Arkansaw on such a bridge as a boy. We went on in the uneasy dawn.
+The woods began to show, and there was a cross where a man had slipped
+from above that very April and been killed. Then, most ominous and
+disturbing, the drizzle changed to a rain, and the guide shook his
+head and said it would be snowing higher up. We went on, and it grew
+lighter. Before it was really day (or else the weather confused and
+darkened the sky), we crossed a good bridge, built long ago, and we
+halted at a shed where the cattle lie in the late summer when the snow
+is melted. There we rested a moment.
+
+But on leaving its shelter we noticed many disquieting things. The
+place was a hollow, the end of the ravine--a bowl, as it were; one way
+out of which is the Nufenen, and the other the Gries.
+
+Here it is in a sketch map. The heights are marked lighter and
+lighter, from black in the valleys to white in the impassable
+mountains. E is where we stood, in a great cup or basin, having just
+come up the ravine B. C is the Italian valley of the Tosa, and the
+neck between it and E is the Gries.  D is the valley of the Ticino,
+and the neck between E and it is the Nufenen. A is the Crystal
+Mountain. You may take the necks or passes to be about 8000, and the
+mountains 10,000 or 11,000 feet above the sea.
+
+We noticed, I say, many disquieting things. First, all, that bowl or
+cup below the passes was a carpet of snow, save where patches of black
+water showed, and all the passes and mountains, from top to bottom,
+were covered with very thick snow; the deep surface of it soft and
+fresh fallen.  Secondly, the rain had turned into snow. It was falling
+thickly all around.  Nowhere have I more perceived the immediate
+presence of great Death.  Thirdly, it was far colder, and we felt the
+beginning of a wind. Fourthly, the clouds had come quite low down.
+
+The guide said it could not be done, but I said we must attempt it. I
+was eager, and had not yet felt the awful grip of the cold. We left
+the Nufenen on our left, a hopeless steep of new snow buried in fog,
+and we attacked the Gries. For half-an-hour we plunged on through snow
+above our knees, and my thin cotton clothes were soaked. So far the
+guide knew we were more or less on the path, and he went on and I
+panted after him. Neither of us spoke, but occasionally he looked back
+to make sure I had not dropped out.
+
+The snow began to fall more thickly, and the wind had risen somewhat.
+I was afraid of another protest from the guide, but he stuck to it
+well, and I after him, continually plunging through soft snow and
+making yard after yard upwards. The snow fell more thickly and the
+wind still rose.
+
+We came to a place which is, in the warm season, an alp; that is, a
+slope of grass, very steep but not terrifying; having here and there
+sharp little precipices of rock breaking it into steps, but by no
+means (in summer) a matter to make one draw back. Now, however, when
+everything was still Arctic it was a very different matter. A sheer
+steep of snow whose downward plunge ran into the driving storm and was
+lost, whose head was lost in the same mass of thick cloud above, a
+slope somewhat hollowed and bent inwards, had to be crossed if we were
+to go any farther; and I was terrified, for I knew nothing of
+climbing. The guide said there was little danger, only if one slipped
+one might slide down to safety, or one might (much less probably) get
+over rocks and be killed. I was chattering a little with cold; but as
+he did not propose a return, I followed him. The surface was
+alternately slabs of frozen snow and patches of soft new snow. In the
+first he cut steps, in the second we plunged, and once I went right in
+and a mass of snow broke off beneath me and went careering down the
+slope. He showed me how to hold my staff backwards as he did his
+alpenstock, and use it as a kind of brake in case I slipped.
+
+We had been about twenty minutes crawling over that wall of snow and
+ice; and it was more and more apparent that we were in for danger.
+Before we had quite reached the far side, the wind was blowing a very
+full gale and roared past our ears. The surface snow was whirring
+furiously like dust before it: past our faces and against them drove
+the snow-flakes, cutting the air: not falling, but making straight
+darts and streaks. They seemed like the form of the whistling wind;
+they blinded us. The rocks on the far side of the slope, rocks which
+had been our goal when we set out to cross it, had long ago
+disappeared in the increasing rush of the blizzard.  Suddenly as we
+were still painfully moving on, stooping against the mad wind, these
+rocks loomed up over as large as houses, and we saw them through the
+swarming snow-flakes as great hulls are seen through a fog at sea. The
+guide crouched under the lee of the nearest; I came up close to him
+and he put his hands to my ear and shouted to me that nothing further
+could be done--he had so to shout because in among the rocks the
+hurricane made a roaring sound, swamping the voice.
+
+I asked how far we were from the summit. He said he did not know where
+we were exactly, but that we could not be more than 800 feet from it.
+I was but that from Italy and I would not admit defeat. I offered him
+all I had in money to go on, but it was folly in me, because if I had
+had enough to tempt him and if he had yielded we should both have
+died. Luckily it was but a little sum. He shook his head. He would not
+go on, he broke out, for all the money there was in the world. He
+shouted me to eat and drink, and so we both did.
+
+Then I understood his wisdom, for in a little while the cold began to
+seize me in my thin clothes. My hands were numb, my face already gave
+me intolerable pain, and my legs suffered and felt heavy. I learnt
+another thing (which had I been used to mountains I should have
+known), that it was not a simple thing to return. The guide was
+hesitating whether to stay in this rough shelter, or to face the
+chances of the descent. This terror had not crossed my mind, and I
+thought as little of it as I could, needing my courage, and being near
+to breaking down from the intensity of the cold.
+
+It seems that in a _tourmente_ (for by that excellent name do the
+mountain people call such a storm) it is always a matter of doubt
+whether to halt or go back. If you go back through it and lose your
+way, you are done for. If you halt in some shelter, it may go on for
+two or three days, and then there is an end of you.
+
+After a little he decided for a return, but he told me honestly what
+the chances were, and my suffering from cold mercifully mitigated my
+fear. But even in that moment, I felt in a confused but very conscious
+way that I was defeated. I had crossed so many great hills and rivers,
+and pressed so well on my undeviating arrow-line to Rome, and I had
+charged this one great barrier manfully where the straight path of my
+pilgrimage crossed the Alps--and I had failed! Even in that fearful
+cold I felt it, and it ran through my doubt of return like another and
+deeper current of pain. Italy was there, just above, right to my hand.
+A lifting of a cloud, a little respite, and every downward step would
+have been towards the sunlight. As it was, I was being driven back
+northward, in retreat and ashamed. The Alps had conquered me.
+
+Let us always after this combat their immensity and their will, and
+always hate the inhuman guards that hold the gates of Italy, and the
+powers that lie in wait for men on those high places. But now I know
+that Italy will always stand apart. She is cut off by no ordinary
+wall, and Death has all his army on her frontiers.
+
+Well, we returned. Twice the guide rubbed my hands with brandy, and
+once I had to halt and recover for a moment, failing and losing my
+hold. Believe it or not, the deep footsteps of our ascent were already
+quite lost and covered by the new snow since our halt, and even had
+they been visible, the guide would not have retraced them. He did what
+I did not at first understand, but what I soon saw to be wise. He took
+a steep slant downward over the face of the snow-slope, and though
+such a pitch of descent a little unnerved me, it was well in the end.
+For when we had gone down perhaps 900 feet, or a thousand, in
+perpendicular distance, even I, half numb and fainting, could feel
+that the storm was less violent. Another two hundred, and the flakes
+could be seen not driving in flashes past, but separately falling.
+Then in some few minutes we could see the slope for a very long way
+downwards quite clearly; then, soon after, we saw far below us the
+place where the mountain-side merged easily into the plain of that cup
+or basin whence we had started.
+
+When we saw this, the guide said to me, 'Hold your stick thus, if you
+are strong enough, and let yourself slide.' I could just hold it, in
+spite of the cold. Life was returning to me with intolerable pain. We
+shot down the slope almost as quickly as falling, but it was evidently
+safe to do so, as the end was clearly visible, and had no break or
+rock in it.
+
+So we reached the plain below, and entered the little shed, and thence
+looking up, we saw the storm above us; but no one could have told it
+for what it was. Here, below, was silence, and the terror and raging
+above seemed only a great trembling cloud occupying the mountain. Then
+we set our faces down the ravine by which we had come up, and so came
+down to where the snow changed to rain. When we got right down into
+the valley of the Rhone, we found it all roofed with cloud, and the
+higher trees were white with snow, making a line like a tide mark on
+the slopes of the hills.
+
+I re-entered 'The Bear', silent and angered, and not accepting the
+humiliation of that failure. Then, having eaten, I determined in equal
+silence to take the road like any other fool; to cross the Furka by a
+fine highroad, like any tourist, and to cross the St Gothard by
+another fine highroad, as millions had done before me, and not to look
+heaven in the face again till I was back after my long detour, on the
+straight road again for Rome.
+
+But to think of it! I who had all that planned out, and had so nearly
+done it! I who had cut a path across Europe like a shaft, and seen so
+many strange places!--now to have to recite all the litany of the
+vulgar; Bellinzona, Lugano, and this and that, which any railway
+travelling fellow can tell you. Not till Como should I feel a man
+again ...
+
+Indeed it is a bitter thing to have to give up one's sword.
+
+I had not the money to wait; my defeat had lowered me in purse as well
+as in heart. I started off to enter by the ordinary gates--not Italy
+even, but a half-Italy, the canton of the Ticino. It was very hard.
+
+This book is not a tragedy, and I will not write at any length of such
+pain. That same day, in the latter half of it, I went sullenly over
+the Furka; exactly as easy a thing as going up St James' Street and
+down Piccadilly. I found the same storm on its summit, but on a
+highroad it was a different affair. I took no short cuts. I drank at
+all the inns--at the base, half-way up, near the top, and at the top.
+I told them, as the snow beat past, how I had attacked and all but
+conquered the Gries that wild morning, and they took me for a liar; so
+I became silent even within my own mind. I looked sullenly at the
+white ground all the way. And when on the far side I had got low
+enough to be rid of the snow and wind and to be in the dripping rain
+again, I welcomed the rain, and let it soothe like a sodden friend my
+sodden uncongenial mind.
+
+I will not write of Hospenthal. It has an old tower, and the road to
+it is straight and hideous. Much I cared for the old tower! The people
+of the inn (which I chose at random) cannot have loved me much.
+
+I will not write of the St Gothard. Get it out of a guide-book. I rose
+when I felt inclined; I was delighted to find it still raining. A
+dense mist above the rain gave me still greater pleasure. I had
+started quite at my leisure late in the day, and I did the thing
+stolidly, and my heart was like a dully-heated mass of coal or iron
+because I was acknowledging defeat. You who have never taken a
+straight line and held it, nor seen strange men and remote places, you
+do not know what it is to have to go round by the common way.
+
+Only in the afternoon, and on those little zig-zags which are sharper
+than any other in the Alps (perhaps the road is older), something
+changed.
+
+A warm air stirred the dense mist which had mercifully cut me off from
+anything but the mere road and from the contemplation of hackneyed
+sights.
+
+A hint or memory of gracious things ran in the slight breeze, the
+wreaths of fog would lift a little for a few yards, and in their
+clearings I thought to approach a softer and more desirable world. I
+was soothed as though with caresses and when I began to see somewhat
+farther and felt a vigour and fulness in the outline of the Trees, I
+said to myself suddenly--
+
+'I know what it is! It is the South, and a great part of my blood.
+They may call it Switzerland still, but I know now that I am in Italy,
+and this is the gate of Italy lying in groves.'
+
+Then and on till evening I reconciled myself with misfortune, and when
+I heard again at Airolo the speech of civilized men, and saw the
+strong Latin eyes and straight forms of the Race after all those days
+of fog and frost and German speech and the north, my eyes filled with
+tears and I was as glad as a man come home again, and I could have
+kissed the ground.
+
+The wine of Airolo and its songs, how greatly they refreshed me! To
+see men with answering eyes and to find a salute returned; the noise
+of careless mouths talking all together; the group at cards, and the
+laughter that is proper to mankind; the straight carriage of the
+women, and in all the people something erect and noble as though
+indeed they possessed the earth.  I made a meal there, talking to all
+my companions left and right in a new speech of my own, which was made
+up, as it were, of the essence of all the Latin tongues, saying--
+
+_'Ha! Si jo a traversa li montagna no erat facile! Nenni! II san
+Gottardo?  Nil est! pooh! poco! Ma hesterna jo ha voulu traversar in
+Val Bavona, e credi non ritornar, namfredo, fredo erat in alto! La
+tourmente ma prise...'_
+
+And so forth, explaining all fully with gestures, exaggerating,
+emphasizing, and acting the whole matter, so that they understood me
+without much error. But I found it more difficult to understand them,
+because they had a regular formed language with terminations and
+special words.
+
+It went to my heart to offer them no wine, but a thought was in me of
+which you shall soon hear more. My money was running low, and the
+chief anxiety of a civilized man was spreading over my mind like the
+shadow of a cloud over a field of corn in summer. They gave me a
+number of 'good-nights', and at parting I could not forbear from
+boasting that I was a pilgrim on my way to Rome. This they repeated
+one to another, and one man told me that the next good halting-place
+was a town called Faido, three hours down the road.  He held up three
+fingers to explain, and that was the last intercourse I had with the
+Airolans, for at once I took the road.
+
+I glanced up the dark ravine which I should have descended had I
+crossed the Nufenen. I thought of the Val Bavona, only just over the
+great wall that held the west; and in one place where a rift (you have
+just seen its picture) led up to the summits of the hills I was half
+tempted to go back to Airolo and sleep and next morning to attempt a
+crossing. But I had accepted my fate on the Gries and the falling road
+also held me, and so I continued my way.
+
+Everything was pleasing in this new valley under the sunlight that
+still came strongly from behind the enormous mountains; everything
+also was new, and I was evidently now in a country of a special kind.
+The slopes were populous, I had come to the great mother of fruits and
+men, and I was soon to see her cities and her old walls, and the
+rivers that glide by them. Church towers also repeated the same shapes
+up and up the wooded hills until the villages stopped at the line of
+the higher slopes and at the patches of snow. The houses were square
+and coloured; they were graced with arbours, and there seemed to be
+all around nothing but what was reasonable and secure, and especially
+no rich or poor.
+
+I noticed all these things on the one side and the other till, not two
+hours from Airolo, I came to a step in the valley. For the valley of
+the Ticino is made up of distinct levels, each of which might have
+held a lake once for the way it is enclosed: and each level ends in
+high rocks with a gorge between them. Down this gorge the river
+tumbles in falls and rapids and the road picks its way down steeply,
+all banked and cut, and sometimes has to cross from side to side by a
+bridge, while the railway above one overcomes the sharp descent by
+running round into the heart of the hills through circular tunnels and
+coming out again far below the cavern where it plunged in. Then when
+all three--the river, the road, and the railway--- have got over the
+great step, a new level of the valley opens. This is the way the road
+comes into the south, and as I passed down to the lower valley, though
+it was darkening into evening, something melted out of the mountain
+air, there was content and warmth in the growing things, and I found
+it was a place for vineyards. So, before it was yet dark, I came into
+Faido, and there I slept, having at last, after so many adventures,
+crossed the threshold and occupied Italy.
+
+Next day before sunrise I went out, and all the valley was adorned and
+tremulous with the films of morning.
+
+Now all of you who have hitherto followed the story of this great
+journey, put out of your minds the Alps and the passes and the
+snows--postpone even for a moment the influence of the happy dawn and
+of that South into which I had entered, and consider only this truth,
+that I found myself just out of Faido on this blessed date of God with
+eight francs and forty centimes for my viaticum and temporal provision
+wherewith to accomplish the good work of my pilgrimage.
+
+Now when you consider that coffee and bread was twopence and a penny
+for the maid, you may say without lying that I had left behind me the
+escarpment of the Alps and stood upon the downward slopes of the first
+Italian stream and at the summit of the entry road with _eight francs
+ten centimes_ in my pocket--my body hearty and my spirit light, for
+the arriving sun shot glory into the sky. The air was keen, and a
+fresh day came radiant over the high eastern walls of the valley.
+
+And what of that? Why, one might make many things of it. For instance,
+eight francs and ten centimes is a very good day's wages; it is a lot
+to spend in cab fares but little for a _coupe._ It is a heavy price
+for Burgundy but a song for Tokay. It is eighty miles third-class and
+more; it is thirty or less first-class; it is a flash in a train _de
+luxe,_ and a mere fleabite as a bribe to a journalist. It would be
+enormous to give it to an apostle begging at a church door, but
+nothing to spend on luncheon.
+
+Properly spent I can imagine it saving five or six souls, but I cannot
+believe that so paltry a sum would damn half an one.
+
+Then, again, it would be a nice thing to sing about. Thus, if one were
+a modern fool one might write a dirge with 'Huit francs et dix
+centimes' all chanted on one low sad note, and coming in between
+brackets for a 'motif, and with a lot about autumn and Death--which
+last, Death that is, people nowadays seem to regard as something odd,
+whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or
+one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would
+have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it
+the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric
+of it, to the tune of 'Madame la Marquise'--
+
+_'Huit francs et dix centimes, Tra la la, la la la.'_
+
+Or one might put it rhetorically, fiercely, stoically, finely,
+republicanly into the Heroics of the Great School. Thus--
+
+HERNANI _(with indignation)... dans ces efforts sublimes_ _'Qu'avez
+vous a offrir?' 
+
+RUY BLAS _(simply) Huit francs et dix centimes!_
+
+Or finally (for this kind of thing cannot go on for ever), one might
+curl one's hair and dye it black, and cock a dirty slouch hat over one
+ear and take a guitar and sit on a flat stone by the roadside and
+cross one's legs, and, after a few pings and pongs on the strings,
+strike up a Ballad with the refrain--
+
+_Car j'ai toujours huit francs et dix centimes!_ a jocular,
+sub-sardonic, a triumphant refrain!
+
+But all this is by the way; the point is, why was the eight francs and
+ten centimes of such importance just there and then?
+
+For this reason, that I could get no more money before Milan; and I
+think a little reflection will show you what a meaning lies in that
+phrase. Milan was nearer ninety miles than eighty miles off. By the
+strict road it was over ninety. And so I was forced to consider and to
+be anxious, for how would this money hold out?
+
+There was nothing for it but forced marches, and little prospect of
+luxuries. But could it be done?
+
+I thought it could, and I reasoned this way.
+
+'It is true I need a good deal of food, and that if a man is to cover
+great distances he must keep fit. It is also true that many men have
+done more on less. On the other hand, they were men who were not
+pressed for time--I am; and I do not know the habits of the country.
+Ninety miles is three good days; two very heavy days. Indeed, whether
+it can be done at all in two is doubtful. But it can be done in two
+days, two nights, and half the third day. So if I plan it thus I shall
+achieve it; namely, to march say forty-five miles or more to-day, and
+to sleep rough at the end of it. My food may cost me altogether three
+francs. I march the next day twenty-five to thirty, my food costing me
+another three francs. Then with the remaining two francs and ten
+centimes I will take a bed at the end of the day, and coffee and bread
+next morning, and will march the remaining twenty miles or less (as
+they may be) into Milan with a copper or two in my pocket. Then in
+Milan, having obtained my money, I will eat.'
+
+So I planned with very careful and exact precision, but many accidents
+and unexpected things, diverting my plans, lay in wait for me among
+the hills.
+
+And to cut a long story short, as the old sailor said to the young
+fool--
+
+LECTOR. What did the old sailor say to the young fool?
+
+AUCTOR. Why, the old sailor was teaching the young fool his compass,
+and he said---
+
+'Here we go from north, making round by west, and then by south round
+by east again to north. There are thirty-two points of the compass,
+namely, first these four, N., W., S., and E., and these are halved,
+making four more, viz., NW., S W., SE., and NE. I trust I make myself
+clear,' said the old sailor.
+
+'That makes eight divisions, as we call them. So look smart and
+follow.  Each of these eight is divided into two symbolically and
+symmetrically divided parts, as is most evident in the nomenclature of
+the same,' said the old sailor. 'Thus between N. and NE. is NNE.,
+between NE. and E. is ENE., between E. and SE. is...'
+
+'I see,' said the young fool.
+
+The old sailor, frowning at him, continued--
+
+'Smart you there. Heels together, and note you well. Each of these
+sixteen divisions is separated quite reasonably and precisely into
+two. Thus between N. and NNE. we get N. by E.,' said the old sailor;
+'and between NNE. and NE. we get NE. by E., and between NE. and ENE.
+we get NE. by E.,' said the old sailor; 'and between ENE. and E. we
+get E. by N., and then between E. and ESE. we get...'
+
+But here he noticed something dangerous in the young fool's eyes, and
+having read all his life Admiral Griles' 'Notes on Discipline', and
+knowing that discipline is a subtle bond depending 'not on force but
+on an attitude of the mind,' he continued--
+
+'And so TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT we come round to the north again.'
+Then he added, 'It is customary also to divide each of these points
+into quarters. Thus NNE. 3/4 E. signifies...'
+
+But at this point the young fool, whose hands were clasped behind him
+and concealed a marlin-spike, up and killed the old sailor, and so
+rounded off this fascinating tale.
+
+Well then, to cut a long story short, I had to make forced marches.
+With eight francs and ten centimes, and nearer ninety than eighty-five
+miles before the next relief, it was necessary to plan and then to
+urge on heroically.  Said I to myself, 'The thing can be done quite
+easily. What is ninety miles? Two long days! Who cannot live on four
+francs a day? Why, lots of men do it on two francs a day.'
+
+But my guardian angel said to me, 'You are an ass! Ninety miles is a
+great deal more than twice forty-five. Besides which' (said he) 'a
+great effort needs largeness and ease. Men who live on two francs a
+day or less are not men who attempt to march forty-five miles a day.
+Indeed, my friend, you are pushing it very close.'
+
+'Well,' thought I, 'at least in such a glorious air, with such Hills
+all about one, and such a race, one can come to no great harm.'
+
+But I knew within me that Latins are hard where money is concerned,
+and I feared for my strength. I was determined to push forward and to
+live on little. I filled my lungs and put on the spirit of an attempt
+and swung down the valley.
+
+Alas! I may not linger on that charge, for if I did I should not give
+you any measure of its determination and rapidity. Many little places
+passed me off the road on the flanks of that valley, and mostly to the
+left. While the morning was yet young, I came to the packed little
+town of Bodio, and passed the eight franc limit by taking coffee,
+brandy, and bread. There also were a gentleman and a lady in a
+carriage who wondered where I was going, and I told them (in French)
+'to Rome'. It was nine in the morning when I came to Biasca. The sun
+was glorious, and not yet warm: it was too early for a meal. They gave
+me a little cold meat and bread and wine, and seven francs stood out
+dry above the falling tide of my money.
+
+Here at Biasca the valley took on a different aspect. It became wider
+and more of a countryside; the vast hills, receding, took on an
+appearance of less familiar majesty, and because the trend of the
+Ticino turned southerly some miles ahead the whole place seemed
+enclosed from the world. One would have said that a high mountain
+before me closed it in and rendered it unique and unknown, had not a
+wide cleft in the east argued another pass over the hills, and
+reminded me that there were various routes over the crest of the Alps.
+
+Indeed, this hackneyed approach to Italy which I had dreaded and
+despised and accepted only after a defeat was very marvellous, and
+this valley of the Ticino ought to stand apart and be a commonwealth
+of its own like Andorra or the Gresivaudan: the noble garden of the
+Isere within the first gates of the Dauphine.
+
+I was fatigued, and my senses lost acuteness. Still I noticed with
+delight the new character of the miles I pursued. A low hill just
+before me, jutting out apparently from the high western mountains,
+forbade me to see beyond it. The plain was alluvial, while copses and
+wood and many cultivated fields now found room where, higher up, had
+been nothing but the bed of a torrent with bare banks and strips of
+grass immediately above them; it was a place worthy of a special name
+and of being one lordship and a countryside. Still I went on towards
+that near boundary of the mountain spur and towards the point where
+the river rounded it, the great barrier hill before me still seeming
+to shut in the valley.
+
+It was noon, or thereabouts, the heat was increasing (I did not feel
+it greatly, for I had eaten and drunk next to nothing), when, coming
+round the point, there opened out before me the great fan of the lower
+valley and the widening and fruitful plain through which the Ticino
+rolls in a full river to reach Lake Major, which is its sea.
+
+Weary as I was, the vision of this sudden expansion roused me and made
+me forget everything except the sight before me. The valley turned
+well southward as it broadened. The Alps spread out on either side
+like great arms welcoming the southern day; the wholesome and familiar
+haze that should accompany summer dimmed the more distant mountains of
+the lakes and turned them amethystine, and something of repose and of
+distance was added to the landscape; something I had not seen for many
+days. There was room in that air and space for dreams and for many
+living men, for towns perhaps on the slopes, for the boats of happy
+men upon the waters, and everywhere for crowded and contented living.
+History might be in all this, and I remembered it was the entry and
+introduction of many armies. Singing therefore a song of Charlemagne,
+I swung on in a good effort to where, right under the sun, what seemed
+a wall and two towers on a sharp little hillock set in the bosom of
+the valley showed me Bellinzona. Within the central street of that
+city, and on its shaded side, I sank down upon a bench before the
+curtained door of a drinking booth and boasted that I had covered in
+that morning my twenty-five miles.
+
+The woman of the place came out to greet me, and asked me a question.
+I did not catch it (for it was in a foreign language), but guessing
+her to mean that I should take something, I asked for vermouth, and
+seeing before me a strange door built of red stone, I drew it as I
+sipped my glass and the woman talked to me all the while in a language
+I could not understand. And as I drew I became so interested that I
+forgot my poverty and offered her husband a glass, and then gave
+another to a lounging man that had watched me at work, and so from
+less than seven francs my money fell to six exactly, and my pencil
+fell from my hand, and I became afraid.
+
+'I have done a foolish thing,' said I to myself, 'and have endangered
+the success of my endeavour. Nevertheless, that cannot now be
+remedied, and I must eat; and as eating is best where one has friends
+I will ask a meal of this woman.'
+
+Now had they understood French I could have bargained and chosen; as
+it was I had to take what they were taking, and so I sat with them as
+they all came out and ate together at the little table. They had soup
+and flesh, wine and bread, and as we ate we talked, not understanding
+each other, and laughing heartily at our mutual ignorance. And they
+charged me a franc, which brought my six francs down to five. But I,
+knowing my subtle duty to the world, put down twopence more, as I
+would have done anywhere else, for a _pour boire;_ and so with four
+francs and eighty centimes left, and with much less than a third of my
+task accomplished I rose, now drowsy with the food and wine, and
+saluting them, took the road once more.
+
+But as I left Bellinzona there was a task before me which was to bring
+my poverty to the test; for you must know that my map was a bad one,
+and on a very small scale, and the road from Bellinzona to Lugano has
+a crook in it, and it was essential to find a short cut. So I thought
+to myself, 'I will try to see a good map as cheaply as possible,' and
+I slunk off to the right into a kind of main square, and there I found
+a proud stationer's shop, such as would deal with rich men only, or
+tourists of the coarser and less humble kind. I entered with some
+assurance, and said in French--
+
+'Sir, I wish to know the hills between here and Lugano, but I am too
+poor to buy a map. If you will let me look at one for a few moments, I
+will pay you what you think fit.'
+
+The wicked stationer became like a devil for pride, and glaring at me,
+said--
+
+'Look! Look for yourself. I do not take pence. I sell maps; I do not
+hire them!'
+
+Then I thought, 'Shall I take a favour from such a man?' But I
+yielded, and did. I went up to the wall and studied a large map for
+some moments. Then as I left, I said to him--
+
+'Sir, I shall always hold in remembrance the day on which you did me
+this signal kindness; nor shall I forget your courtesy and goodwill.'
+
+And what do you think he did at that?
+
+Why, he burst into twenty smiles, and bowed and seemed beatified, and
+said: 'Whatever I can do for my customers and for visitors to this
+town, I shall always be delighted to do. Pray, sir, will you not look
+at other maps for a moment?'
+
+Now, why did he say this and grin happily like a gargoyle appeased?
+Did something in my accent suggest wealth? or was he naturally kindly?
+I do not know; but of this I am sure, one should never hate human
+beings merely on a first, nor on a tenth, impression. Who knows? This
+map-seller of Bellinzona may have been a good man; anyhow, I left him
+as rich as I had found him, and remembering that the true key to a
+forced march is to break the twenty-four hours into three pieces, and
+now feeling the extreme heat, I went out along the burning straight
+road until I found a border of grass and a hedge, and there, in spite
+of the dust and the continually passing carts, I lay at full length in
+the shade and fell into the sleep of men against whom there is no
+reckoning. Just as I forgot the world I heard a clock strike two.
+
+I slept for hours beneath that hedge, and when I woke the air was no
+longer a trembling furnace, but everything about me was wrapped round
+as in a cloak of southern afternoon, and was still. The sun had fallen
+midway, and shone in steady glory through a haze that overhung Lake
+Major, and the wide luxuriant estuary of the vale. There lay before me
+a long straight road for miles at the base of high hills; then, far
+off, this road seemed to end at the foot of a mountain called, I
+believe, Ash Mount or Cinder Hill. But my imperfect map told me that
+here it went sharp round to the left, choosing a pass, and then at an
+angle went down its way to Lugano.
+
+Now Lugano was not fifteen miles as the crow flies from where I stood,
+and I determined to cut off that angle by climbing the high hills just
+above me. They were wooded only on their slopes; their crest and much
+of their sides were a down-land of parched grass, with rocks appearing
+here and there. At the first divergent lane I made off eastward from
+the road and began to climb.
+
+In under the chestnut trees the lane became a number of vague beaten
+paths; I followed straight upwards. Here and there were little houses
+standing hidden in leaves, and soon I crossed the railway, and at last
+above the trees I saw the sight of all the Bellinzona valley to the
+north; and turning my eyes I saw it broaden out between its walls to
+where the lake lay very bright, in spite of the slight mist, and this
+mist gave the lake distances, and the mountains round about it were
+transfigured and seemed part of the mere light.
+
+The Italian lakes have that in them and their air which removes them
+from common living. Their beauty is not the beauty which each of us
+sees for himself in the world; it is rather the beauty of a special
+creation; the expression of some mind. To eyes innocent, and first
+freshly noting our great temporal inheritance--1 mean to the eyes of a
+boy and girl just entered upon the estate of this glorious earth, and
+thinking themselves immortal, this shrine of Europe might remain for
+ever in the memory; an enchanted experience, in which the single sense
+of sight had almost touched the boundary of music. They would remember
+these lakes as the central emotion of their youth. To mean men also
+who, in spite of years and of a full foreknowledge of death, yet
+attempt nothing but the satisfaction of sense, and pride themselves
+upon the taste and fineness with which they achieve this satisfaction,
+the Italian lakes would seem a place for habitation, and there such a
+man might build his house contentedly. But to ordinary Christians I am
+sure there is something unnatural in this beauty of theirs, and they
+find in it either a paradise only to be won by a much longer road to a
+bait and veil of sorcery, behind which lies great peril.  Now, for all
+we know, beauty beyond the world may not really bear this double
+aspect; but to us on earth--if we are ordinary men--beauty of this
+kind has something evil. Have you not read in books how men when they
+see even divine visions are terrified? So as I looked at Lake Major in
+its halo I also was afraid, and I was glad to cross the ridge and
+crest of the hill and to shut out that picture framed all round with
+glory.
+
+But on the other side of the hill I found, to my great disgust, not as
+I had hoped, a fine slope down leading to Lugano, but a second
+interior valley and another range just opposite me. I had not the
+patience to climb this so I followed down the marshy land at the foot
+of it, passed round the end of the hill and came upon the railway,
+which had tunnelled under the range I had crossed. I followed the
+railway for a little while and at last crossed it, penetrated through
+a thick brushwood, forded a nasty little stream, and found myself
+again on the main road, wishing heartily I had never left it.
+
+It was still at least seven miles to Lugano, and though all the way
+was downhill, yet fatigue threatened me. These short cuts over marshy
+land and through difficult thickets are not short cuts at all, and I
+was just wondering whether, although it was already evening, I dared
+not rest a while, when there appeared at a turn in the road a little
+pink house with a yard all shaded over by a vast tree; there was also
+a trellis making a roof over a plain bench and table, and on the
+trellis grew vines.
+
+'Into such houses,' I thought, 'the gods walk when they come down and
+talk with men, and such houses are the scenes of adventures. I will go
+in and rest.'
+
+So I walked straight into the courtyard and found there a shrivelled
+brown-faced man with kindly eyes, who was singing a song to himself.
+He could talk a little French, a little English, and his own Italian
+language.  He had been to America and to Paris; he was full of
+memories; and when I had listened to these and asked for food and
+drink, and said I was extremely poor and would have to bargain, he
+made a kind of litany of 'I will not cheat you; I am an honest man; I
+also am poor,' and so forth.  Nevertheless I argued about every
+item--the bread, the sausage, and the beer. Seeing that I was in
+necessity, he charged me about three times their value, but I beat him
+down to double, and lower than that he would not go.  Then we sat down
+together at the table and ate and drank and talked of far countries;
+and he would interject remarks on his honesty compared with the
+wickedness of his neighbours, and I parried with illustrations of my
+poverty and need, pulling out the four francs odd that remained to me,
+and jingling them sorrowfully in my hand. 'With these,' I said, 'I
+must reach Milan.'
+
+Then I left him, and as I went down the road a slight breeze came on,
+and brought with it the coolness of evening.
+
+At last the falling plateau reached an edge, many little lights
+glittered below me, and I sat on a stone and looked down at the town
+of Lugano. It was nearly dark. The mountains all around had lost their
+mouldings, and were marked in flat silhouettes against the sky. The
+new lake which had just appeared below me was bright as water is at
+dusk, and far away in the north and east the high Alps still stood up
+and received the large glow of evening. Everything else was full of
+the coming night, and a few stars shone. Up from She town came the
+distant noise of music; otherwise there was no sound. I could have
+rested there a long time, letting my tired body lapse into the
+advancing darkness, and catching in my spirit the inspiration of the
+silence--had it not been for hunger. I knew by experience that when it
+is very late one cannot be served in the eating-houses of poor men,
+and I had not the money or any other. So I rose and shambled down the
+steep road into the town, and there I found a square with arcades, and
+in the south-eastern corner of this square just such a little tavern
+as I required. Entering, therefore, and taking off my hat very low, I
+said in French to a man who was sitting there with friends, and who
+was the master, 'Sir, what is the least price at which you can give me
+a meal?'
+
+He said, 'What do you want?'
+
+I answered, 'Soup, meat, vegetables, bread, and a little wine.'
+
+He counted on his fingers, while all his friends stared respectfully
+at him and me. He then gave orders, and a very young and beautiful
+girl set before me as excellent a meal as I had eaten for days on
+days, and he charged me but a franc and a half. He gave me also coffee
+and a little cheese, and I, feeling hearty, gave threepence over for
+the service, and they all very genially wished me a good-night; but
+their wishes were of no value to me, for the night was terrible.
+
+I had gone over forty miles; how much over I did not know. I should
+have slept at Lugano, but my lightening purse forbade me. I thought,
+'I will push on and on; after all, I have already slept, and so broken
+the back of the day. I will push on till I am at the end of my tether,
+then I will find a wood and sleep.' Within four miles my strength
+abandoned me. I was not even so far down the lake as to have lost the
+sound of the band at Lugano floating up the still water, when I was
+under an imperative necessity for repose. It was perhaps ten o'clock,
+and the sky was open and glorious with stars. I climbed up a bank on
+my right, and searching for a place to lie found one under a tree near
+a great telegraph pole. Here was a little parched grass, and one could
+lie there and see the lake and wait for sleep. It was a benediction to
+stretch out all supported by the dry earth, with my little side-bag
+for pillow, and to look at the clear night above the hills, and to
+listen to the very distant music, and to wonder whether or not, in
+this strange southern country, there might not be snakes gliding about
+in the undergrowth. Caught in such a skein of influence I was soothed
+and fell asleep.
+
+For a little while I slept dreamlessly.
+
+Just so much of my living self remained as can know, without
+understanding, the air around. It is the life of trees. That
+under-part, the barely conscious base of nature which trees and
+sleeping men are sunk in, is not only dominated by an immeasurable
+calm, but is also beyond all expression contented. And in its very
+stuff there is a complete and changeless joy.  This is surely what the
+great mind meant when it said to the Athenian judges that death must
+not be dreaded since no experience in life was so pleasurable as a
+deep sleep; for being wise and seeing the intercommunion of things, he
+could not mean extinction, which is nonsense, but a lapse into that
+under-part of which I speak. For there are gods also below the earth.
+
+But a dream came into my sleep and disturbed me, increasing life, and
+therefore bringing pain. I dreamt that I was arguing, at first easily,
+then violently, with another man. More and more he pressed me, and at
+last in my dream there were clearly spoken words, and he said to me,
+'You must be wrong, because you are so cold; if you were right you
+would not be so cold.' And this argument seemed quite reasonable to me
+in my foolish dream, and I muttered to him, 'You are right, I must be
+in the wrong. It is very cold ...' Then I half opened my eyes and saw
+the telegraph pole, the trees, and the lake. Far up the lake, where
+the Italian Frontier cuts it, the torpedo-boats, looking for
+smugglers, were casting their search-lights. One of the roving beams
+fell full on me and I became broad awake. I stood up.  It was indeed
+cold, with a kind of clinging and grasping chill that was not to be
+expressed in degrees of heat, but in dampness perhaps, or perhaps in
+some subtler influence of the air.
+
+I sat on the bank and gazed at the lake in some despair. Certainly I
+could not sleep again without a covering cloth, and it was now past
+midnight, nor did I know of any house, whether if I took the road I
+should find one in a mile, or in two, or in five. And, note you, I was
+utterly exhausted. That enormous march from Faido, though it had been
+wisely broken by the siesta at Bellinzona, needed more than a few cold
+hours under trees, and I thought of the three poor francs in my
+pocket, and of the thirty-eight miles remaining to Milan.
+
+The stars were beyond the middle of their slow turning, and I watched
+them, splendid and in order, for sympathy, as I also regularly, but
+slowly and painfully, dragged myself along my appointed road. But in a
+very short time a great, tall, square, white house stood right on the
+roadway, and to my intense joy I saw a light in one of its higher
+windows. Standing therefore beneath, I cried at the top of my voice,
+'Hola!' five or six times. A woman put her head out of the window into
+the fresh night, and said, 'You cannot sleep here; we have no rooms,'
+then she remained looking out of her window and ready to analyse the
+difficulties of the moment; a good-natured woman and fat.
+
+In a moment another window at the same level, but farther from me,
+opened, and a man leaned out, just as those alternate figures come in
+and out of the toys that tell the weather. 'It is impossible,' said
+the man; 'we have no rooms.'
+
+Then they talked a great deal together, while I shouted, _'Quid vis?
+Non e possibile dormire in la foresta! e troppo fredo! Vis ne me
+assassinare?  Veni de Lugano--e piu--non e possibile ritornare!'_ and
+so forth.
+
+They answered in strophe and antistrophe, sometimes together in full
+chorus, and again in semichorus, and with variations, that it was
+impossible. Then a light showed in the chinks of their great door; the
+lock grated, and it opened. A third person, a tall youth, stood in the
+hall. I went forward into the breach and occupied the hall. He blinked
+at me above a candle, and murmured, as a man apologizing 'It is not
+possible.'
+
+Whatever I have in common with these southerners made me understand
+that I had won, so I smiled at him and nodded; he also smiled, and at
+once beckoned to me. He led me upstairs, and showed me a charming bed
+in a clean room, where there was a portrait of the Pope, looking
+cunning; the charge for that delightful and human place was sixpence,
+and as I said good-night to the youth, the man and woman from above
+said good-night also. And this was my first introduction to the most
+permanent feature in the Italian character. The good people!
+
+When I woke and rose I was the first to be up and out. It was high
+morning.  The sun was not yet quite over the eastern mountains, but I
+had slept, though so shortly yet at great ease, and the world seemed
+new and full of a merry mind. The sky was coloured like that high
+metal work which you may see in the studios of Paris; there was gold
+in it fading into bronze, and above, the bronze softened to silver. A
+little morning breeze, courageous and steady, blew down the lake and
+provoked the water to glad ripples, and there was nothing that did not
+move and take pleasure in the day.
+
+The Lake of Lugano is of a complicated shape, and has many arms. It is
+at this point very narrow indeed, and shallow too; a mole, pierced at
+either end with low arches, has here been thrown across it, and by
+this mole the railway and the road pass over to the eastern shore. I
+turned in this long causeway and noticed the northern view. On the
+farther shore was an old village and some pleasure-houses of rich men
+on the shore; the boats also were beginning to go about the water.
+These boats were strange, unlike other boats; they were covered with
+hoods, and looked like floating waggons. This was to shield the rowers
+from the sun. Far off a man was sailing with a little brown
+sprit-sail. It was morning, and all the world was alive.
+
+Coffee in the village left me two francs and two pennies. I still
+thought the thing could be done, so invigorating and deceiving are the
+early hours, and coming farther down the road to an old and beautiful
+courtyard on the left, I drew it, and hearing a bell at hand I saw a
+tumble-down church with trees before it, and went in to Mass; and
+though it was a little low village Mass, yet the priest had three
+acolytes to serve it, and (true and gracious mark of a Catholic
+country!) these boys were restless and distracted at their office.
+
+You may think it trivial, but it was certainly a portent. One of the
+acolytes had half his head clean shaved! A most extraordinary sight! I
+could not take my eyes from it, and I heartily wished I had an
+Omen-book with me to tell me what it might mean.
+
+When there were oracles on earth, before Pan died, this sight would
+have been of the utmost use. For I should have consulted the oracle
+woman for a Lira--at Biasca for instance, or in the lonely woods of
+the Cinder Mountain; and, after a lot of incense and hesitation, and
+wrestling with the god, the oracle would have accepted Apollo and,
+staring like one entranced, she would have chanted verses which,
+though ambiguous, would at least have been a guide. Thus:
+
+  _Matutinus adest ubi Vesper, et accipiens te 
+  Saepe recusatum voces intelligit hospes 
+  Rusticus ignotas notas, ac flumina tellus
+  Occupat--In sancto tum, tum, stans 
+  Aede caveto Tonsuram Hirsuti
+  Capitis, via namque pedestrem 
+  Ferrea praeveniens cursum, peregrine, laborem_ 
+  Pro pietate tua inceptum frustratur, amore 
+  Antiqui Ritus alto sub Numine Romae._
+
+LECTOR. What Hoggish great Participles!
+
+AUCTOR. Well, well, you see it was but a rustic oracle at 9 3/4 d. the
+revelation, and even that is supposing silver at par. Let us translate
+it for the vulgar:
+
+When early morning seems but eve And they that still refuse receive:
+When speech unknown men understand; And floods are crossed upon dry
+land. Within the Sacred Walls beware The Shaven Head that boasts of
+Hair, For when the road attains the rail The Pilgrim's great attempt
+shall fail.
+
+Of course such an oracle might very easily have made me fear too much.
+The 'shaven head' I should have taken for a priest, especially if it
+was to be met with 'in a temple'--it might have prevented me entering
+a church, which would have been deplorable. Then I might have taken it
+to mean that I should never have reached Rome, which would have been a
+monstrous weight upon my mind. Still, as things unfolded themselves,
+the oracle would have become plainer and plainer, and I felt the lack
+of it greatly. For, I repeat, I had certainly received an omen.
+
+The road now neared the end of the lake, and the town called Capo di
+Lago, or 'Lake-head', lay off to my right. I saw also that in a very
+little while I should abruptly find the plains. A low hill some five
+miles ahead of me was the last roll of the mountains, and just above
+me stood the last high crest, a precipitous peak of bare rock, up
+which there ran a cog-railway to some hotel or other. I passed through
+an old town under the now rising heat; I passed a cemetery in the
+Italian manner, with marble figures like common living men. The road
+turned to the left, and I was fairly on the shoulder of the last
+glacis. I stood on the Alps at their southern bank, and before me was
+Lombardy.
+
+Also in this ending of the Swiss canton one was more evidently in
+Italy than ever. A village perched upon a rock, deep woods and a
+ravine below it, its houses and its church, all betrayed the full
+Italian spirit.
+
+The frontier town was Chiasso. I hesitated with reverence before
+touching the sacred soil which I had taken so long to reach, and I
+longed to be able to drink its health; but though I had gone, I
+suppose, ten miles, and though the heat was increasing, I would not
+stop; for I remembered the two francs, and my former certitude of
+reaching Milan was shaking and crumbling. The great heat of midday
+would soon be on me, I had yet nearly thirty miles to go, and my bad
+night began to oppress me.
+
+I crossed the frontier, which is here an imaginary line. Two slovenly
+customs-house men asked me if I had anything dutiable on me. I said
+No, and it was evident enough, for in my little sack or pocket was
+nothing but a piece of bread. If they had applied the American test,
+and searched me for money, then indeed they could have turned me back,
+and I should have been forced to go into the fields a quarter of a
+mile or so and come into their country by a path instead of a
+highroad.
+
+This necessity was spared me. I climbed slowly up the long slope that
+hides Como, then I came down upon that lovely city and saw its frame
+of hills and its lake below me.
+
+These things are not like things seen by the eyes. I say it again,
+they are like what one feels when music is played.
+
+I entered Como between ten and eleven faint for food, and then a new
+interest came to fill my mind with memories of this great adventure.
+The lake was in flood, and all the town was water.
+
+Como dry must be interesting enough; Como flooded is a marvel. What
+else is Venice? And here is a Venice at the foot of high mountains,
+and _all_ in the water, no streets or squares; a fine even depth of
+three feet and a half or so for navigators, much what you have in the
+Spitway in London River at low spring tides.
+
+There were a few boats about, but the traffic and pleasure of Como was
+passing along planks laid on trestles over the water here and there
+like bridges; and for those who were in haste, and could afford it
+(such as take cabs in London), there were wheelbarrows, coster carts,
+and what not, pulled about by men for hire; and it was a sight to
+remember all one's life to see the rich men of Como squatting on these
+carts and barrows, and being pulled about over the water by the poor
+men of Como, being, indeed, an epitome of all modern sociology and
+economics and religion and organized charity and strenuousness and
+liberalism and sophistry generally.
+
+For my part I was determined to explore this curious town in the
+water, and I especially desired to see it on the lake side, because
+there one would get the best impression of its being really an aquatic
+town; so I went northward, as I was directed, and came quite
+unexpectedly upon the astonishing cathedral. It seemed built of
+polished marble, and it was in every way so exquisite in proportion,
+so delicate in sculpture, and so triumphant in attitude, that I
+thought to myself--
+
+'No wonder men praise Italy if this first Italian town has such a
+building as this.'
+
+But, as you will learn later, many of the things praised are ugly, and
+are praised only by certain followers of charlatans.
+
+So I went on till I got to the lake, and there I found a little port
+about as big as a dining-room (for the Italian lakes play at being
+little seas.  They have little ports, little lighthouses, little
+fleets for war, and little custom-houses, and little storms and little
+lines of steamers.  Indeed, if one wanted to give a rich child a
+perfect model or toy, one could not give him anything better than an
+Italian lake), and when I had long gazed at the town, standing, as it
+seemed, right in the lake, I felt giddy, and said to myself, 'This is
+the lack of food,' for I had eaten nothing but my coffee and bread
+eleven miles before, at dawn.
+
+So I pulled out my two francs, and going into a little shop, I bought
+bread, sausage, and a very little wine for fourpence, and with one
+franc eighty left I stood in the street eating and wondering what my
+next step should be.
+
+It seemed on the map perhaps twenty-five, perhaps twenty-six miles to
+Milan. It was now nearly noon, and as hot as could be. I might, if I
+held out, cover the distance in eight or nine hours, but I did not see
+myself walking in the middle heat on the plain of Lombardy, and even
+if I had been able I should only have got into Milan at dark or later,
+when the post office (with my money in it) would be shut; and where
+could I sleep, for my one franc eighty would be gone? A man covering
+these distances must have one good meal a day or he falls ill. I could
+beg, but there was the risk of being arrested, and that means an
+indefinite waste of time, perhaps several days; and time, that had
+defeated me at the Gries, threatened me here again. I had nothing to
+sell or to pawn, and I had no friends. The Consul I would not attempt;
+I knew too much of such things as Consuls when poor and dirty men try
+them. Besides which, there was no Consul I pondered.
+
+I went into the cool of the cathedral to sit in its fine darkness and
+think better. I sat before a shrine where candles were burning, put up
+for their private intentions by the faithful. Of many, two had nearly
+burnt out. I watched them in their slow race for extinction when a
+thought took me.
+
+'I will,' said I to myself, 'use these candles for an ordeal or
+heavenly judgement. The left hand one shall be for attempting the road
+at the risk of illness or very dangerous failure; the right hand one
+shall stand for my going by rail till I come to that point on the
+railway where one franc eighty will take me, and thence walking into
+Milan:--and heaven defend the right.'
+
+They were a long time going out, and they fell evenly. At last the
+right hand one shot up the long flame that precedes the death of
+candles; the contest took on interest, and even excitement, when, just
+as I thought the left hand certain of winning, it went out without
+guess or warning, like a second-rate person leaving this world for
+another. The right hand candle waved its flame still higher, as though
+in triumph, outlived its colleague just the moment to enjoy glory, and
+then in its turn went fluttering down the dark way from which they say
+there is no return.
+
+None may protest against the voice of the Gods. I went straight to the
+nearest railway station (for there are two), and putting down one
+franc eighty, asked in French for a ticket to whatever station that
+sum would reach down the line. The ticket came out marked Milan, and I
+admitted the miracle and confessed the finger of Providence. There was
+no change, and as I got into the train I had become that rarest and
+ultimate kind of traveller, the man without any money whatsoever--
+without passport, without letters, without food or wine; it would be
+interesting to see what would follow if the train broke down.
+
+I had marched 378 miles and some three furlongs, or thereabouts.
+
+Thus did I break--but by a direct command--the last and dearest of my
+vows, and as the train rumbled off, I took luxury in the rolling
+wheels.
+
+I thought of that other medieval and papistical pilgrim hobbling along
+rather than 'take advantage of any wheeled thing', and I laughed at
+him.  Now if Moroso-Malodoroso or any other Non-Aryan, Antichristian,
+over-inductive, statistical, brittle-minded man and scientist, sees
+anything remarkable in one self laughing at another self, let me tell
+him and all such for their wide-eyed edification and astonishment that
+I knew a man once that had fifty-six selves (there would have been
+fifty-seven, but for the poet in him that died young)--he could evolve
+them at will, and they were very useful to lend to the parish priest
+when he wished to make up a respectable Procession on Holy-days. And I
+knew another man that could make himself so tall as to look over the
+heads of the scientists as a pine-tree looks over grasses, and again
+so small as to discern very clearly the thick coating or dust of
+wicked pride that covers them up in a fine impenetrable coat. So much
+for the moderns.
+
+The train rolled on. I noticed Lombardy out of the windows. It is
+flat. I listened to the talk of the crowded peasants in the train. I
+did not understand it. I twice leaned out to see if Milan were not
+standing up before me out of the plain, but I saw nothing. Then I fell
+asleep, and when I woke suddenly it was because we were in the
+terminus of that noble great town, which I then set out to traverse in
+search of my necessary money and sustenance. It was yet but early in
+the afternoon.
+
+What a magnificent city is Milan! The great houses are all of stone,
+and stand regular and in order, along wide straight streets. There are
+swift cars, drawn by electricity, for such as can afford them. Men are
+brisk and alert even in the summer heats, and there are shops of a
+very good kind, though a trifle showy. There are many newspapers to
+help the Milanese to be better men and to cultivate charity and
+humility; there are banks full of paper money; there are soldiers,
+good pavements, and all that man requires to fulfil him, soul and
+body; cafes, arcades, mutoscopes, and every sign of the perfect state.
+And the whole centres in a splendid open square, in the midst of which
+is the cathedral, which is justly the most renowned in the world.
+
+My pilgrimage is to Rome, my business is with lonely places, hills,
+and the recollection of the spirit. It would be waste to describe at
+length this mighty capital. The mists and the woods, the snows and the
+interminable way, had left me ill-suited for the place, and I was
+ashamed. I sat outside a cafe, opposite the cathedral, watching its
+pinnacles of light; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the master a hurt
+by sitting there in his fine great cafe, unkempt, in such clothes,
+like a tramp; but he was courteous in spite of his riches, and I
+ordered a very expensive drink for him also, in order to make amends.
+I showed him my sketches, and told him of my adventures in French, and
+he was kind enough to sit opposite me, and to take that drink with me.
+He talked French quite easily, as it seems do all such men in the
+principal towns of north Italy. Still, the broad day shamed me, and
+only when darkness came did I feel at ease.
+
+I wandered in the streets till I saw a small eating shop, and there I
+took a good meal. But when one is living the life of the poor, one
+sees how hard are the great cities. Everything was dearer, and worse,
+than in the simple countrysides. The innkeeper and his wife were
+kindly, but their eyes showed that they had often to suspect men. They
+gave me a bed, but it was a franc and more, and I had to pay before
+going upstairs to it. The walls were mildewed, the place ramshackle
+and evil, the rickety bed not clean, the door broken and warped, and
+that night I was oppressed with the vision of poverty. Dirt and
+clamour and inhuman conditions surrounded me. Yet the people meant
+well.
+
+With the first light I got up quietly, glad to find the street again
+and the air. I stood in the crypt of the cathedral to hear the
+Ambrosian Mass, and it was (as I had expected) like any other, save
+for a kind of second _lavabo_ before the Elevation. To read the
+distorted stupidity of the north one might have imagined that in the
+Ambrosian ritual the priest put a _non_ before the _credo,_ and
+_nec's_ at each clause of it, and renounced his baptismal vows at the
+_kyrie;_ but the Milanese are Catholics like any others, and the
+northern historians are either liars or ignorant men. And I know three
+that are both together.
+
+Then I set out down the long street that leads south out of Milan, and
+was soon in the dull and sordid suburb of the Piacenzan way. The sky
+was grey, the air chilly, and in a little while--alas!--it rained.
+
+Lombardy is an alluvial plain.
+
+That is the pretty way of putting it. The truth is more vivid if you
+say that Lombardy is as flat as a marsh, and that it is made up of
+mud. Of course this mud dries when the sun shines on it, but mud it is
+and mud it will remain; and that day, as the rain began falling, mud
+it rapidly revealed itself to be; and the more did it seem to be mud
+when one saw how the moistening soil showed cracks from the last day's
+heat.
+
+Lombardy has no forests, but any amount of groups of trees; moreover
+(what is very remarkable), it is all cultivated in fields more or less
+square.  These fields have ditches round them, full of mud and water
+running slowly, and some of them are themselves under water in order
+to cultivate rice. All these fields have a few trees bordering them,
+apart from the standing clumps; but these trees are not very high.
+There are no open views in Lombardy, and Lombardy is all the same.
+Irregular large farmsteads stand at random all up and down the
+country; no square mile of Lombardy is empty.  There are many, many
+little villages; many straggling small towns about seven to eight
+miles apart, and a great number of large towns from thirty to fifty
+miles apart. Indeed, this very road to Piacenza, which the rain now
+covered with a veil of despair, was among the longest stretches
+between any two large towns, although it was less than fifty miles.
+
+On the map, before coming to this desolate place, there seemed a
+straighter and a better way to Rome than this great road. There is a
+river called the Lambro, which comes east of Milan and cuts the
+Piacenzan road at a place called Melegnano. It seemed to lead straight
+down to a point on the Po, a little above Piacenza. This stream one
+could follow (so it seemed), and when it joined the Po get a boat or
+ferry, and see on the other side the famous Trebbia, where Hannibal
+conquered and Joubert fell, and so make straight on for the Apennine.
+
+Since it is always said in books that Lombardy is a furnace in summer,
+and that whole great armies have died of the heat there, this river
+bank would make a fine refuge. Clear and delicious water, more limpid
+than glass, would reflect and echo the restless poplars, and would
+make tolerable or even pleasing the excessive summer. Not so. It was a
+northern mind judging by northern things that came to this conclusion.
+There is not in all Lombardy a clear stream, but every river and brook
+is rolling mud. In the rain, not heat, but a damp and penetrating
+chill was the danger. There is no walking on the banks of the rivers;
+they are cliffs of crumbling soil, jumbled anyhow.
+
+Man may, as Pinkerton (Sir Jonas Pinkerton) writes, be master of his
+fate, but he has a precious poor servant. It is easier to command a
+lapdog or a mule for a whole day than one's own fate for half-an-hour.
+
+Nevertheless, though it was apparent that I should have to follow the
+main road for a while, I determined to make at last to the right of
+it, and to pass through a place called 'Old Lodi', for I reasoned
+thus: 'Lodi is the famous town. How much more interesting must Old
+Lodi be which is the mothertown of Lodi?' Also, Old Lodi brought me
+back again on the straight line to Rome, and I foolishly thought it
+might be possible to hear there of some straight path down the Lambro
+(for that river still possessed me somewhat).
+
+Therefore, after hours and hours of trudging miserably along the wide
+highway in the wretched and searching rain, after splashing through
+tortuous Melegnano, and not even stopping to wonder if it was the
+place of the battle, after noting in despair the impossible Lambro, I
+came, caring for nothing, to the place where a secondary road branches
+off to the right over a level crossing and makes for Lodi Vecchio.
+
+It was not nearly midday, but I had walked perhaps fifteen miles, and
+had only rested once in a miserable Trattoria. In less than three
+miles I came to that unkempt and lengthy village, founded upon dirt
+and living in misery, and through the quiet, cold, persistent rain I
+splashed up the main street. I passed wretched, shivering dogs and
+mournful fowls that took a poor refuge against walls; passed a sad
+horse that hung its head in the wet and stood waiting for a master,
+till at last I reached the open square where the church stood, then I
+knew that I had seen all Old Lodi had to offer me. So, going into an
+eating-house, or inn, opposite the church, I found a girl and her
+mother serving, and I saluted them, but there was no fire, and my
+heart sank to the level of that room, which was, I am sure, no more
+than fifty-four degrees.
+
+Why should the less gracious part of a pilgrimage be specially
+remembered?  In life were remember joy best--that is what makes us sad
+by contrast; pain somewhat, especially if it is acute; but dulness
+never. And a book--which has it in its own power to choose and to
+emphasize--has no business to record dulness. What did I at Lodi
+Vecchio? I ate; I dried my clothes before a tepid stove in a kitchen.
+I tried to make myself understood by the girl and her mother. I sat at
+a window and drew the ugly church on principle. Oh, the vile sketch!
+
+Worthy of that Lombard plain, which they had told me was so full of
+wonderful things. I gave up all hope of by-roads, and I determined to
+push back obliquely to the highway again--obliquely in order to save
+time!  Nepios!
+
+These 'by-roads' of the map turned out in real life to be all manner
+of abominable tracks. Some few were metalled, some were cart-ruts
+merely, some were open lanes of rank grass; and along most there went
+a horrible ditch, and in many fields the standing water proclaimed
+desolation. IN so far as I can be said to have had a way at all, I
+lost it. I could not ask my way because my only ultimate goal was
+Piacenza, and that was far off. I did not know the name of any place
+between. Two or three groups of houses I passed, and sometimes church
+towers glimmered through the rain. I passed a larger and wider road
+than the rest, but obviously not my road; I pressed on and passed
+another; and by this time, having ploughed up Lombardy for some four
+hours, I was utterly lost. I no longer felt the north, and, for all I
+knew, I might be going backwards. The only certain thing was that I
+was somewhere in the belt between the highroad and the Lambro, and
+that was little enough to know at the close of such a day. Grown
+desperate, I clamoured within my mind for a miracle; and it was not
+long before I saw a little bent man sitting on a crazy cart and going
+ahead of me at a pace much slower than a walk--the pace of a horse
+crawling. I caught him up, and, doubting much whether he would
+understand a word, I said to him repeatedly--
+
+_'La granda via? La via a Piacenza?'_
+
+He shook his head as though to indicate that this filthy lane was not
+the road. Just as I had despaired of learning anything, he pointed
+with his arm away to the right, perpendicularly to the road we were
+on, and nodded. He moved his hand up and down. I had been going north!
+
+On getting this sign I did not wait for a cross road, but jumped the
+little ditch and pushed through long grass, across further ditches,
+along the side of patches of growing corn, heedless of the huge weight
+on my boots and of the oozing ground, till I saw against the rainy sky
+a line of telegraph poles. For the first time since they were made the
+sight of them gave a man joy. There was a long stagnant pond full of
+reeds between me and the railroad; but, as I outflanked it, I came
+upon a road that crossed the railway at a level and led me into the
+great Piacenzan way. Almost immediately appeared a village. It was a
+hole called Secugnano, and there I entered a house where a bush
+hanging above the door promised entertainment, and an old hobbling
+woman gave me food and drink and a bed. The night had fallen, and upon
+the roof above me I could hear the steady rain.
+
+The next morning--Heaven preserve the world from evil!--it was still
+raining.
+
+LECTOR. It does not seem to me that this part of your book is very
+entertaining.
+
+AUCTOR. I know that; but what am I to do?
+
+LECTOR. Why, what was the next point in the pilgrimage that was even
+tolerably noteworthy?
+
+AUCTOR. I suppose the Bridge of Boats.
+
+LECTOR. And how far on was that?
+
+AUCTOR. About fourteen miles, more or less ... I passed through a town
+with a name as long as my arm, and I suppose the Bridge of Boats must
+have been nine miles on after that.
+
+LECTOR. And it rained all the time, and there was mud?
+
+AUCTOR. Precisely.
+
+LECTOR. Well, then, let us skip it and tell stories.
+
+AUCTOR. With all my heart. And since you are such a good judge of
+literary poignancy, do you begin.
+
+LECTOR. I will, and I draw my inspiration from your style.
+
+Once upon a time there was a man who was born in Croydon, and whose
+name was Charles Amieson Blake. He went to Rugby at twelve and left it
+at seventeen. He fell in love twice and then went to Cambridge till he
+was twenty-three. Having left Cambridge he fell in love more mildly,
+and was put by his father into a government office, where he began at
+_180_ pounds a year. At thirty-five he was earning 500 pounds a year,
+and perquisites made 750 pounds a year. He met a pleasant lady and
+fell in love quite a little compared with the other times. She had 250
+pounds a year. That made _1000_ pounds a year. They married and had
+three children--Richard, Amy, and Cornelia. He rose to a high
+government position, was knighted, retired at sixty-three, and died at
+sixty-seven. He is buried at Kensal Green...
+
+AUCTOR. Thank you, Lector, that is a very good story. It is simple and
+full of plain human touches. You know how to deal with the facts of
+everyday life ... It requires a master-hand. Tell me, Lector, had this
+man any adventures?
+
+LECTOR. None that I know of.
+
+AUCTOR. Had he opinions?
+
+LECTOR. Yes. I forgot to tell you he was a Unionist. He spoke two
+foreign languages badly. He often went abroad to Assisi, Florence, and
+Boulogne...  He left 7,623 pounds 6s. 8d., and a house and garden at
+Sutton. His wife lives there still.
+
+AUCTOR. Oh!
+
+LECTOR. It is the human story ... the daily task!
+
+AUCTOR. Very true, my dear Lector ... the common lot... Now let me
+tell my story. It is about the Hole that could not be Filled Up.
+
+LECTOR. Oh no! Auctor, no! That is the oldest story in the--
+
+AUCTOR. Patience, dear Lector, patience! I will tell it well. Besides
+which I promise you it shall never be told again. I will copyright it.
+
+Well, once there was a Learned Man who had a bargain with the Devil
+that he should warn the Devil's emissaries of all the good deeds done
+around him so that they could be upset, and he in turn was to have all
+those pleasant things of this life which the Devil's allies usually
+get, to wit a Comfortable Home, Self-Respect, good health, 'enough
+money for one's rank', and generally what is called 'a happy useful
+life'--_till_ midnight of All-Hallowe'en in the last year of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+So this Learned Man did all he was required, and daily would inform
+the messenger imps of the good being done or prepared in the
+neighbourhood, and they would upset it; so that the place he lived in
+from a nice country town became a great Centre of Industry, full of
+wealth and desirable family mansions and street property, and was
+called in hell 'Depot B' (Depot A you may guess at). But at last
+toward the 15th of October 1900, the Learned Man began to shake in his
+shoes and to dread the judgement; for, you see, he had not the
+comfortable ignorance of his kind, and was compelled to believe in the
+Devil willy-nilly, and, as I say, he shook in his shoes.
+
+So he bethought him of a plan to cheat the Devil, and the day before
+All-Hallowe'en he cut a very small round hole in the floor of his
+study, just near the fireplace, right through down to the cellar. Then
+he got a number of things that do great harm (newspapers, legal
+documents, unpaid bills, and so forth) and made ready for action.
+
+Next morning when the little imps came for orders as usual, after
+prayers, he took them down into the cellar, and pointing out the hole
+in the ceiling, he said to them:
+
+'My friends, this little hole is a mystery. It communicates, I
+believe, with the chapel; but I cannot find the exit. All I know is,
+that some pious person or angel, or what not, desirous to do good,
+slips into it every day whatever he thinks may be a cause of evil in
+the neighbourhood, hoping thus to destroy it' (in proof of which
+statement he showed them a scattered heap of newspapers on the floor
+of the cellar beneath the hole). 'And the best thing you can do,' he
+added, 'is to stay here and take them away as far as they come down
+and put them back into circulation again. Tut! tut!' he added, picking
+up a moneylender's threatening letter to a widow, 'it is astonishing
+how these people interfere with the most sacred rights! Here is a
+letter actually stolen from the post! Pray see that it is delivered.'
+
+So he left the little imps at work, and fed them from above with all
+manner of evil-doing things, which they as promptly drew into the
+cellar, and at intervals flew away with, to put them into circulation
+again.
+
+That evening, at about half-past eleven, the Devil came to fetch the
+Learned Man, and found him seated at his fine great desk, writing. The
+Learned Man got up very affably to receive the Devil, and offered him
+a chair by the fire, just near the little round hole.
+
+'Pray don't move,' said the Devil; 'I came early on purpose not to
+disturb you.'
+
+'You are very good,' replied the Learned Man. 'The fact is, I have to
+finish my report on Lady Grope's Settlement among our Poor in the Bull
+Ring--it is making some progress. But their condition is
+heart-breaking, my dear sir; heart-breaking!'
+
+'I can well believe it,' said the Devil sadly and solemnly, leaning
+back in his chair, and pressing his hands together like a roof. 'The
+poor in our great towns, Sir Charles' (for the Learned Man had been
+made a Baronet), 'the condition, I say, of the--Don't I feel a
+draught?' he added abruptly. For the Devil can't bear draughts.
+
+'Why,' said the Learned Man, as though ashamed, 'just near your chair
+there _is_ a little hole that I have done my best to fill up, but
+somehow it seemed impossible to fill it... I don't know...'
+
+The Devil hates excuses, and is above all practical, so he just
+whipped the soul of a lawyer out of his side-pocket, tied a knot in it
+to stiffen it, and shoved it into the hole.
+
+'There!' said the Devil contentedly; 'if you had taken a piece of rag,
+or what not, you might yourself... Hulloa!...' He looked down and saw
+the hole still gaping, and he felt a furious draught coming up again.
+He wondered a little, and then muttered: 'It's a pity I have on my
+best things. I never dare crease them, and I have nothing in my
+pockets to speak of, otherwise I might have brought something bigger.'
+He felt in his left-hand trouser pocket, and fished out a pedant,
+crumpled him carefully into a ball, and stuffed him hard into the
+hole, so that he suffered agonies. Then the Devil watched carefully.
+The soul of the pedant was at first tugged as if from below, then
+drawn slowly down, and finally shot off out of sight.
+
+'This is a most extraordinary thing!' said the Devil.
+
+'It is the draught. It is very strong between the joists,' ventured
+the Learned Man.
+
+'Fiddle-sticks ends!' shouted the Devil. 'It is a trick! But I've
+never been caught yet, and I never will be.'
+
+He clapped his hands, and a whole host of his followers poured in
+through the windows with mortgages, Acts of Parliament, legal
+decisions, declarations of war, charters to universities, patents for
+medicines, naturalization orders, shares in gold mines,
+specifications, prospectuses, water companies' reports, publishers'
+agreements, letters patent, freedoms of cities, and, in a word, all
+that the Devil controls in the way of hole-stopping rubbish; and the
+Devil, kneeling on the floor, stuffed them into the hole like a
+madman. But as fast as he stuffed, the little imps below (who had
+summoned a number of their kind to their aid also) pulled it through
+and carted it away. And the Devil, like one possessed, lashed the
+floor with his tail, and his eyes glared like coals of fire, and the
+sweat ran down his face, and he breathed hard, and pushed every
+imaginable thing he had into the hole so swiftly that at last his
+documents and parchments looked like streaks and flashes. But the
+loyal little imps, not to be beaten, drew them through into the cellar
+as fast as machinery, and whirled them to their assistants; and all
+the poor lost souls who had been pressed into the service were
+groaning that their one holiday in the year was being filched from
+them, when, just as the process was going on so fast that it roared
+like a printing-machine in full blast, the clock in the hall struck
+twelve.
+
+The Devil suddenly stopped and stood up.
+
+'Out of my house,' said the Learned Man; 'out of my house! I've had
+enough of you, and I've no time for fiddle-faddle! It's past twelve,
+and I've won!'
+
+The Devil, though still panting, smiled a diabolical smile, and
+pulling out his repeater (which he had taken as a perquisite from the
+body of a member of Parliament), said, 'I suppose you keep Greenwich
+time?'
+
+'Certainly!' said Sir Charles.
+
+'Well,' said the Devil, 'so much the worse for you to live in Suffolk.
+You're four minutes fast, so I'll trouble you to come along with me;
+and I warn you that any words you now say may be used against...'
+
+At this point the Learned Man's patron saint, who thought things had
+gone far enough, materialized himself and coughed gently. They both
+looked round, and there was St Charles sitting in the easy chair.
+
+'So far,' murmured the Saint to the Devil suavely, 'so far from being
+four minutes too early, you are exactly a year too late.' On saying
+this, the Saint smiled a genial, priestly smile, folded his hands,
+twiddled his thumbs slowly round and round, and gazed in a fatherly
+way at the Devil.
+
+'What do you mean?' shouted the Devil.
+
+'What I say,' said St Charles calmly; '1900 is not the last year of
+the nineteenth century; it is the first year of the twentieth.'
+
+'Oh!' sneered the Devil, 'are you an anti-vaccinationist as well? Now,
+look here' (and he began counting on his fingers); 'supposing in the
+year 1 B.C.  ...'
+
+'I never argue,' said St Charles.
+
+'Well, all I know is,' answered the Devil with some heat, 'that in
+this matter as in most others, thank the Lord, I have on my side all
+the historians and all the scientists, all the universities, all
+the...'
+
+'And I,' interrupted St Charles, waving his hand like a gentleman (he
+is a Borromeo), 'I have the Pope!'
+
+At this the Devil gave a great howl, and disappeared in a clap of
+thunder, and was never seen again till his recent appearance at
+Brighton.
+
+So the Learned Man was saved; but hardly; for he had to spend five
+hundred years in Purgatory catechizing such heretics and pagans as got
+there, and instructing them in the true faith. And with the more
+muscular he passed a knotty time.
+
+You do not see the river Po till you are close to it. Then, a little
+crook in the road being passed, you come between high trees, and
+straight out before you, level with you, runs the road into and over a
+very wide mass of tumbling water. It does not look like a bridge, it
+looks like a quay. It does not rise; it has all the appearance of
+being a strip of road shaved off and floated on the water.
+
+All this is because it passes over boats, as do some bridges over the
+Rhine. (At Cologne, I believe, and certainly at Kiel--for I once sat
+at the end of that and saw a lot of sad German soldiers drilling, a
+memory which later made me understand (1) why they can be out-marched
+by Latins; (2) why they impress travellers and civilians; (3) why the
+governing class in Germany take care to avoid common service; (4) why
+there is no promotion from the ranks; and (5) why their artillery is
+too rigid and not quick enough. It also showed me something intimate
+and fundamental about the Germans which Tacitus never understood and
+which all our historians miss--they are _of necessity_ histrionic.
+Note I do not say it is a vice of theirs. It is a necessity of theirs,
+an appetite. They must see themselves on a stage. Whether they do
+things well or ill, whether it is their excellent army with its
+ridiculous parade, or their eighteenth-century _sans-soucis_ with
+avenues and surprises, or their national legends with gods in wigs and
+strong men in tights, they _must_ be play-actors to be happy and
+therefore to be efficient; and if I were Lord of Germany, and desired
+to lead my nation and to be loved by them, I should put great golden
+feathers on my helmet, I should use rhetorical expressions, spout
+monologues in public, organize wide cavalry charges at reviews, and
+move through life generally to the crashing of an orchestra. For by
+doing this even a vulgar, short, and diseased man, who dabbled in
+stocks and shares and was led by financiers, could become a hero, and
+do his nation good.)
+
+LECTOR. What is all this?
+
+AUCTOR. It is a parenthesis.
+
+LECTOR. It is good to know the names of the strange things one meets
+with on one's travels.
+
+AUCTOR. So I return to where I branched off, and tell you that the
+river Po is here crossed by a bridge of boats.
+
+It is a very large stream. Half-way across, it is even a trifle
+uncomfortable to be so near the rush of the water on the trembling
+pontoons. And on that day its speed and turbulence were emphasized by
+the falling rain. For the marks of the rain on the water showed the
+rapidity of the current, and the silence of its fall framed and
+enhanced the swirl of the great river.
+
+Once across, it is a step up into Piacenza--a step through mud and
+rain. On my right was that plain where Barbarossa received, and was
+glorified by, the rising life of the twelfth century; there the
+renaissance of our Europe saw the future glorious for the first time
+since the twilight of Rome, and being full of morning they imagined a
+new earth and gave it a Lord. It was at Roncaglia, I think in spring,
+and I wish I had been there. For in spring even the Lombard plain they
+say is beautiful and generous, but in summer I know by experience that
+it is cold, brutish, and wet.
+
+And so in Piacenza it rained and there was mud, till I came to a hotel
+called the Moor's Head, in a very narrow street, and entering it I
+discovered a curious thing: the Italians live in palaces: I might have
+known it.
+
+They are the impoverished heirs of a great time; its garments cling to
+them, but their rooms are too large for the modern penury. I found
+these men eating in a great corridor, in a hall, as they might do in a
+palace. I found high, painted ceilings and many things of marble, a
+vast kitchen, and all the apparatus of the great houses--at the
+service of a handful of contented, unknown men. So in England, when we
+have worked out our full fate, happier but poorer men will sit in the
+faded country-houses (a community, or an inn, or impoverished
+squires), and rough food will be eaten under mouldering great
+pictures, and there will be offices or granaries in the galleries of
+our castles; and where Lord Saxonthorpe (whose real name is
+Hauptstein) now plans our policy, common Englishmen will return to the
+simpler life, and there will be dogs, and beer, and catches upon
+winter evenings. For Italy also once gathered by artifice the wealth
+that was not of her making.
+
+He was a good man, the innkeeper of this palace. He warmed me at his
+fire in his enormous kitchen, and I drank Malaga to the health of the
+cooks. I ate of their food, I bought a bottle of a new kind of sweet
+wine called 'Vino Dolce', and--I took the road.
+
+LECTOR. And did you see nothing of Piacenza?
+
+AUCTOR. Nothing, Lector; it was raining, and there was mud. I stood in
+front of the cathedral on my way out, and watched it rain. It rained
+all along the broad and splendid Emilian Way. I had promised myself
+great visions of the Roman soldiery passing up that eternal road; it
+still was stamped with the imperial mark, but the rain washed out its
+interest, and left me cold. The Apennines also, rising abruptly from
+the plain, were to have given me revelations at sunset; they gave me
+none. Their foothills appeared continually on my right, they
+themselves were veiled. And all these miles of road fade into the
+confused memory of that intolerable plain. The night at Firenzuola,
+the morning (the second morning of this visitation) still cold, still
+heartless, and sodden with the abominable weather, shall form no part
+of this book.
+
+Things grand and simple of their nature are possessed, as you know, of
+a very subtle flavour. The larger music, the more majestic lengths of
+verse called epics, the exact in sculpture, the classic drama, the
+most absolute kinds of wine, require a perfect harmony of circumstance
+for their appreciation. Whatever is strong, poignant, and immediate in
+its effect is not so difficult to suit; farce, horror, rage, or what
+not, these a man can find in the arts, even when his mood may be heavy
+or disturbed; just as (to take their parallel in wines) strong Beaune
+will always rouse a man. But that which is cousin to the immortal
+spirit, and which has, so to speak, no colour but mere light, _that_
+needs for its recognition so serene an air of abstraction and of
+content as makes its pleasure seem rare in this troubled life, and
+causes us to recall it like a descent of the gods.
+
+For who, having noise around him, can strike the table with pleasure
+at reading the Misanthrope, or in mere thirst or in fatigue praise
+Chinon wine? Who does not need for either of these perfect things
+Recollection, a variety of according conditions, and a certain easy
+Plenitude of the Mind?
+
+So it is with the majesty of Plains, and with the haunting power of
+their imperial roads.
+
+All you that have had your souls touched at the innermost, and have
+attempted to release yourselves in verse and have written trash--(and
+who know it)--be comforted. You shall have satisfaction at last, and
+you shall attain fame in some other fashion--perhaps in private
+theatricals or perhaps in journalism. You will be granted a prevision
+of complete success, and your hearts shall be filled--but you must not
+expect to find this mood on the Emilian Way when it is raining.
+
+All you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the
+approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front
+and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good
+endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of
+revelation when you shall bless the effect of time. But this divine
+moment--- it is not on the Emilian Way in the rain that you should
+seek it.
+
+All you that have loved passionately and have torn your hearts asunder
+in disillusions, do not imagine that things broken cannot be mended by
+the good angels. There is a kind of splice called 'the long splice'
+which makes a cut rope seem what it was before; it is even stronger
+than before, and can pass through a block. There will descend upon you
+a blessed hour when you will be convinced as by a miracle, and you
+will suddenly understand the _redintegratio amoris (amoris
+redintegratio,_ a Latin phrase). But this hour you will not receive in
+the rain on the Emilian Way.
+
+Here then, next day, just outside a town called Borgo, past the middle
+of morning, the rain ceased.
+
+Its effect was still upon the slippery and shining road, the sky was
+still fast and leaden, when, in a distaste for their towns, I skirted
+the place by a lane that runs westward of the houses, and sitting upon
+a low wall, I looked up at the Apennines, which were now plain above
+me, and thought over my approaching passage through those hills.
+
+But here I must make clear by a map the mass of mountains which I was
+about to attempt, and in which I forded so many rivers, met so many
+strange men and beasts, saw such unaccountable sights, was imprisoned,
+starved, frozen, haunted, delighted, burnt up, and finally refreshed
+in Tuscany--in a word, where I had the most extraordinary and
+unheard-of adventures that ever diversified the life of man.
+
+The straight line to Rome runs from Milan not quite through Piacenza,
+but within a mile or two of that city. Then it runs across the first
+folds of the Apennines, and gradually diverges from the Emilian Way.
+It was not possible to follow this part of the line exactly, for there
+was no kind of track. But by following the Emilian Way for several
+miles (as I had done), and by leaving it at the right moment, it was
+possible to strike the straight line again near a village called
+Medesano.
+
+Now on the far side of the Apennines, beyond their main crest, there
+happens, most providentially, to be a river called the Serchio, whose
+valley is fairly straight and points down directly to Rome. To follow
+this valley would be practically to follow the line to Rome, and it
+struck the Tuscan plain not far from Lucca.
+
+But to get from the Emilian Way over the eastern slope of the
+Apennines' main ridge and crest, to where the Serchio rises on the
+western side, is a very difficult matter. The few roads across the
+Apennines cut my track at right angles, and were therefore useless. In
+order to strike the watershed at the sources of the Serchio it was
+necessary to go obliquely across a torrent and four rivers (the Taro,
+the Parma, the Enza, and the Secchia), and to climb the four spurs
+that divided them; crossing each nearer to the principal chain as I
+advanced until, after the Secchia, the next climb would be that of the
+central crest itself, on the far side of which I should find the
+Serchio valley.
+
+Perhaps in places roads might correspond to this track. Certainly the
+bulk of it would be mule-paths or rough gullies--how much I could not
+tell. The only way I could work it with my wretched map was to note
+the names of towns' or hamlets more or less on the line, and to pick
+my way from one to another. I wrote them down as follows: Fornovo,
+Calestano, Tizzano, Colagna--the last at the foot of the final pass.
+The distance to that pass as the crow flies was only a little more
+than thirty miles. So exceedingly difficult was the task that it took
+me over two days. Till I reached Fornovo beyond the Taro, I was not
+really in the hills.
+
+By country roads, picking my way, I made that afternoon for Medesano.
+The lanes were tortuous; they crossed continual streams that ran from
+the hills above, full and foaming after the rain, and frothing with
+the waste of the mountains. I had not gone two miles when the sky
+broke; not four when a new warmth began to steal over the air and a
+sense of summer to appear in the earth about me. With the greatest
+rapidity the unusual weather that had accompanied me from Milan was
+changing into the normal brilliancy of the south; but it was too late
+for the sun to tell, though he shone from time to time through clouds
+that were now moving eastwards more perceptibly and shredding as they
+moved.
+
+Quite tired and desiring food, keen also for rest after those
+dispiriting days, I stopped, before reaching Medesano, at an inn where
+three ways met; and there I purposed to eat and spend the night, for
+the next day, it was easy to see, would be tropical, and I should rise
+before dawn if I was to save the heat. I entered.
+
+The room within was of red wood. It had two tables, a little counter
+with a vast array of bottles, a woman behind the counter, and a small,
+nervous man in a strange hat serving. And all the little place was
+filled and crammed with a crowd of perhaps twenty men, gesticulating,
+shouting, laughing, quarrelling, and one very big man was explaining
+to another the virtues of his knife; and all were already amply
+satisfied with wine. For in this part men do not own, but are paid
+wages, so that they waste the little they have.
+
+I saluted the company, and walking up to the counter was about to call
+for wine. They had all become silent, when one man asked me a question
+in Italian. I did not understand it, and attempted to say so, when
+another asked the same question; then six or seven--and there was a
+hubbub. And out of the hubbub I heard a similar sentence rising all
+the time. To this day I do not know what it meant, but I thought (and
+think) it meant 'He is a Venetian,' or 'He is the Venetian.' Something
+in my broken language had made them think this, and evidently the
+Venetians (or a Venetian) were (or was) gravely unpopular here. Why, I
+cannot tell. Perhaps the Venetians were blacklegs. But evidently a
+Venetian, or the whole Venetian nation, had recently done them a
+wrong.
+
+At any rate one very dark-haired man put his face close up to mine,
+unlipped his teeth, and began a great noise of cursing and
+threatening, and this so angered me that it overmastered my fear,
+which had till then been considerable. I remembered also a rule which
+a wise man once told me for guidance, and it is this: 'God disposes of
+victory, but, as the world is made, when men smile, smile; when men
+laugh, laugh; when men hit, hit; when men shout, shout; and when men
+curse, curse you also, my son, and in doubt let them always take the
+first move.'
+
+I say my fear had been considerable, especially of the man with the
+knife, but I got too angry to remember it, and advancing my face also
+to this insulter's I shouted, _'Dio Ladro! Dios di mi alma!
+Sanguinamento! Nombre di Dios! Che? Che vole? Non sono da Venezia io!
+Sono de Francia! Je m'en fiche da vestra Venezia! Non se vede che non
+parlar vestra lingua? Che sono forestiere?'_ and so forth. At this
+they evidently divided into two parties, and all began raging amongst
+themselves, and some at me, while the others argued louder and louder
+that there was an error.
+
+The little innkeeper caught my arm over the counter, and I turned
+round sharply, thinking he was doing me a wrong, but I saw him nodding
+and winking at me, and he was on my side. This was probably because he
+was responsible if anything happened, and he alone could not fly from
+the police.
+
+He made them a speech which, for all I know, may have been to the
+effect that he had known and loved me from childhood, or may have been
+that he knew me for one Jacques of Turin, or may have been any other
+lie. Whatever lie it was, it appeased them. Their anger went down to a
+murmur, just like soda-water settling down into a glass.
+
+I stood wine; we drank. I showed them my book, and as my pencil needed
+sharpening the large man lent me his knife for courtesy. When I got it
+in my hand I saw plainly that it was no knife for stabbing with; it
+was a pruning-knife, and would have bit the hand that cherished it (as
+they say of serpents). On the other hand, it would have been a good
+knife for ripping, and passable at a slash. You must not expect too
+much of one article.
+
+I took food, but I saw that in this parish it was safer to sleep out
+of doors than in; so in the falling evening, but not yet sunset, I
+wandered on, not at a pace but looking for shelter, and I found at
+last just what I wanted: a little shed, with dried ferns (as it
+seemed) strewed in a corner, a few old sacks, and a broken piece of
+machinery--though this last was of no use to me.
+
+I thought: 'It will be safe here, for I shall rise before day, and the
+owner, if there is one, will not disturb me.'
+
+The air was fairly warm. The place quite dry. The open side looked
+westward and a little south.
+
+The sun had now set behind the Apennines, and there was a deep
+effulgence in the sky. I drank a little wine, lit a pipe, and watched
+the west in silence.
+
+Whatever was left of the great pall from which all that rain had
+fallen, now was banked up on the further side of heaven in toppling
+great clouds that caught the full glow of evening.
+
+The great clouds stood up in heaven, separate, like persons; and no
+wind blew; but everything was full of evening. I worshipped them so
+far as it is permitted to worship inanimate things.
+
+They domed into the pure light of the higher air, inviolable. They
+seemed halted in the presence of a commanding majesty who ranked them
+all in order.
+
+This vision filled me with a large calm which a travelled man may find
+on coming to his home, or a learner in the communion of wise men.
+Repose, certitude, and, as it were, a premonition of glory occupied my
+spirit.  Before it was yet quite dark I had made a bed out of the dry
+bracken, covered myself with the sacks and cloths, and very soon I
+fell asleep, still thinking of the shapes of clouds and of the power
+of God.
+
+Next morning it was as I had thought. Going out before it was fully
+light, a dense mist all around and a clear sky showed what the day was
+to be. As I reached Medesano the sun rose, and in half-an-hour the air
+was instinct with heat; within an hour it was blinding. An early Mass
+in the church below the village prepared my day, but as I took coffee
+afterwards in a little inn, and asked about crossing the Taro to
+Fornovo--my first point--to my astonishment they shook their heads.
+The Taro was impassable.
+
+Why could it not be crossed? My very broken language made it difficult
+for me to understand. They talked _oframi,_ which I thought meant
+oars; but _rami,_ had I known it, meant the separate branches or
+streams whereby these torrential rivers of Italy flow through their
+arid beds.
+
+I drew a boat and asked if one could not cross in that (for I was a
+northerner, and my idea of a river was a river with banks and water in
+between), but they laughed and said 'No.' Then I made the motion of
+swimming. They said it was impossible, and one man hung his head to
+indicate drowning. It was serious. They said to-morrow, or rather next
+day, one might do it.
+
+Finally, a boy that stood by said he remembered a man who knew the
+river better than any one, and he, if any one could, would get me
+across. So I took the boy with me up the road, and as we went I saw,
+parallel to the road, a wide plain of dazzling rocks and sand, and
+beyond it, shining and silhouetted like an Arab village, the group of
+houses that was Fornovo.  This plain was their sort of river in these
+hills. The boy said that sometimes it was full and a mile wide,
+sometimes it dwindled into dirty pools. Now, as I looked, a few thin
+streams seemed to wind through it, and I could not understand the
+danger.
+
+After a mile or two we came to a spot in the road where a patch of
+brushwood only separated us from the river-bed. Here the boy bade me
+wait, and asked a group of peasants whether the guide was in; they
+said they thought so, and some went up into the hillside with the boy
+to fetch him, others remained with me, looking at the river-bed and at
+Fornovo beyond, shaking their heads, and saying it had not been done
+for days. But I did not understand whether the rain-freshet had passed
+and was draining away, or whether it had not yet come down from
+beyond, and I waited for the guide.
+
+They brought him at last down from his hut among the hills. He came
+with great strides, a kindly-looking man, extremely tall and thin, and
+with very pale eyes. He smiled. They pointed me out to him, and we
+struck the bargain by holding up three fingers each for three lira,
+and nodding. Then he grasped his long staff and I mine, we bade
+farewell to the party, and together we went in silence through thick
+brushwood down towards the broad river-bed. The stones of it glared
+like the sands of Africa; Fornovo baked under the sun all white and
+black; between us was this broad plain of parched shingle and rocks
+that could, in a night, become one enormous river, or dwindle to a
+chain of stagnant ponds. To-day some seven narrow streams wandered in
+the expanse, and again they seemed so easy to cross that again I
+wondered at the need of a guide.
+
+We came to the edge of the first, and I climbed on the guide's back.
+He went bare-legged into the stream deeper and deeper till my feet,
+though held up high, just touched the water; then laboriously he
+climbed the further shore, and I got down upon dry land. It had been
+but twenty yards or so, and he knew the place well. I had seen, as we
+crossed, what a torrent this first little stream was, and I now knew
+the difficulty and understood the warnings of the inn.
+
+The second branch was impassable. We followed it up for nearly a mile
+to where 'an island' (that is, a mass of high land that must have been
+an island in flood-time, and that had on it an old brown village)
+stood above the white bed of the river. Just at this 'island' my guide
+found a ford.  And the way he found it is worth telling. He taught me
+the trick, and it is most useful to men who wander alone in mountains.
+
+You take a heavy stone, how heavy you must learn to judge, for a more
+rapid current needs a heavier stone; but say about ten pounds. This
+you lob gently into mid-stream. _How,_ it is impossible to describe,
+but when you do it it is quite easy to see that in about four feet of
+water, or less, the stone splashes quite differently from the way it
+does in five feet or more. It is a sure test, and one much easier to
+acquire by practice than to write about. To teach myself this trick I
+practised it throughout my journey in these wilds.
+
+Having found a ford then, he again took me on his shoulders, but, in
+mid-stream, the water being up to his breast, his foot slipped on a
+stone (all the bed beneath was rolling and churning in the torrent),
+and in a moment we had both fallen. He pulled me up straight by his
+side, and then indeed, overwhelmed in the rush of water, it was easy
+to understand how the Taro could drown men, and why the peasants
+dreaded these little ribbons of water.
+
+The current rushed and foamed past me, coming nearly to my neck; and
+it was icy cold. One had to lean against it, and the water so took
+away one's weight that at any moment one might have slipped and been
+carried away. The guide, a much taller man (indeed he was six foot
+three or so), supported me, holding my arm: and again in a moment we
+reached dry land.
+
+After that adventure there was no need for carrying. The third,
+fourth, fifth, and sixth branches were easily fordable. The seventh
+was broad and deep, and I found it a heavy matter; nor should I have
+waded it but for my guide, for the water bore against me like a man
+wrestling, and it was as cold as Acheron, the river of the dead. Then
+on the further shore, and warning him (in Lingua Franca) of his peril,
+I gave him his wage, and he smiled and thanked me, and went back,
+choosing his plans at leisure.
+
+Thus did I cross the river Taro; a danger for men.
+
+Where I landed was a poor man sunning himself. He rose and walked with
+me to Fornovo. He knew the guide.
+
+'He is a good man,' he said to me of this friend. 'He is as good as a
+little piece of bread.'
+
+'E vero,' I answered; 'e San Cristophero.'
+
+This pleased the peasant; and indeed it was true. For the guide's
+business was exactly that of St Christopher, except that the Saint
+took no money, and lived, I suppose, on air.
+
+And so to Fornovo; and the heat blinded and confused, and the air was
+alive with flies. But the sun dried me at once, and I pressed up the
+road because I needed food. After I had eaten in this old town I was
+preparing to make for Calestano and to cross the first high spur of
+the Apennines that separated me from it, when I saw, as I left the
+place, a very old church; and I stayed a moment and looked at carvings
+which were in no order, but put in pell-mell, evidently chosen from
+some older building. They were barbaric, but one could see that they
+stood for the last judgement of man, and there were the good looking
+foolish, and there were the wicked being boiled by devils in a pot,
+and what was most pleasing was one devil who with great joy was
+carrying off a rich man's gold in a bag. But now we are too wise to
+believe in such follies, and when we die we take our wealth with us;
+in the ninth century they had no way of doing this, for no system of
+credit yet obtained.
+
+Then leaving the main road which runs to Pontremoli and at last to
+Spezzia, my lane climbed up into the hills and ceased, little by
+little, to be even a lane. It became from time to time the bed of a
+stream, then nothing, then a lane again, and at last, at the head of
+the glen, I confessed to having lost it; but I noted a great rock or
+peak above me for a landmark, and I said to myself--
+
+'No matter. The wall of this glen before me is obviously the ridge of
+the spur; the rock must be left to the north, and I have but to cross
+the ridge by its guidance.' By this time, however, the heat overcame
+me, and, as it was already afternoon, and as I had used so much of the
+preceding night for my journey, I remembered the wise custom of hot
+countries and lay down to sleep.
+
+I slept but a little while, yet when I woke the air was cooler. I
+climbed the side of the glen at random, and on the summit I found, to
+my disgust, a road. What road could it be? To this day I do not know.
+Perhaps I had missed my way and struck the main highway again. Perhaps
+(it is often so in the Apennines) it was a road leading nowhere. At
+any rate I hesitated, and looked back to judge my direction.
+
+It was a happy accident. I was now some 2000 feet above the Taro.
+There, before me, stood the high strange rock that I had watched from
+below; all around it and below me was the glen or cup of bare hills,
+slabs, and slopes of sand and stone calcined in the sun, and, beyond
+these near things, all the plain of Lombardy was at my feet.
+
+It was this which made it worth while to have toiled up that steep
+wall, and even to have lost my way--to see a hundred miles of the
+great flat stretched out before me: all the kingdoms of the world.
+
+Nor was this all. There were sharp white clouds on the far northern
+horizon, low down above the uncertain edge of the world. I looked
+again and found they did not move. Then I knew they were the Alps.
+
+Believe it or not, I was looking back to a place of days before: over
+how many, many miles of road! The rare, white peaks and edges could
+not deceive me; they still stood to the sunlight, and sent me from
+that vast distance the memory of my passage, when their snows had
+seemed interminable and their height so monstrous; their cold such a
+cloak of death. Now they were as far off as childhood, and I saw them
+for the last time.
+
+All this I drew. Then finding a post directing me to a side road for
+Calestano, I followed it down and down into the valley beyond; and up
+the walls of this second valley as the evening fell I heard the noise
+of the water running, as the Taro had run, a net of torrents from the
+melting snows far off. These streams I soon saw below me, winding (as
+those of the Taro had wound) through a floor of dry shingle and rock;
+but when my road ceased suddenly some hundreds of feet above the bed
+of the river, and when, full of evening, I had scrambled down through
+trees to the brink of the water, I found I should have to repeat what
+I had done that morning and to ford these streams. For there was no
+track of any kind and no bridge, and Calestano stood opposite me, a
+purple cluster of houses in the dusk against the farther mountain
+side.
+
+Very warily, lobbing stones as I had been taught, and following up and
+down each branch to find a place, I forded one by one the six little
+cold and violent rivers, and reaching the farther shore, I reached
+also, as I thought, supper, companionship, and a bed.
+
+But it is not in this simple way that human life is arranged. What
+awaited me in Calestano was ill favour, a prison, release, base
+flattery, and a very tardy meal.
+
+It is our duty to pity all men. It is our duty to pity those who are
+in prison. It is our duty to pity those who are not in prison. How
+much more is it the duty of a Christian man to pity the rich who
+cannot ever get into prison? These indeed I do now specially pity, and
+extend to them my commiseration.
+
+What! Never even to have felt the grip of the policeman; to have
+watched his bold suspicious eye; to have tried to make a good show
+under examination ... never to have heard the bolt grinding in the
+lock, and never to have looked round at the cleanly simplicity of a
+cell? Then what emotions have you had, unimprisonable rich; or what do
+you know of active living and of adventure?
+
+It was after drinking some wine and eating macaroni and bread at a
+poor inn, the only one in the place, and after having to shout at the
+ill-natured hostess (and to try twenty guesses before I made her
+understand that I wanted cheese), it was when I had thus eaten and
+shouted, and had gone over the way to drink coffee and to smoke in a
+little cafe, that my adventure befell me.
+
+In the inn there had been a fat jolly-looking man and two
+official-looking people with white caps dining at another table. I had
+taken no notice of them at the time. But as I sat smoking and thinking
+in the little cafe, which was bright and full of people, I noticed a
+first danger-signal when I was told sullenly that 'they had no bed;
+they thought I could get none in the town': then, suddenly, these two
+men in white caps came in, and they arrested me with as much ease as
+you or I would hold a horse.
+
+A moment later there came in two magnificent fellows, gendarmes, with
+swords and cocked hats, and moustaches _a l'Abd el Kader,_ as we used
+to say in the old days; these four, the two gendarmes and two
+policemen, sat down opposite me on chairs and began cross-questioning
+me in Italian, a language in which I was not proficient. I so far
+understood them as to know that they were asking for my papers.
+
+'Niente!' said I, and poured out on the table a card-case, a
+sketch-book, two pencils, a bottle of wine, a cup, a piece of bread, a
+scrap of French newspaper, an old _Secolo,_ a needle, some thread, and
+a flute--but no passport.
+
+They looked in the card-case and found 73 lira; that is, not quite
+three pounds. They examined the sketch-book critically, as behoved
+southerners who are mostly of an artistic bent: but they found no
+passport. They questioned me again, and as I picked about for words to
+reply, the smaller (the policeman, a man with a face like a fox)
+shouted that he had heard me speaking Italian _currently_ in the inn,
+and that my hesitation was a blind.
+
+This lie so annoyed me that I said angrily in French (which I made as
+southern as possible to suit them):
+
+'You lie: and you can be punished for such lies, since you are an
+official.' For though the police are the same in all countries, and
+will swear black is white, and destroy men for a song, yet where there
+is a _droit administratif-_ that is, where the Revolution has made
+things tolerable--you are much surer of punishing your policeman, and
+he is much less able to do you a damage than in England or America;
+for he counts as an official and is under a more public discipline and
+responsibility if he exceeds his powers.
+
+Then I added, speaking distinctly, 'I can speak French and Latin. Have
+you a priest in Calestano, and does he know Latin?'
+
+This was a fine touch. They winced, and parried it by saying that the
+Sindaco knew French. Then they led me away to their barracks while
+they fetched the Sindaco, and so I was imprisoned.
+
+But not for long. Very soon I was again following up the street, and
+we came to the house of the Sindaco or Mayor. There he was, an old man
+with white hair, God bless him, playing cards with his son and
+daughter. To him therefore, as understanding French, I was bidden
+address myself. I told him in clear and exact idiom that his policemen
+were fools, that his town was a rabbit-warren, and his prison the only
+cleanly thing in it; that half-a-dozen telegrams to places I could
+indicate would show where I had passed; that I was a common tourist,
+not even an artist (as my sketch-book showed), and that my cards gave
+my exact address and description.
+
+But the Sindaco, the French-speaking Sindaco, understood me not in the
+least, and it seemed a wicked thing in me to expose him in his old
+age, so I waited till he spoke. He spoke a word common to all
+languages, and one he had just caught from my lips.
+
+'Tourist-e?' he said.
+
+I nodded. Then he told them to let me go. It was as simple as that;
+and to this day, I suppose, he passes for a very bilingual Mayor. He
+did me a service, and I am willing to believe that in his youth he
+smacked his lips over the subtle flavour of Voltaire, but I fear
+to-day he would have a poor time with Anatole France.
+
+What a contrast was there between the hour when I had gone out of the
+cafe a prisoner and that when I returned rejoicing with a crowd about
+me, proclaiming my innocence, and shouting one to another that I was a
+tourist and had seventy-three lira on my person! The landlady smiled
+and bowed: she had before refused me a bed! The men at the tables made
+me a god! Nor did I think them worse for this. Why should I? A man
+unknown, unkempt, unshaven, in tatters, covered with weeks of travel
+and mud, and in a suit that originally cost not ten shillings; having
+slept in leaves and ferns, and forest places, crosses a river at dusk
+and enters a town furtively, not by the road. He is a foreigner; he
+carries a great club. Is it not much wiser to arrest such a man? Why
+yes, evidently. And when you have arrested him, can you do more than
+let him go without proof, on his own word? Hardly!
+
+Thus I loved the people of Calestano, especially for this strange
+adventure they had given me; and next day, having slept in a human
+room, I went at sunrise up the mountain sides beyond and above their
+town, and so climbed by a long cleft the _second_ spur of the
+Apennines: the spur that separated me from the _third_ river, the
+Parma. And my goal above the Parma (when I should have crossed it) was
+a place marked in the map 'Tizzano'. To climb this second spur, to
+reach and cross the Parma in the vale below, to find Tizzano, I left
+Calestano on that fragrant morning; and having passed and drawn a
+little hamlet called Frangi, standing on a crag, I went on up the
+steep vale and soon reached the top of the ridge, which here dips a
+little and allows a path to cross over to the southern side.
+
+It is the custom of many, when they get over a ridge, to begin
+singing. Nor did I fail, early as was the hour, to sing in passing
+this the second of my Apennine summits. I sang easily with an open
+throat everything that I could remember in praise of joy; and I did
+not spare the choruses of my songs, being even at pains to imitate
+(when they were double) the various voices of either part.
+
+Now, so much of the Englishman was in me that, coming round a corner
+of rock from which one first sees Beduzzo hanging on its ledge (as you
+know), and finding round this corner a peasant sitting at his ease, I
+was ashamed.  For I did not like to be overheard singing fantastic
+songs. But he, used to singing as a solitary pastime, greeted me, and
+we walked along together, pointing out to each other the glories of
+the world before us and exulting in the morning. It was his business
+to show me things and their names: the great Mountain of the
+Pilgrimage to the South, the strange rock of Castel-Nuovo; in the far
+haze the plain of Parma; and Tizzano on its high hill, the ridge
+straight before me. He also would tell me the name in Italian of the
+things to hand--my boots, my staff, my hat; and I told him their names
+in French, all of which he was eager to learn.
+
+We talked of the way people here tilled and owned ground, of the
+dangers in the hills, and of the happiness of lonely men. But if you
+ask how we understood each other, I will explain the matter to you.
+
+In Italy, in the Apennines of the north, there seem to be three strata
+of language. In the valleys the Italian was pure, resonant, and
+foreign to me.  There dwell the townsmen, and they deal down river
+with the plains.  Half-way up (as at Frangi, at Beduzzo, at Tizzano) I
+began to understand them. They have the nasal 'n'; they clip their
+words. On the summits, at last, they speak like northerners, and I was
+easily understood, for they said not _'vino' _but _'vin';_ not _'duo'_
+but _'du'_, and so forth. They are the Gauls of the hills. I told them
+so, and they were very pleased.
+
+Then I and my peasant parted, but as one should never leave a man
+without giving him something to show by way of token on the Day of
+Judgement, I gave this man a little picture of Milan, and bade him
+keep it for my sake.
+
+So he went his way, and I mine, and the last thing he said to me was
+about a _'molinar'_, but I did not know what that meant.
+
+When I had taken a cut down the mountain, and discovered a highroad at
+the bottom, I saw that the river before me needed fording, like all
+the rest; and as my map showed me there was no bridge for many miles
+down, I cast about to cross directly, if possible on some man's
+shoulders.
+
+I met an old woman with a heap of grass on her back; I pointed to the
+river, and said (in Lingua Franca) that I wished to cross. She again
+used that word _'molinar',_ and I had an inkling that it meant
+'miller'. I said to myself--
+
+'Where there is a miller there is a mill. For _Ubi Petrus ibi
+Ecclesia._ Where there is a mill there is water; a mill must have
+motive power: .'.  (a) I must get near the stream; (b) I must look out
+for the noise and aspect of a mill.
+
+I therefore (thanking the grass-bearing woman) went right over the
+fields till I saw a great, slow mill-wheel against a house, and a sad
+man standing looking at it as though it were the Procession of God's
+Providence. He was thinking of many things. I tapped him on the
+shoulder (whereat he started) and spoke the great word of that valley,
+_'molinar'_. It opened all the gates of his soul. He smiled at me like
+a man grown young again, and, beckoning me to follow, led radiantly up
+the sluice to where it drew from the river.
+
+Here three men were at work digging a better entry for the water. One
+was an old, happy man in spectacles, the second a young man with
+stilts in his hands, the third was very tall and narrow; his face was
+sad, and he was of the kind that endure all things and conquer. I said
+'_Molinar_?'' I had found him.
+
+To the man who had brought me I gave 50 c., and so innocent and good
+are these people that he said _'Pourquoi?'_ or words like it, and I
+said it was necessary. Then I said to the molinar, _'Quanta?'_ and he,
+holding up a tall finger, said '_Una Lira'._ The young man leapt on to
+his stilts, the molinar stooped down and I got upon his shoulders, and
+we all attempted the many streams of the river Parma, in which I think
+I should by myself have drowned.
+
+I say advisedly--'I should have been drowned.' These upper rivers of
+the hills run high and low according to storms and to the melting of
+the snows.  The river of Parma (for this torrent at last fed Parma)
+was higher than the rest.
+
+Even the molinar, the god of that valley, had to pick his way
+carefully, and the young man on stilts had to go before, much higher
+than mortal men, and up above the water. I could see him as he went,
+and I could see that, to tell the truth, there was a ford--a rare
+thing in upper waters, because in the torrent-sources of rivers either
+the upper waters run over changeless rocks or else over gravel and
+sand. Now if they run over rocks they have their isolated shallow
+places, which any man may find, and their deep--evident by the still
+and mysterious surface, where fish go round and round in the hollows;
+but no true ford continuous from side to side. So it is in Scotland.
+And if they run over gravel and sand, then with every storm or 'spate'
+they shift and change. But here by some accident there ran--perhaps a
+shelf or rock, perhaps a ruin of a Roman bridge--something at least
+that was deep enough and solid enough to be a true ford--and that we
+followed.
+
+The molinar--even the molinar--was careful of his way. Twice he
+waited, waist high, while the man on stilts before us suddenly lost
+ground and plunged to his feet. Once, crossing a small branch (for the
+river here, like all these rivers, runs in many arms over the dry
+gravel), it seemed there was no foothold and we had to cast up and
+down. Whenever we found dry land, I came off the molinar's back to
+rest him, and when he took the water again I mounted again. So we
+passed the many streams, and stood at last on the Tizzanian side. Then
+I gave a lira to the molinar, and to his companion on stilts 50 c.,
+who said, 'What is this for?' and I said, 'You also helped.'
+
+The molinar then, with gesticulations and expression of the eyes, gave
+me to understand that for this 50 c. the stilt-man would take me up to
+Tizzano on the high ridge and show me the path up the ridge; so the
+stilt-man turned to me and said, _'Andiamo' _which means _'Allons'.
+_But when the Italians say _'Andiamo' _they are less harsh than the
+northern French who say _'Allans'; _for the northern French have three
+troubles in the blood.  They are fighters; they will for ever be
+seeking the perfect state, and they love furiously. Hence they ferment
+twice over, like wine subjected to movement and breeding acidity.
+Therefore is it that when they say _'Allons'_ it is harsher than
+_'Andiamo'._ My Italian said to me genially, _'Andiamo_'.
+
+The Catholic Church makes men. By which I do not mean boasters and
+swaggerers, nor bullies nor ignorant fools, who, finding themselves
+comfortable, think that their comfort will be a boon to others, and
+attempt (with singular unsuccess) to force it on the world; but men,
+human beings, different from the beasts, capable of firmness and
+discipline and recognition; accepting death; tenacious. Of her effects
+the most gracious is the character of the Irish and of these Italians.
+Of such also some day she may make soldiers.
+
+Have you ever noticed that all the Catholic Church does is thought
+beautiful and lovable until she comes out into the open, and then
+suddenly she is found by her enemies (which are the seven capital
+sins, and the four sins calling to heaven for vengeance) to be hateful
+and grinding? So it is; and it is the fine irony of her present
+renovation that those who were for ever belauding her pictures, and
+her saints, and her architecture, as we praise things dead, they are
+the most angered by her appearance on this modern field all armed,
+just as she was, with works and art and songs, sometimes superlative,
+often vulgar. Note you, she is still careless of art or songs, as she
+has always been. She lays her foundations in something other, which
+something other our moderns hate. Yet out of that something other came
+the art and song of the Middle Ages. And what art or songs have you?
+She is Europe and all our past. She is returning. _Andiamo._
+
+LECTOR. But Mr _(deleted by the Censor)_ does not think so?
+
+AUCTOR. I last saw him supping at the Savoy. _Andiamo._
+
+We went up the hill together over a burnt land, but shaded with trees.
+It was very hot. I could scarcely continue, so fast did my companion
+go, and so much did the heat oppress me.
+
+We passed a fountain at which oxen drank, and there I supped up cool
+water from the spout, but he wagged his finger before his face to tell
+me that this was an error under a hot sun.
+
+We went on and met two men driving cattle up the path between the
+trees.  These I soon found to be talking of prices and markets with my
+guide. For it was market-day. As we came up at last on to the little
+town--a little, little town like a nest, and all surrounded with
+walls, and a castle in it and a church--we found a thousand beasts all
+lowing and answering each other along the highroad, and on into the
+market square through the gate.  There my guide led me into a large
+room, where a great many peasants were eating soup with macaroni in
+it, and some few, meat. But I was too exhausted to eat meat, so I
+supped up my broth and then began diapephradizing on my fingers to
+show the great innkeeper what I wanted.
+
+I first pulled up the macaroni out of the dish, and said, _Fromagio,
+Pommodoro,_ by which I meant cheese--tomato. He then said he knew what
+I meant, and brought me that spaghetti so treated, which is a dish for
+a king, a cosmopolitan traitor, an oppressor of the poor, a usurer, or
+any other rich man, but there is no spaghetti in the place to which
+such men go, whereas these peasants will continue to enjoy it in
+heaven.
+
+I then pulled out my bottle of wine, drank what was left out of the
+neck (by way of sign), and putting it down said, _'Tale, tantum, vino
+rosso.'_ My guide also said many things which probably meant that I
+was a rich man, who threw his money about by the sixpence. So the
+innkeeper went through a door and brought back a bottle all corked and
+sealed, and said on his fingers, and with his mouth and eyes, 'THIS
+KIND OF WINE IS SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL.'
+
+Only in the foolish cities do men think it a fine thing to appear
+careless of money. So I, very narrowly watching him out of half-closed
+eyes, held up my five fingers interrogatively, and said,
+_'Cinquante?'_ meaning 'Dare you ask fivepence?'
+
+At which he and all the peasants around, even including my guide,
+laughed aloud as at an excellent joke, and said, _'Cinquante, Ho!
+ho!'_ and dug each other in the ribs. But the innkeeper of Tizzano Val
+Parmense said in Italian a number of things which meant that I could
+but be joking, and added (in passing) that a lira made it a kind of
+gift to me. A lira was, as it were, but a token to prove that it had
+changed hands: a registration fee: a matter of record; at a lira it
+was pure charity. Then I said, _'Soixante Dix?'_ which meant nothing
+to him, so I held up seven fingers; he waved his hand about genially,
+and said that as I was evidently a good fellow, a traveller, and as
+anyhow he was practically giving me the wine, he would make it
+ninepence; it was hardly worth his while to stretch out his hand for
+so little money. So then I pulled out 80 c. in coppers, and said,
+_'Tutto',_ which means 'all'. Then he put the bottle before me, took
+the money, and an immense clamour rose from all those who had been
+watching the scene, and they applauded it as a ratified bargain. And
+this is the way in which bargains were struck of old time in these
+hills when your fathers and mine lived and shivered in a cave, hunted
+wolves, and bargained with clubs only.
+
+So this being settled, and I eager for the wine, wished it to be
+opened, especially to stand drink to my guide. The innkeeper was in
+another room.  The guide was too courteous to ask for a corkscrew, and
+I did not know the Italian for a corkscrew.
+
+I pointed to the cork, but all I got out of my guide was a remark that
+the wine was very good. Then I made the emblem and sign of a corkscrew
+in my sketch-book with a pencil, but he pretended not to
+understand--such was his breeding. Then I imitated the mode, sound,
+and gesture of a corkscrew entering a cork, and an old man next to me
+said '_Tira-buchon'--_a common French word as familiar as the woods of
+Marly! It was brought. The bottle was opened and we all drank
+together.
+
+As I rose to go out of Tizzano Val Parmense my guide said to me, _'Se
+chiama Tira-Buchon perche E' lira il buchon'_ And I said to him,
+_'Dominus Vobiscum'_ and left him to his hills.
+
+I took the road downwards from the ridge into the next dip and valley,
+but after a mile or so in the great heat (it was now one o'clock) I
+was exhausted. So I went up to a little wooded bank, and lay there in
+the shade sketching Tizzano Val Parmense, where it stood not much
+above me, and then I lay down and slept for an hour and smoked a pipe
+and thought of many things.
+
+From the ridge on which Tizzano stands, which is the third of these
+Apennine spurs, to the next, the fourth, is but a little way; one
+looks across from one to the other. Nevertheless it is a difficult
+piece of walking, because in the middle of the valley another ridge,
+almost as high as the principal spurs, runs down, and this has to be
+climbed at its lowest part before one can get down to the torrent of
+the Enza, where it runs with a hollow noise in the depths of the
+mountains. So the whole valley looks confused, and it appears, and is,
+laborious.
+
+Very high up above in a mass of trees stood the first of those many
+ruined towers and castles in which the Apennines abound, and of which
+Canossa, far off and indistinguishable in the haze, was the chief
+example. It was called 'The Tower of Rugino'. Beyond the deep trench
+of the Enza, poised as it seemed on its southern bank (but really much
+further off, in the Secchia valley), stood that strange high rock of
+Castel-Nuovo, which the peasant had shown me that morning and which
+was the landmark of this attempt. It seemed made rather by man than by
+nature, so square and exact was it and so cut off from the other
+hills.
+
+It was not till the later afternoon, when the air was already full of
+the golden dust that comes before the fall of the evening, that I
+stood above the Enza and saw it running thousands of feet below. Here
+I halted for a moment irresolute, and looked at the confusion of the
+hills. It had been my intention to make a straight line for Collagna,
+but I could not tell where Collagna lay save that it was somewhere
+behind the high mountain that was now darkening against the sky.
+Moreover, the Enza (as I could see down, down from where I stood) was
+not fordable. It did not run in streams but in one full current, and
+was a true river. All the scene was wild. I had come close to the
+central ridge of the Apennines. It stood above me but five or six
+clear miles away, and on its slopes there were patches and fields of
+snow which were beginning to glimmer in the diminishing light.
+
+Four peasants sat on the edge of the road. They were preparing to go
+to their quiet homesteads, and they were gathering their scythes
+together, for they had been mowing in a field. Coming up to these, I
+asked them how I might reach Collagna. They told me that I could not
+go straight, as I had wished, on account of the impassable river, but
+that if I went down the steep directly below me I should find a
+bridge; that thence a path went up the opposite ridge to where a
+hamlet, called Ceregio (which they showed me beyond the valley), stood
+in trees on the crest, and once there (they said) I could be further
+directed. I understood all their speech except one fatal word. I
+thought they told me that Ceregio was _half_ the way to Collagna; and
+what that error cost me you shall hear.
+
+They drank my wine, I ate their bread, and we parted: they to go to
+their accustomed place, and I to cross this unknown valley. But when I
+had left these grave and kindly men, the echo of their voices remained
+with me; the deep valley of the Enza seemed lonely, and as I went
+lower and lower down towards the noise of the river I lost the sun.
+
+The Enza was flooded. A rough bridge, made of stout logs resting on
+trunks of trees that were lashed together like tripods and supported a
+long plank, was afforded to cross it. But in the high water it did not
+quite reach to the hither bank. I rolled great stones into the water
+and made a short causeway, and so, somewhat perilously, I attained the
+farther shore, and went up, up by a little precipitous path till I
+reached the hamlet of Ceregio standing on its hill, blessed and
+secluded; for no road leads in or out of it, but only mule-paths.
+
+The houses were all grouped together round a church; it was dim
+between them; but several men driving oxen took me to a house that was
+perhaps the inn, though there was no sign; and there in a twilight
+room we all sat down together like Christians in perfect harmony, and
+the woman of the house served us.
+
+Now when, after this communion, I asked the way to Collagna, they must
+have thought me foolish, and have wondered why I did not pass the
+night with them, for they knew how far off Collagna was. But I (by the
+error in language of which I have told you) believed it to be but a
+short way off.  It was in reality ten miles. The oldest of my
+companions said he would put me on the way.
+
+We went together in the half light by a lane that followed the crest
+of the hill, and we passed a charming thing, a little white sculpture
+in relief, set up for a shrine and representing the Annunciation; and
+as we passed it we both smiled. Then in a few hundred yards we passed
+another that was the Visitation, and they were gracious and beautiful
+to a degree, and I saw that they stood for the five joyful mysteries.
+Then he had to leave me, and he said, pointing to the little shrine:
+
+'When you come to the fifth of these the path divides. Take that to
+the left, and follow it round the hollow of the mountain: it will
+become a lane. This lane crosses a stream and passes near a tower.
+When you have reached the tower it joins a great highroad, and that is
+the road to Collagna.'
+
+And when he indicated the shrines he smiled, as though in apology for
+them, and I saw that we were of the same religion. Then (since people
+who will not meet again should give each other presents mutually) I
+gave him the best of my two pipes, a new pipe with letters carved on
+it, which he took to be the initials of my name, and he on his part
+gave me a hedge-rose which he had plucked and had been holding in his
+fingers. And I continued the path alone.
+
+Certainly these people have a benediction upon them, granted them for
+their simple lives and their justice. Their eyes are fearless and
+kindly. They are courteous, straight, and all have in them laughter
+and sadness. They are full of songs, of memories, of the stories of
+their native place; and their worship is conformable to the world that
+God made. May they possess their own land, and may their influence
+come again from Italy to save from jar, and boasting, and ineptitude
+the foolish, valourless cities, and the garish crowds of shouting
+men.... And let us especially pray that the revival of the faith may
+do something for our poor old universities.
+
+Already, when I heard all these directions, they seemed to argue a
+longer road than I had expected. It proved interminable.
+
+It was now fully dark; the night was very cold from the height of the
+hills; a dense dew began to fall upon the ground, and the sky was full
+of stars. For hours I went on slowly down the lane that ran round the
+hollow of the wooded mountain, wondering why I did not reach the
+stream he spoke of. It was midnight when I came to the level, and yet
+I heard no water, and did not yet see the tower against the sky.
+Extreme fatigue made it impossible, as I thought, to proceed farther,
+when I saw a light in a window, and went to it quickly and stood
+beneath it. A woman from the window called me _Caro mio,_ which was
+gracious, but she would not let me sleep even in the straw of the
+barn.
+
+I hobbled on in despair of the night, for the necessity of sleep was
+weighing me down after four high hills climbed that day, and after the
+rough ways and the heat and the continual marching.
+
+I found a bridge which crossed the deep ravine they had told me of.
+This high bridge was new, and had been built of fine stone, yet it was
+broken and ruined, and a gap suddenly showed in the dark. I stepped
+back from it in fear. The clambering down to the stream and up again
+through the briars to regain the road broke me yet more, and when, on
+the hill beyond, I saw the tower faintly darker against the dark sky,
+I went up doggedly to it, fearing faintness, and reaching it where it
+stood (it was on the highest ground overlooking the Secchia valley), I
+sat down on a stone beside it and waited for the morning.
+
+The long slope of the hills fell away for miles to where, by daylight,
+would have lain the misty plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the
+landscape. The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the
+place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy
+roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a
+cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of
+Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous--bare, rugged, a desert
+place--added something of doom.
+
+The hours were creeping on with the less certain stars; a very faint
+and unliving grey touched the edges of the clouds. The cold possessed
+me, and I rose to walk, if I could walk, a little farther.
+
+What is that in the mind which, after (it may be) a slight
+disappointment or a petty accident, causes it to suffer on the scale
+of grave things?
+
+I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful,
+colourless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and
+influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round
+the first uncertain promise of increasing light. For there is an hour
+before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul
+or around it, when even the stars fail.
+
+And this long and dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst when
+one was alone at sea in a small boat without wind; drifting beyond
+one's harbour in the ebb of the outer channel tide, and sogging back
+at the first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea without any
+waves. In such lonely mornings I have watched the Owers light turning,
+and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments could
+be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I have prayed for the
+morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I
+say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing.
+
+But now, on this ridge, dragging myself on to the main road, I found a
+deeper abyss of isolation and despairing fatigue than I had ever
+known, and I came near to turning eastward and imploring the hastening
+of light, as men pray continually without reason for things that can
+but come in a due order. I still went forward a little, because when I
+sat down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune; and because my
+feet, going painfully and slowly, yet gave a little balance and rhythm
+to the movement of my mind.
+
+I heard no sound of animals or birds. I passed several fields,
+deserted in the half-darkness; and in some I felt the hay, but always
+found it wringing wet with dew, nor could I discover a good shelter
+from the wind that blew off the upper snow of the summits. For a
+little space of time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road,
+that shadow of sleep which numbs the mind, but it could not compel me
+to lie down, and I accepted it only as a partial and beneficent
+oblivion which covered my desolation and suffering as a thin,
+transparent cloud may cover an evil moon.
+
+Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating
+gloom (which I think the clouds in purgatory must reflect) lifted from
+the valley as though to a slow order given by some calm and good
+influence that was marshalling in the day. Their colours came back to
+things; the trees recovered their shape, life, and trembling; here and
+there, on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their
+movement took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the
+first time the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. That subtle
+barrier was drawn which marks to-day from yesterday; all the night and
+its despondency became the past and entered memory. The road before
+me, the pass on my left (my last ridge, and the entry into Tuscany),
+the mass of the great hills, had become mixed into the increasing
+light, that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present which I
+have always found capable of opening the doors of the future with a
+gesture of victory.
+
+My pain either left me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little
+way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and
+dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing to the
+east.
+
+There, without any warning of colours, or of the heraldry that we have
+in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without
+doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with
+security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun.
+
+The air became warmer almost suddenly. The splendour and health of the
+new day left me all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to
+immediate sleep.
+
+I found therefore in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath
+one of my trees, a place for lying down; I stretched myself out upon
+it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vague and
+tenuous delight separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last
+confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of
+prayer--and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of
+adoration--this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good
+proceeds, but partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the
+things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most
+complete and glorious.
+
+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 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 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 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, 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 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!
+
+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, Brueckengebildung im kult-Historischer.  Passenmayer;
+Durat, _Le pont antique, etude 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 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.
+
+The next morning with daylight I continued the road to Lucca, and of
+that also I will say nothing.
+
+LECTOR. Why on earth did you write this book?
+
+AUCTOR. For my amusement.
+
+LECTOR. And why do you suppose I got it?
+
+AUCTOR. I cannot conceive ... however, I will give up this much, to
+tell you that at Decimo the mystery of cypress trees first came into
+my adventure and pilgrimage: of cypress trees which henceforward were
+to mark my Tuscan road. And I will tell you that there also I came
+across a thing peculiar (I suppose) to the region of Lucca, for I saw
+it there as at Decimo, and also some miles beyond. I mean fine
+mournful towers built thus: In the first storey one arch, in the
+second two, in the third three, and so on: a very noble way of
+building.
+
+And I will tell you something more. I will tell you something no one
+has yet heard. To wit, why this place is called Decimo, and why just
+below it is another little spot called Sexta.
+
+LECTOR.. ..
+
+AUCTOR. I know what you are going to say! Do not say it. You are going
+to say: 'It is because they were at the sixth and tenth milestones
+from Lucca on the Roman road.' Heaven help these scientists! Did you
+suppose that I thought it was called Decimo because the people had ten
+toes? Tell me, why is not every place ten miles out of a Roman town
+called by such a name? Eh?  You are dumb. You cannot answer. Like most
+moderns you have entirely missed the point. We all know that there was
+a Roman town at Lucca, because it was called Luca, and if there had
+been no Roman town the modern town would not be spelt with two _c's._
+All Roman towns had milestones beyond them. But why did _this_ tenth
+milestone from _this_ Roman town keep its name?
+
+LECTOR. I am indifferent.
+
+AUCTOR. I will tell you. Up in the tangle of the Carrara mountains,
+overhanging the Garfagnana, was a wild tribe, whose name I forget
+(unless it were the Bruttii), but which troubled the Romans not a
+little, defeating them horribly, and keeping the legionaries in some
+anxiety for years. So when the soldiers marched out north from Luca
+about six miles, they could halt and smile at each other, and say 'At
+_Sextant..._ that's all right.  All safe so far!' and therefore only a
+little village grew up at this little rest and emotion. But as they
+got nearer the gates of the hills they began to be visibly perturbed,
+and they would say: 'The eighth mile! cheer up!' Then 'The ninth mile!
+Sanctissima Madonna! Have you seen anything moving on the heights?'
+But when they got to the _tenth_ milestone, which stands before the
+very jaws of the defile, then indeed they said with terrible emphasis,
+_'Ad Decimam!'_ And there was no restraining them: they would camp and
+entrench, or die in the venture: for they were Romans and stern
+fellows, and loved a good square camp and a ditch, and sentries and a
+clear moon, and plenty of sharp stakes, and all the panoply of war.
+That is the origin of Decimo.
+
+For all my early start, the intolerable heat had again taken the
+ascendant before I had fairly entered the plain. Then, it being yet
+but morning, I entered from the north the town of Lucca, which is the
+neatest, the regularest, the exactest, the most fly-in-amber little
+town in the world, with its uncrowded streets, its absurd
+fortifications, and its contented silent houses--all like a family at
+ease and at rest under its high sun. It is as sharp and trim as its
+own map, and that map is as clear as a geometrical problem. Everything
+in Lucca is good.
+
+I went with a short shadow, creeping when I could on the eastern side
+of the street to save the sunlight; then I came to the main square,
+and immediately on my left was the Albergo di Something-or-other, a
+fine great hotel, but most unfortunately right facing the blazing sky.
+I had to stop outside it to count my money. I counted it wrong and
+entered. There I saw the master, who talked French.
+
+'Can you in an hour,' said I, 'give me a meal to my order, then a bed,
+though it is early day?' This absurd question I made less absurd by
+explaining to him my purpose. How I was walking to Rome and how, being
+northern, I was unaccustomed to such heat; how, therefore, I had
+missed sleep, and would find it necessary in future to walk mainly by
+night. For I had now determined to fill the last few marches up in
+darkness, and to sleep out the strong hours of the sun.
+
+All this he understood; I ordered such a meal as men give to beloved
+friends returned from wars. I ordered a wine I had known long ago in
+the valley of the Saone in the old time of peace before ever the Greek
+came to the land. While they cooked it I went to their cool and
+splendid cathedral to follow a late Mass. Then I came home and ate
+their admirable food and drank the wine which the Burgundians had
+trodden upon the hills of gold so many years before. They showed me a
+regal kind of a room where a bed with great hangings invited repose.
+
+All my days of marching, the dirty inns, the forests, the nights
+abroad, the cold, the mists, the sleeplessness, the faintness, the
+dust, the dazzling sun, the Apennines--all my days came over me, and
+there fell on me a peaceful weight, as his two hundred years fell upon
+Charlemagne in the tower of Saragossa when the battle was done; after
+he had curbed the valley of Ebro and christened Bramimonde.
+
+So I slept deeply all day long; and, outside, the glare made a silence
+upon the closed shutters, save that little insects darted in the outer
+air.
+
+When I woke it was evening. So well had they used me that I paid what
+they asked, and, not knowing what money remained over, I left their
+town by the southern gate, crossed the railway and took the road.
+
+My way lay under the flank of that mountain whereby the Luccans cannot
+see Pisa, or the Pisans cannot see Lucca--it is all one to me, I shall
+not live in either town, God willing; and if they are so eager to
+squint at one another, in Heaven's name, cannot they be at the pains
+to walk round the end of the hill? It is this laziness which is the
+ruin of many; but not of pilgrims, for here was I off to cross the
+plain of Arno in one night, and reach by morning the mouth and gate of
+that valley of the Elsa, which same is a very manifest proof of how
+Rome was intended to be the end and centre of all roads, the chief
+city of the world, and the Popes' residence--as, indeed, it plainly is
+to this day, for all the world to deny at their peril, spiritual,
+geographical, historical, sociological, economic, and philosophical.
+
+For if some such primeval and predestinarian quality were not inherent
+in the City, how, think you, would the valley of the Serchio--the hot,
+droughty, and baking Garfagnana--lead down pointing straight to Rome;
+and how would that same line, prolonged across the plain, find fitting
+it exactly beyond that plain this vale of the Elsa, itself leading up
+directly towards Rome? I say, nowhere in the world is such a
+coincidence observable, and they that will not take it for a portent
+may go back to their rationalism and consort with microbes and make
+their meals off logarithms, washed down with an exact distillation of
+the root of minus one; and the peace of fools, that is the deepest and
+most balmy of all, be theirs for ever and ever.
+
+Here again you fall into errors as you read, ever expecting something
+new; for of that night's march there is nothing to tell, save that it
+was cool, full of mist, and an easy matter after the royal
+entertainment and sleep of the princely Albergo that dignifies Lucca.
+The villages were silent, the moon soon left the sky, and the stars
+could not show through the fog, which deepened in the hours after
+midnight.
+
+A map I had bought in Lucca made the difficulties of the first part of
+the road (though there were many cross-ways) easy enough; and the
+second part, in midnight and the early hours, was very plain sailing,
+till--having crossed the main line and having, at last, very weary,
+come up to the branch railway at a slant from the west and north, I
+crossed that also under the full light--I stood fairly in the Elsa
+valley and on the highroad which follows the railway straight to
+Siena. That long march, I say, had been easy enough in the coolness
+and in the dark; but I saw nothing; my interior thoughts alone would
+have afforded matter for this part; but of these if you have not had
+enough in near six hundred miles of travel, you are a stouter fellow
+than I took you for.
+
+Though it was midsummer, the light had come quickly. Long after
+sunrise the mist dispersed, and the nature of the valley appeared.
+
+It was in no way mountainous, but easy, pleasant, and comfortable,
+bounded by low, rounded hills, having upon them here and there a row
+of cypresses against the sky; and it was populous with pleasant farms.
+Though the soil was baked and dry, as indeed it is everywhere in this
+south, yet little regular streams (or canals) irrigated it and
+nourished many trees--- but the deep grass of the north was wanting.
+
+For an hour or more after sunrise I continued my way very briskly;
+then what had been the warmth of the early sun turned into the violent
+heat of day, and remembering Merlin where he says that those who will
+walk by night must sleep by day, and having in my mind the severe
+verses of James Bayle, sometime Fellow of St Anne's, that 'in Tuscan
+summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but the nights are
+cool' (he was no flamboyant poet; he loved the quiet diction of the
+right wing of English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit of
+sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay down under a tree of
+a kind I had never seen; and lulled under the pleasant fancy that this
+was a picture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that I was
+reclining in some background landscape of the fifteenth century (for
+the scene was of that kind), I fell asleep.
+
+When I woke it was as though I had slept long; but I doubted the
+feeling.  The young sun still low in the sky, and the shadows not yet
+shortened, puzzled me. I looked at my watch, but the dislocation of
+habit which night marches produce had left it unwound. It marked a
+quarter to three, which was absurd. I took the road somewhat stiffly
+and wondering. I passed several small white cottages; there was no
+clock in them, and their people were away. At last in a Trattoria, as
+they served me with food, a woman told me it was just after seven; I
+had slept but an hour.
+
+Outside, the day was intense; already flies had begun to annoy the
+darkened room within. Through the half-curtained door the road was
+white in the sun, and the railway ran just beyond.
+
+I paid my reckoning, and then, partly for an amusement, I ranged my
+remaining pence upon the table, first in the shape of a Maltese cross,
+then in a circle (interesting details!). The road lay white in the
+sunlight outside, and the railway ran just beyond.
+
+I counted the pence and the silver--there was three francs and a
+little over; I remembered the imperial largesse at Lucca, the lordly
+spending of great sums, where, now in the pocket of an obsequious man,
+the pounds were taking care of themselves. I remembered how at Como I
+had been compelled by poverty to enter the train for Milan. How little
+was three francs for the remaining twenty-five miles to Siena! The
+road lay white in the sunlight, and the railway ran just beyond.
+
+I remembered the pleasing cheque in the post-office of Siena; the
+banks of Siena, and the money changers at their counters changing
+money at the rate of change.
+
+'If one man,' thought I, 'may take five per cent discount on a sum of
+money in the exchange, may not another man take discount off a walk of
+over seven hundred miles? May he not cut off it, as his due,
+twenty-five miserable little miles in the train?' Sleep coming over me
+after my meal increased the temptation. Alas! how true is the great
+phrase of Averroes (or it may be Boa-ed-din: anyhow, the Arabic
+escapes me, but the meaning is plain enough), that when one has once
+fallen, it is easy to fall again (saving always heavy falls from
+cliffs and high towers, for after these there is no more falling)....
+Examine the horse's knees before you buy him; take no ticket-of-leave
+man into your house for charity; touch no prospectus that has
+founders' shares, and do not play with firearms or knives and never go
+near the water till you know how to swim. Oh! blessed wisdom of the
+ages!  sole patrimony of the poor! The road lay white in the sun, and
+the railway ran just beyond.
+
+If the people of Milo did well to put up a statue in gold to the man
+that invented wheels, so should we also put one up in Portland stone
+or plaster to the man that invented rails, whose property it is not
+only to increase the speed and ease of travel, but also to bring on
+slumber as can no drug: not even poppies gathered under a waning moon.
+The rails have a rhythm of slight falls and rises ... they make a loud
+roar like a perpetual torrent; they cover up the mind with a veil.
+
+Once only, when a number of men were shouting 'POGGI-BON-SI,' like a
+war-cry to the clank of bronze, did I open my eyes sleepily to see a
+hill, a castle wall, many cypresses, and a strange tower bulging out
+at the top (such towers I learned were the feature of Tuscany). Then
+in a moment, as it seemed, I awoke in the station of Siena, where the
+railway ends and goes no farther.
+
+It was still only morning; but the glare was beyond bearing as I
+passed through the enormous gate of the town, a gate pierced in high
+and stupendous walls that are here guarded by lions. In the narrow
+main street there was full shade, and it was made cooler by the
+contrast of the blaze on the higher storeys of the northern side. The
+wonders of Siena kept sleep a moment from my mind. I saw their great
+square where a tower of vast height marks the guildhall. I heard Mass
+in a chapel of their cathedral: a chapel all frescoed, and built, as
+it were, out of doors, and right below the altar-end or choir. I noted
+how the city stood like a queen of hills dominating all Tuscany: above
+the Elsa northward, southward above the province round Mount Amiato.
+And this great mountain I saw also hazily far off on the horizon. I
+suffered the vulgarities of the main street all in English and
+American, like a show. I took my money and changed it; then, having so
+passed not a full hour, and oppressed by weariness, I said to myself:
+
+'After all, my business is not with cities, and already I have seen
+far off the great hill whence one can see far off the hills that
+overhang Rome.'
+
+With this in my mind I wandered out for a quiet place, and found it in
+a desolate green to the north of the city, near a huge, old red-brick
+church like a barn. A deep shadow beneath it invited me in spite of
+the scant and dusty grass, and in this country no one disturbs the
+wanderer. There, lying down, I slept without dreams till evening.
+
+AUCTOR. Turn to page 94.
+
+LECTOR. I have it. It is not easy to watch the book in two places at
+once; but pray continue.
+
+AUCTOR. Note the words from the eighth to the tenth lines.
+
+LECTOR. Why?
+
+AUCTOR. They will make what follows seem less abrupt.
+
+Once there was a man dining by himself at the Cafe Anglais, in the
+days when people went there. It was a full night, and he sat alone at
+a small table, when there entered a very big man in a large fur coat.
+The big man looked round annoyed, because there was no room, and the
+first man very courteously offered him a seat at his little table.
+They sat down and ate and talked of several things; among others, of
+Bureaucracy. The first maintained that Bureaucracy was the curse of
+France.
+
+'Men are governed by it like sheep. The administrator, however humble,
+is a despot; most people will even run forward to meet him halfway,
+like the servile dogs they are,' said he.
+
+'No,' answered the Man in the Big Fur Coat, 'I should say men were
+governed just by the ordinary human sense of authority. I have no
+theories. I say they recognize authority and obey it. Whether it is
+bureaucratic or not is merely a question of form.'
+
+At this moment there came in a tall, rather stiff Englishman. He also
+was put out at finding no room. The two men saw the manager approach
+him; a few words were passed, and a card; then the manager suddenly
+smiled, bowed, smirked, and finally went up to the table and begged
+that the Duke of Sussex might be allowed to share it. The Duke hoped
+he did not incommode these gentlemen. They assured him that, on the
+contrary, they esteemed his presence a favour.
+
+'It is our prerogative,' said the Man in the Big Fur Coat, 'to be the
+host Paris entertaining her Guest.'
+
+They would take no denial; they insisted on the Duke's dining with
+them, and they told him what they had just been discussing. The Duke
+listened to their theories with some _morgue,_ much _spleen,_ and no
+little _phlegm,_ but with _perfect courtesy,_ and then, towards the
+coffee, told them in fluent French with a strong accent, his own
+opinion. (He had had eight excellent courses; Yquem with his fish, the
+best Chambertin during the dinner, and a glass of wonderful champagne
+with his dessert.) He spoke as follows, with a slight and rather hard
+smile:
+
+'My opinion may seem to you impertinent, but I believe nothing more
+subtly and powerfully affects men than the aristocratic feeling. Do
+not misunderstand me,' he added, seeing that they would protest; 'it
+is not my own experience alone that guides me. All history bears
+witness to the same truth.'
+
+The simple-minded Frenchmen put down this infatuation to the Duke's
+early training, little knowing that our English men of rank are the
+simplest fellows in the world, and are quite indifferent to their
+titles save in business matters.
+
+The Frenchmen paid the bill, and they all three went on to the
+Boulevard.
+
+'Now,' said the first man to his two companions, 'I will give you a
+practical example of what I meant when I said that Bureaucracy
+governed mankind.'
+
+He went up to the wall of the Credit Lyonnais, put the forefinger of
+either hand against it, about twenty-five centimetres apart, and at a
+level of about a foot above his eyes. Holding his fingers thus he
+gazed at them, shifting them slightly from time to time and moving his
+glance from one to the other rapidly. A crowd gathered. In a few
+moments a pleasant elderly, short, and rather fat gentleman in the
+crowd came forward, and, taking off his hat, asked if he could do
+anything for him.
+
+'Why,' said our friend, 'the fact is I am an engineer (section D of
+the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important
+measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs
+to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the
+concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be
+drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor
+in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have
+marked; yet I can get no further without my Double Refractor.'
+
+'Do not let that trouble you,' said the short, stout stranger; 'I will
+be delighted to keep the place exactly marked while you run for your
+instrument.'
+
+The crowd was now swelled to a considerable size; it blocked up the
+pavement, and was swelled every moment by the arrival of the curious.
+The little fat elderly man put his fingers exactly where the other's
+had been, effecting the exchange with a sharp gesture; and each
+watched intently to see that it was right to within a millimetre. The
+attitude was constrained.  The elderly man smiled, and begged the
+engineer not to be alarmed. So they left him with his two forefingers
+well above his head, precisely twenty-five centimetres apart, and
+pressing their tips against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais. Then the
+three friends slipped out of the crowd and pursued their way.
+
+'Let us go to the theatre,' said the experimenter, 'and when we come
+back I warrant you will agree with my remarks on Bureaucracy.'
+
+They went to hear the admirable marble lines of Corneille. For three
+hours they were absorbed by the classics, and, when they returned, a
+crowd, now enormous, was surging all over the Boulevard, stopping the
+traffic and filled with a noise like the sea. Policemen were attacking
+it with the utmost energy, but still it grew and eddied; and in the
+centre--a little respectful space kept empty around him--still
+stretched the poor little fat elderly man, a pitiable sight. His knees
+were bent, his head wagged and drooped with extreme fatigue, he was
+the colour of old blotting-paper; but still he kept the tips of his
+two forefingers exactly twenty-five centimetres apart, well above his
+head, and pressed against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais.
+
+'You will not match that with your aristocratic sentiment!' said the
+author of the scene in pardonable triumph.
+
+'I am not so sure,' answered the Duke of Sussex. He pulled out his
+watch.  'It is midnight,' he said, 'and I must be off; but let me tell
+you before we part that you have paid for a most expensive dinner, and
+have behaved all night with an extravagant deference under the
+impression that I was the Duke of Sussex. As a fact my name is Jerks,
+and I am a commercial traveller in the linseed oil line; and I wish
+you the best of good evenings.'
+
+'Wait a moment,' said the Man in the Big Fur Coat; 'my theory of the
+Simple Human Sense of Authority still holds. I am a detective officer,
+and you will both be good enough to follow me to the police station.'
+
+And so they did, and the Engineer was fined fifty francs in
+correctional, and the Duke of Sussex was imprisoned for ten days, with
+interdiction of domicile for six months; the first indeed under the
+Prefectorial Decree of the 18th of November 1843, but the second under
+the law of the 12th germinal of the year VIII.
+
+In this way I have got over between twenty and thirty miles of road
+which were tramped in the dark, and the description of which would
+have plagued you worse than a swarm of hornets.
+
+Oh, blessed interlude! no struggling moon, no mist, no long-winded
+passages upon the genial earth, no the sense of the night, no marvels
+of the dawn, no rhodomontade, no religion, no rhetoric, no sleeping
+villages, no silent towns (there was one), no rustle of trees--just a
+short story, and there you have a whole march covered as though a
+brigade had swung down it. A new day has come, and the sun has risen
+over the detestable parched hillocks of this downward way.
+
+No, no, Lector! Do not blame me that Tuscany should have passed
+beneath me unnoticed, as the monotonous sea passes beneath a boat in
+full sail. Blame all those days of marching; hundreds upon hundreds of
+miles that exhausted the powers of the mind. Blame the fiery and angry
+sky of Etruria, that compelled most of my way to be taken at night.
+Blame St Augustine, who misled me in his Confessions by talking like
+an African of 'the icy shores of Italy'; or blame Rome, that now more
+and more drew me to Herself as She approached from six to five, from
+five to four, from four to three--now She was but _three_ days off.
+The third sun after that I now saw rising would shine upon the City.
+
+I did indeed go forward a little in the heat, but it was useless.
+After an hour I abandoned it. It was not so much the sun, though that
+was intemperate and deadly; it was rather the inhuman aspect of the
+earth which made me despair. It was as though the soil had been left
+imperfect and rough after some cataclysm; it reminded me of those bad
+lands in the west of America, where the desert has no form, and where
+the crumbling and ashy look of things is more abhorrent than their
+mere desolation. As soon march through evil dreams!
+
+The north is the place for men. Eden was there; and the four rivers of
+Paradise are the Seine, the Oise, the Thames, and the Arun; there are
+grasses there, and the trees are generous, and the air is an unnoticed
+pleasure. The waters brim up to the edges of the fields. But for this
+bare Tuscany I was never made.
+
+How far I had gone I could not tell, nor precisely how much farther
+San Quirico, the neighbouring town, might be. The imperfect map I had
+bought at Siena was too minute to give me clear indications. I was
+content to wait for evening, and then to go on till I found it. An
+hour or so in the shade of a row of parched and dusty bushes I lay and
+ate and drank my wine, and smoked, and then all day I slept, and woke
+a while, and slept again more deeply. But how people sleep and wake,
+if you do not yet know it after so much of this book you never will.
+
+It was perhaps five o'clock, or rather more, when I rose unhappily and
+took up the ceaseless road.
+
+Even the goodness of the Italian nature seemed parched up in those dry
+hollows. At an inn where I ate they shouted at me, thinking in that
+way to make me understand; and their voices were as harsh as the
+grating of metal against stone. A mile farther I crossed a lonely line
+of railway; then my map told me where I was, and I went wearily up an
+indefinite slope under the declining sun, and thought it outrageous
+that only when the light had gone was there any tolerable air in this
+country.
+
+Soon the walls of San Quirico, partly ruinous, stood above the fields
+(for the smallest places here have walls); as I entered its gate the
+sun set, and as though the cool, coming suddenly, had a magic in it,
+everything turned kinder. A church that could wake interest stood at
+the entry of the town; it had stone lions on its steps, and the
+pillars were so carved as to resemble knotted ropes. There for the
+first time I saw in procession one of those confraternities which in
+Italy bury the dead; they had long and dreadful hoods over their
+heads, with slits for the eyes. I spoke to the people of San Quirico,
+and they to me. They were upstanding, and very fine and noble in the
+lines of the face. On their walls is set a marble tablet, on which it
+is registered that the people of Tuscany, being asked whether they
+would have their hereditary Duke or the House of Savoy, voted for the
+latter by such and such a great majority; and this kind of tablet I
+afterwards found was common to all these small towns. Then passing
+down their long street I came, at the farther gate, to a great sight,
+which the twilight still permitted me to receive in its entirety.
+
+For San Quirico is built on the edge of a kind of swell in the land,
+and here where I stood one looked over the next great wave; for the
+shape of the view was, on a vast scale, just what one sees from a
+lonely boat looking forward over a following sea.
+
+The trough of the wave was a shallow purple valley, its arid quality
+hidden by the kindly glimmer of evening; few trees stood in it to
+break its sweep, and its irregularities and mouldings were just those
+of a sweep of water after a gale. The crest of the wave beyond was
+seventeen miles away. It had, as have also such crests at sea, one
+highest, toppling peak in its long line, and this, against the clear
+sky, one could see to be marked by buildings. These buildings were the
+ruined castle and walls of Radicofani, and it lay straight on my way
+to Rome.
+
+It is a strange thing, arresting northern eyes, to see towns thus
+built on summits up into the sky, and this height seemed the more
+fantastic because it was framed. A row of cypress trees stood on
+either side of the road where it fell from San Quirico, and, exactly
+between these, this high crest, a long way off, was set as though by
+design.
+
+With more heart in me, and tempted by such an outline as one might be
+by the prospect of adventure, I set out to cross the great bare run of
+the valley. As I went, the mountain of Amiato came more and more
+nearly abreast of me in the west; in its foothills near me were
+ravines and unexpected rocks; upon one of them hung a village. I
+watched its church and one tall cypress next it, as they stood black
+against the last of daylight. Then for miles I went on the dusty way,
+and crossed by old bridges watercourses in which stood nothing but
+green pools; and the night deepened.
+
+It was when I had crossed the greater part of the obscure plain, at
+its lowest dip and not far from the climb up to Radicofani, that I saw
+lights shining in a large farmhouse, and though it was my business to
+walk by night, yet I needed companionship, so I went in.
+
+There in a very large room, floored with brick and lit by one candle,
+were two fine old peasants, with faces like apostles, playing a game
+of cards.  There also was a woman playing with a strong boy child,
+that could not yet talk: and the child ran up to me. Nothing could
+persuade the master of the house but that I was a very poor man who
+needed sleep, and so good and generous was this old man that my
+protests seemed to him nothing but the excuses and shame of poverty.
+He asked me where I was going. I said, 'To Rome.' He came out with a
+lantern to the stable, and showed me there a manger full of hay,
+indicating that I might sleep in it... His candle flashed upon the
+great silent oxen standing in rows; their enormous horns, three times
+the length of what we know in England, filled me with wonder ... Well!
+(may it count to me as gain!), rather than seem to offend him I lay
+down in that manger, though I had no more desire to sleep than has the
+flittermouse in our Sussex gloamings; also I was careful to offer no
+money, for that is brutality. When he had left me I took the
+opportunity for a little rest, and lay on my back in the hay
+wide-awake and staring at darkness.
+
+The great oxen champed and champed their food with a regular sound; I
+remembered the steerage in a liner, the noise of the sea and the
+regular screw, for this it exactly resembled. I considered in the
+darkness the noble aspect of these beasts as I had seen them in the
+lantern light, and I determined when I got to Rome to buy two such
+horns, and to bring them to England and have them mounted for drinking
+horns--great drinking horns, a yard deep--and to get an engraver to
+engrave a motto for each. On the first I would have--
+
+  King Alfred was in Wantage born 
+  He drank out of a ram's horn.  
+  Here is a better man than he, 
+  Who drinks deeper, as you see.
+
+Thus my friends drinking out of it should lift up their hearts and no
+longer be oppressed with humility. But on the second I determined for
+a rousing Latin thing, such as men shouted round camp fires in the
+year 888 or thereabouts; so, the imagination fairly set going and
+taking wood-cock's flight, snipe-fashion, zigzag and devil-may-care-
+for-the-rules, this seemed to suit me--
+
+  _Salve, cornu cornuum!  
+  Cornutorum vis Boum.  
+  Munus excellent Deum!
+  Gregis o praesidium!  
+  Sitis desiderium!  
+  Dignum cornuum cornu 
+  Romae memor salve tu!  
+  Tibi cornuum cornuto--_
+
+LECTOR. That means nothing. 
+
+AUCTOR. Shut up!
+
+  _Tibi cornuum cornuto 
+  Tibi clamo, te saluto 
+  Salve cornu cornuum!
+  Fortunatam da Domunt!_
+
+And after this cogitation and musing I got up quietly, so as not to
+offend the peasant: and I crept out, and so upwards on to the crest of
+the hill.
+
+But when, after several miles of climbing, I neared the summit, it was
+already beginning to be light. The bareness and desert grey of the
+distance I had crossed stood revealed in a colourless dawn, only the
+Mont' Amiata, now somewhat to the northward, was more gentle, and
+softened the scene with distant woods. Between it and this height ran
+a vague river-bed as dry as the stones of a salt beach.
+
+The sun rose as I passed under the ruined walls of the castle. In the
+little town itself, early as was the hour, many people were stirring.
+One gave me good-morning--a man of singular character, for here, in
+the very peep of day, he was sitting on a doorstep, idle, lazy and
+contented, as though it was full noon. Another was yoking oxen; a
+third going out singing to work in the fields.
+
+I did not linger in this crow's nest, but going out by the low and
+aged southern gate, another deeper valley, even drier and more dead
+than the last, appeared under the rising sun. It was enough to make
+one despair! And when I thought of the day's sleep in that wilderness,
+of the next night's toil through it--
+
+LECTOR. What about the Brigand of Radicofani of whom you spoke in
+Lorraine, and of whom I am waiting to hear?
+
+AUCTOR. What about him? Why, he was captured long ago, and has since
+died of old age. I am surprised at your interrupting me with such
+questions.  Pray ask for no more tales till we get to the really
+absorbing story of the Hungry Student.
+
+Well, as I was saying, I was in some despair at the sight of that
+valley, which had to be crossed before I could reach the town of
+Acquapendente, or Hanging-water, which I knew to lie somewhere on the
+hills beyond. The sun was conquering me, and I was looking hopelessly
+for a place to sleep, when a cart drawn by two oxen at about one mile
+an hour came creaking by. The driver was asleep, his head on the shady
+side. The devil tempted me, and without one struggle against
+temptation, nay with cynical and congratulatory feelings, I jumped up
+behind, and putting my head also on the shady side (there were soft
+sacks for a bed) I very soon was pleasantly asleep.
+
+We lay side by side for hour after hour, and the day rose on to noon;
+the sun beat upon our feet, but our heads were in the shade and we
+slept heavily a good and honest sleep: he thinking that he was alone,
+but I knowing that I was in company (a far preferable thing), and I
+was right and he was wrong. And the heat grew, and sleep came out of
+that hot sun more surely than it does out of the night air in the
+north. But no dreams wander under the noon.
+
+From time to time one or the other of us would open our eyes drowsily
+and wonder, but sleep was heavy on us both, and our minds were sunk in
+calm like old hulls in the dark depths of the sea where there are no
+storms.
+
+We neither of us really woke until, at the bottom of the hill which
+rises into Acquapendente, the oxen stopped. This halt woke us up;
+first me and then my companion. He looked at me a moment and laughed.
+He seemed to have thought all this while that I was some country
+friend of his who had taken a lift; and I, for my part, had made more
+or less certain that he was a good fellow who would do me no harm. I
+was right, and he was wrong. I knew not what offering to make him to
+compensate him for this trouble which his heavy oxen had taken. After
+some thought I brought a cigar out of my pocket, which he smoked with
+extreme pleasure. The oxen meanwhile had been urged up the slow hill,
+and it was in this way that we reached the famous town of
+Acquapendente. But why it should be called famous is more than I can
+understand. It may be that in one of those narrow streets there is a
+picture or a church, or one of those things which so attract
+unbelieving men. To the pilgrim it is simply a group of houses. Into
+one of these I went, and, upon my soul, I have nothing to say of it
+except that they furnished me with food.
+
+I do not pretend to have counted the flies, though they were numerous;
+and, even had I done so, what interest would the number have, save to
+the statisticians? Now as these are patient men and foolish, I
+heartily recommend them to go and count the flies for themselves.
+
+Leaving this meal then, this town and this people (which were all of a
+humdrum sort), and going out by the gate, the left side of which is
+made up of a church, I went a little way on the short road to San
+Lorenzo, but I had no intention of going far, for (as you know by this
+time) the night had become my day and the day my night.
+
+I found a stream running very sluggish between tall trees, and this
+sight sufficiently reminded me of my own country to permit repose.
+Lying down there I slept till the end of the day, or rather to that
+same time of evening which had now become my usual waking hour ... And
+now tell me, Lector, shall I leave out altogether, or shall I give you
+some description of, the next few miles to San Lorenzo?
+
+LECTOR. Why, if I were you I would put the matter shortly and simply,
+for it is the business of one describing a pilgrimage or any other
+matter not to puff himself up with vain conceit, nor to be always
+picking about for picturesque situations, but to set down plainly and
+shortly what he has seen and heard, describing the whole matter.
+
+AUCTOR. But remember, Lector, that the artist is known not only by
+what he puts in but by what he leaves out.
+
+LECTOR. That is all very well for the artist, but you have no business
+to meddle with such people.
+
+AUCTOR. How then would you write such a book if you had the writing of
+it?
+
+LECTOR. I would not introduce myself at all; I would not tell stories
+at random, nor go in for long descriptions of emotions, which I am
+sure other men have felt as well as I. I would be careful to visit
+those things my readers had already heard of (AUCTOR. The pictures!
+the remarkable pictures! All that is meant by culture! The brown
+photographs! Oh! Lector, indeed I have done you a wrong!), and I would
+certainly not have the bad taste to say anything upon religion. Above
+all, I would be terse.
+
+AUCTOR. I see. You would not pile words one on the other, qualifying,
+exaggerating, conditioning, superlativing, diminishing, connecting,
+amplifying, condensing, mouthing, and glorifying the mere sound: you
+would be terse. You should be known for your self-restraint. There
+should be no verbosity in your style (God forbid!), still less
+pomposity, animosity, curiosity, or ferocity; you would have it neat,
+exact, and scholarly, and, above all, chiselled to the nail. A fig
+(say you), the pip of a fig, for the rambling style. You would be led
+into no hilarity, charity, vulgarity, or barbarity. Eh! my jolly
+Lector? You would simply say what you had to say?
+
+LECTOR. Precisely; I would say a plain thing in a plain way.
+
+AUCTOR. So you think one can say a plain thing in a plain way? You
+think that words mean nothing more than themselves, and that you can
+talk without ellipsis, and that customary phrases have not their
+connotations? You think that, do you? Listen then to the tale of Mr
+Benjamin Franklin Hard, a kindly merchant of Cincinnati, O., who had
+no particular religion, but who had accumulated a fortune of six
+hundred thousand dollars, and who had a horror of breaking the
+Sabbath. He was not 'a kind husband and a good father,' for he was
+unmarried; nor had he any children. But he was all that those words
+connote.
+
+This man Hard at the age of fifty-four retired from business, and
+determined to treat himself to a visit to Europe. He had not been in
+Europe five weeks before he ran bang up against the Catholic Church.
+He was never more surprised in his life. I do not mean that I have
+exactly weighed all his surprises all his life through. I mean that he
+was very much surprised indeed--and that is all that these words
+connote.
+
+He studied the Catholic Church with extreme interest. He watched High
+Mass at several places (hoping it might be different). He thought it
+was what it was not, and then, contrariwise, he thought it was not
+what it was. He talked to poor Catholics, rich Catholics, middle-class
+Catholics, and elusive, wellborn, penniless, neatly dressed,
+successful Catholics; also to pompous, vain Catholics; humble,
+uncertain Catholics; sneaking, pad-footed Catholics; healthy, howling,
+combative Catholics; doubtful, shoulder-shrugging, but devout
+Catholics; fixed, crabbed, and dangerous Catholics; easy, jovial, and
+shone-upon-by-the-heavenly-light Catholics; subtle Catholics; strange
+Catholics, and _(quod tibi manifeste absurdum videtur)_ intellectual,
+_pince-nez,_ jejune, twisted, analytical, yellow, cranky, and
+introspective Catholics: in fine, he talked to all Catholics.  And
+when I say 'all Catholics' I do not mean that he talked to every
+individual Catholic, but that he got a good, integrative grip of the
+Church militant, which is all that the words connote.
+
+Well, this man Hard got to know, among others, a certain good priest
+that loved a good bottle of wine, a fine deep dish of_ poulet a la
+casserole, _and a kind of egg done with cream in a little platter; and
+eating such things, this priest said to him one day: 'Mr Hard, what
+you want is to read some books on Catholicism.' And Hard, who was on
+the point of being received into the Church as the final solution of
+human difficulties, thought it would be a very good thing to instruct
+his mind before baptism.  So he gave the priest a note to a bookseller
+whom an American friend had told him of; and this American friend had
+said:
+
+'You will find Mr Fingle (for such was the bookseller's name) a
+hard-headed, honest, business man. He can say a _plain thing in a
+plain way.'_
+
+'Here,' said Mr Hard to the priest, 'is ten pounds. Send it to this
+bookseller Fingle and he shall choose books on Catholicism to that
+amount, and you shall receive them, and I will come and read them here
+with you.'
+
+So the priest sent the money, and in four days the books came, and Mr
+Hard and the priest opened the package, and these were the books
+inside:
+
+_Auricular Confession:_ a History. By a Brand Saved from the Burning.
+
+_Isabella; or, The Little Female Jesuit._ By 'Hephzibah'.
+
+_Elisha MacNab:_ a Tale of the French Huguenots.
+
+_England and Rome._ By the Rev. Ebenezer Catchpole of Emmanuel,
+Birmingham.
+
+_Nuns and Nunneries._ By 'Ruth', with a Preface by Miss Carran, lately
+rescued from a Canadian Convent.
+
+_History of the Inquisition._ By Llorente.
+
+_The Beast with Seven Heads; or, the Apocalyptical Warning._
+
+_No Truce with the Vatican._
+
+_The True Cause of Irish Disaffection._
+
+_Decline of the Latin Nations._
+
+_Anglo-Saxons the Chosen Race,_ and their connexion with the Ten Lost
+Tribes: with a map.
+
+Finally, a very large book at the bottom of the case called _Giant
+Pope._
+
+And it was no use asking for the money back or protesting. Mr Fingle
+was an honest, straightforward man, who said a plain thing in a plain
+way. They had left him to choose a suitable collection of books on
+Catholicism, and he had chosen the best he knew. And thus did Mr Hard
+(who has recently given a hideous font to the new Catholic church at
+Bismarckville) learn the importance of estimating what words connote.
+
+LECTOR. But all that does not excuse an intolerable prolixity?
+
+AUCTOR. Neither did I say it did, dear Lector. My object was merely to
+get you to San Lorenzo where I bought that wine, and where, going out
+of the gate on the south, I saw suddenly the wide lake of Bolsena all
+below.
+
+It is a great sheet like a sea; but as one knows one is on a high
+plateau, and as there is but a short dip down to it; as it is round
+and has all about it a rim of low even hills, therefore one knows it
+for an old and gigantic crater now full of pure water; and there are
+islands in it and palaces on the islands. Indeed it was an impression
+of silence and recollection, for the water lay all upturned to heaven,
+and, in the sky above me, the moon at her quarter hung still pale in
+the daylight, waiting for glory.
+
+I sat on the coping of a wall, drank a little of my wine, ate a little
+bread and sausage; but still song demanded some outlet in the cool
+evening, and companionship was more of an appetite in me than
+landscape. Please God, I had become southern and took beauty for
+granted.
+
+Anyhow, seeing a little two-wheeled cart come through the gate,
+harnessed to a ramshackle little pony, bony and hard, and driven by a
+little, brown, smiling, and contented old fellow with black hair, I
+made a sign to him and he stopped.
+
+This time there was no temptation of the devil; if anything the
+advance was from my side. I was determined to ride, and I sprang up
+beside the driver.  We raced down the hill, clattering and banging and
+rattling like a piece of ordnance, and he, my brother, unasked began
+to sing. I sang in turn. He sang of Italy, I of four countries:
+America, France, England, and Ireland. I could not understand his
+songs nor he mine, but there was wine in common between us, and
+_salami_ and a merry heart, bread which is the bond of all mankind,
+and that prime solution of ill-ease--I mean the forgetfulness of
+money.
+
+That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a
+drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy
+of remembrance for ever. The moon has shone on but few like it though
+she is old; the lake of Bolsena has glittered beneath none like it
+since the Etruscans here unbended after the solemnities of a triumph.
+It broke my vow to pieces; there was not a shadow of excuse for this
+use of wheels: it was done openly and wantonly in the face of the wide
+sky for pleasure. And what is there else but pleasure, and to what
+else does beauty move on? Not I hope to contemplation! A hideous
+oriental trick! No, but to loud notes and comradeship and the riot of
+galloping, and laughter ringing through old trees. Who would change
+(says Aristippus of Pslinthon) the moon and all the stars for so much
+wine as can be held in the cup of a bottle upturned? The honest man!
+And in his time (note you) they did not make the devilish deep and
+fraudulent bottoms they do now that cheat you of half your liquor.
+
+Moreover if I broke my vows (which is a serious matter), and if I
+neglected to contemplate the heavens (for which neglect I will confess
+to no one, not even to a postulate sub-deacon; it is no sin; it is a
+healthy omission), if (I say) I did this, I did what peasants do. And
+what is more, by drinking wine and eating pig we proved ourselves no
+Mohammedans; and on such as he is sure of, St Peter looks with a
+kindly eye.
+
+Now, just at the very entry to Bolsena, when we had followed the
+lovely lake some time, my driver halted and began to turn up a lane to
+a farm or villa; so I, bidding him good-night, crossed a field and
+stood silent by the lake and watched for a long time the water
+breaking on a tiny shore, and the pretty miniatures of waves. I stood
+there till the stars came out and the moon shone fully; then I went
+towards Bolsena under its high gate which showed in the darkness, and
+under its castle on the rock. There, in a large room which was not
+quite an inn, a woman of great age and dignity served me with fried
+fish from the lake, and the men gathered round me and attempted to
+tell me of the road to Rome, while I in exchange made out to them as
+much by gestures as by broken words the crossing of the Alps and the
+Apennines.
+
+Then, after my meal, one of the men told me I needed sleep; that there
+were no rooms in that house (as I said, it was not an inn), but that
+across the way he would show me one he had for hire. I tried to say
+that my plan was to walk by night. They all assured me he would charge
+me a reasonable sum.  I insisted that the day was too hot for walking.
+They told me, did these Etruscans, that I need fear no extortion from
+so honest a man.
+
+Certainly it is not easy to make everybody understand everything, and
+I had had experience already up in the mountains, days before, of how
+important it is not to be misunderstood when one is wandering in a
+foreign country, poor and ill-clad. I therefore accepted the offer,
+and, what was really very much to my regret, I paid the money he
+demanded. I even so far fell in with the spirit of the thing as to
+sleep a certain number of hours (for after all, my sleep that day in
+the cart had been very broken, and instead of resting throughout the
+whole of the heat I had taken a meal at Acquapendente). But I woke up
+not long after midnight--perhaps between one and two o'clock--and went
+out along the borders of the lake.
+
+The moon had set; I wish I could have seen her hanging at the quarter
+in the clear sky of that high crater, dipping into the rim of its
+inland sea.  It was perceptibly cold. I went on the road quite slowly,
+till it began to climb, and when the day broke I found myself in a
+sunken lane leading up to the town of Montefiascone.
+
+The town lay on its hill in the pale but growing light. A great dome
+gave it dignity, and a castle overlooked the lake. It was built upon
+the very edge and lip of the volcano-cup commanding either side.
+
+I climbed up this sunken lane towards it, not knowing what might be
+beyond, when, at the crest, there shone before me in the sunrise one
+of those unexpected and united landscapes which are among the glories
+of Italy. They have changed the very mind in a hundred northern
+painters, when men travelled hither to Rome to learn their art, and
+coming in by her mountain roads saw, time and again, the set views of
+plains like gardens, surrounded by sharp mountain-land and framed.
+
+The road did not pass through the town; the grand though crumbling
+gate of entry lay up a short straight way to the right, and below,
+where the road continued down the slope, was a level of some eight
+miles full of trees diminishing in distance. At its further side an
+ample mountain, wooded, of gentle flattened outline, but high and
+majestic, barred the way to Rome. It was yet another of those
+volcanoes, fruitful after death, which are the mark of Latium: and it
+held hidden, as did that larger and more confused one on the rim of
+which I stood, a lake in its silent crater. But that lake, as I was to
+find, was far smaller than the glittering sea of Bolsena, whose shores
+now lay behind me.
+
+The distance and the hill that bounded it should in that climate have
+stood clear in the pure air, but it was yet so early that a thin haze
+hung over the earth, and the sun had not yet controlled it: it was
+even chilly. I could not catch the towers of Viterbo, though I knew
+them to stand at the foot of the far mountain. I went down the road,
+and in half-an-hour or so was engaged upon the straight line crossing
+the plain.
+
+I wondered a little how the road would lie with regard to the town,
+and looked at my map for guidance, but it told me little. It was too
+general, taking in all central Italy, and even large places were
+marked only by small circles.
+
+When I approached Viterbo I first saw an astonishing wall,
+perpendicular to my road, untouched, the bones of the Middle Ages. It
+stood up straight before one like a range of cliffs, seeming much
+higher than it should; its hundred feet or so were exaggerated by the
+severity of its stones and by their sheer fall. For they had no
+ornament whatever, and few marks of decay, though many of age. Tall
+towers, exactly square and equally bare of carving or machicolation,
+stood at intervals along this forbidding defence and flanked its
+curtain. Then nearer by, one saw that it was not a huge castle, but
+the wall of a city, for at a corner it went sharp round to contain the
+town, and through one uneven place I saw houses. Many men were walking
+in the roads alongside these walls, and there were gates pierced in
+them whereby the citizens went in and out of the city as bees go in
+and out of the little opening in a hive.
+
+But my main road to Rome did not go through Viterbo, it ran alongside
+of the eastern wall, and I debated a little with myself whether I
+would go in or no. It was out of my way, and I had not entered
+Montefiascone for that reason. On the other hand, Viterbo was a famous
+place. It is all very well to neglect Florence and Pisa because they
+are some miles off the straight way, but Viterbo right under one's
+hand it is a pity to miss. Then I needed wine and food for the later
+day in the mountain. Yet, again, it was getting hot. It was past
+eight, the mist had long ago receded, and I feared delay.  So I mused
+on the white road under the tall towers and dead walls of Viterbo, and
+ruminated on an unimportant thing. Then curiosity did what reason
+could not do, and I entered by a gate.
+
+The streets were narrow, tortuous, and alive, all shaded by the great
+houses, and still full of the cold of the night. The noise of
+fountains echoed in them, and the high voices of women and the cries
+of sellers.  Every house had in it something fantastic and peculiar;
+humanity had twined into this place like a natural growth, and the
+separate thoughts of men, both those that were alive there and those
+dead before them, had decorated it all. There were courtyards with
+blinding whites of sunlit walls above, themselves in shadow; and there
+were many carvings and paintings over doors. I had come into a great
+living place after the loneliness of the road.
+
+There, in the first wide street I could find, I bought sausage and
+bread and a great bottle of wine, and then quitting Viterbo, I left it
+by the same gate and took the road.
+
+For a long while yet I continued under the walls, noting in one place
+a thing peculiar to the Middle Ages, I mean the apse of a church built
+right into the wall as the old Cathedral of St Stephen's was in Paris.
+These, I suppose, enemies respected if they could; for I have noticed
+also that in castles the chapel is not hidden, but stands out from the
+wall. So be it.  Your fathers and mine were there in the fighting, but
+we do not know their names, and I trust and hope yours spared the
+altars as carefully as mine did.
+
+The road began to climb the hill, and though the heat increased--for
+in Italy long before nine it is glaring noon to us northerners (and
+that reminds me: your fathers and mine, to whom allusion has been made
+above {as they say in the dull history books--[LECTOR. How many more
+interior brackets are we to have? Is this algebra? AUCTOR. You
+yourself, Lector, are responsible for the worst.]} your fathers and
+mine coming down into this country to fight, as was their annual
+custom, must have had a plaguy time of it, when you think that they
+could not get across the Alps till summer-time, and then had to hack
+and hew, and thrust and dig, and slash and climb, and charge and puff,
+and blow and swear, and parry and receive, and aim and dodge, and butt
+and run for their lives at the end, under an unaccustomed sun. No
+wonder they saw visions, the dear people! They are dead now, and we do
+not even know their names.)--Where was I?
+
+LECTOR. You were at the uninteresting remark that the heat was
+increasing.
+
+AUCTOR. Precisely. I remember. Well, the heat was increasing, but it
+seemed far more bearable than it had been in the earlier places; in
+the oven of the Garfagnana or in the deserts of Siena. For with the
+first slopes of the mountain a forest of great chestnut trees
+appeared, and it was so cool under these that there was even moss, as
+though I were back again in my own country where there are full rivers
+in summer-time, deep meadows, and all the completion of home.
+
+Also the height may have begun to tell on the air, but not much, for
+when the forest was behind me, and when I had come to a bare heath
+sloping more gently upwards--a glacis in front of the topmost bulwark
+of the round mountain--- I was oppressed with thirst, and though it
+was not too hot to sing (for I sang, and two lonely carabinieri passed
+me singing, and we recognized as we saluted each other that the
+mountain was full of songs), yet I longed for a bench, a flagon, and
+shade.
+
+And as I longed, a little house appeared, and a woman in the shade
+sewing, and an old man. Also a bench and a table, and a tree over it.
+There I sat down and drank white wine and water many times. The woman
+charged me a halfpenny, and the old man would not talk. He did not
+take his old age garrulously. It was his business, not mine; but I
+should dearly have liked to have talked to him in Lingua Franca, and
+to have heard him on the story of his mountain: where it was haunted,
+by what, and on which nights it was dangerous to be abroad. Such as it
+was, there it was. I left them, and shall perhaps never see them
+again.
+
+The road was interminable, and the crest, from which I promised myself
+the view of the crater-lake, was always just before me, and was never
+reached.  A little spring, caught in a hollow log, refreshed a meadow
+on the right.  Drinking there again, I wondered if I should go on or
+rest; but I was full of antiquity, and a memory in the blood, or what
+not, impelled me to see the lake in the crater before I went to sleep:
+after a few hundred yards this obsession was satisfied.
+
+I passed between two banks, where the road had been worn down at the
+crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of
+silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw
+the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark
+slopes around it. Its darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn
+of our saved and happy world.
+
+At its hither end a hill, that had once been a cone in the crater,
+stood out all covered with a dense wood. It was the Hill of Venus.
+
+There was no temple, nor no sacrifice, nor no ritual for the Divinity,
+save this solemn attitude of perennial silence; but under the
+influence which still remained and gave the place its savour, it was
+impossible to believe that the gods were dead. There were no men in
+that hollow; nor was there any memory of men, save of men dead these
+thousands of years. There was no life of visible things. The mind
+released itself and was in touch with whatever survives of conquered
+but immortal Spirits.
+
+Thus ready for worship, and in a mood of adoration; filled also with
+the genius which inhabits its native place and is too subtle or too
+pure to suffer the effect of time, I passed down the ridge-way of the
+mountain rim, and came to the edge overlooking that arena whereon was
+first fought out and decided the chief destiny of the world.
+
+For all below was the Campagna. Names that are at the origin of things
+attached to every cleft and distant rock beyond the spreading level,
+or sanctified the gleams of rivers. There below me was Veii; beyond,
+in the Wall of the Apennines, only just escaped from clouds, was Tibur
+that dignified the ravine at the edge of their rising; that crest to
+the right was Tusculum, and far to the south, but clear, on a mountain
+answering my own, was the mother of the City, Alba Longa. The Tiber, a
+dense, brown fog rolling over and concealing it, was the god of the
+wide plain.
+
+There and at that moment I should have seen the City. I stood up on
+the bank and shaded my eyes, straining to catch the dome at least in
+the sunlight; but I could not, for Rome was hidden by the low Sabinian
+hills.
+
+Soracte I saw there--Soracte, of which I had read as a boy. It stood
+up like an acropolis, but it was a citadel for no city. It stood
+alone, like that soul which once haunted its recesses and prophesied
+the conquering advent of the northern kings. I saw the fields where
+the tribes had lived that were the first enemies of the imperfect
+state, before it gave its name to the fortunes of the Latin race.
+
+Dark Etruria lay behind me, forgotten in the backward of my march: a
+furnace and a riddle out of which religion came to the Romans--a place
+that has left no language. But below me, sunlit and easy (as it seemed
+in the cooler air of that summit), was the arena upon which were first
+fought out the chief destinies of the world.
+
+And I still looked down upon it, wondering.
+
+Was it in so small a space that all the legends of one's childhood
+were acted? Was the defence of the bridge against so neighbouring and
+petty an alliance? Were they peasants of a group of huts that handed
+down the great inheritance of discipline, and made an iron channel
+whereby, even to us, the antique virtues could descend as a living
+memory? It must be so; for the villages and ruins in one landscape
+comprised all the first generations of the history of Rome. The stones
+we admire, the large spirit of the last expression came from that
+rough village and sprang from the broils of that one plain; Rome was
+most vigorous before it could speak. So a man's verse, and all he has,
+are but the last outward appearance, late and already rigid, of an
+earlier, more plastic, and diviner fire.
+
+'Upon this arena,' I still said to myself, 'were first fought out the
+chief destinies of the world'; and so, played upon by an unending
+theme, I ate and drank in a reverie, still wondering, and then lay
+down beneath the shade of a little tree that stood alone upon that
+edge of a new world. And wondering, I fell asleep under the morning
+sun.
+
+But this sleep was not like the earlier oblivions that had refreshed
+my ceaseless journey, for I still dreamt as I slept of what I was to
+see, and visions of action without thought--pageants and
+mysteries--surrounded my spirit; and across the darkness of a mind
+remote from the senses there passed whatever is wrapped up in the
+great name of Rome.
+
+When I woke the evening had come. A haze had gathered upon the plain.
+The road fell into Ronciglione, and dreams surrounded it upon every
+side. For the energy of the body those hours of rest had made a fresh
+and enduring vigour; for the soul no rest was needed. It had attained,
+at least for the next hour, a vigour that demanded only the physical
+capacity of endurance; an eagerness worthy of such great occasions
+found a marching vigour for its servant.
+
+In Ronciglione I saw the things that Turner drew; I mean the rocks
+from which a river springs, and houses all massed together, giving the
+steep a kind of crown. This also accompanied that picture, the soft
+light which mourns the sun and lends half-colours to the world. It was
+cool, and the opportunity beckoned. I ate and drank, asking every one
+questions of Rome, and I passed under their great gate and pursued the
+road to the plain. In the mist, as it rose, there rose also a passion
+to achieve.
+
+All the night long, mile after mile, I hurried along the Cassian Way.
+For five days I had slept through the heat, and the southern night had
+become my daytime; and though the mist was dense, and though the moon,
+now past her quarter, only made a vague place in heaven, yet
+expectation and fancy took more than the place of sight. In this fog I
+felt with every step of the night march the approach to the goal.
+
+Long past the place I had marked as a halt, long past Sette Vene, a
+light blurred upon the white wreaths of vapour; distant songs and the
+noise of men feasting ended what had been for many, many hours--for
+more than twenty miles of pressing forward--an exaltation worthy of
+the influence that bred it. Then came on me again, after the full
+march, a necessity for food and for repose. But these things, which
+have been the matter of so much in this book, now seemed subservient
+only to the reaching of an end; they were left aside in the mind.
+
+It was an inn with trellis outside making an arbour. In the yard
+before it many peasants sat at table; their beasts and waggons stood
+in the roadway, though, at this late hour, men were feeding some and
+housing others.  Within, fifty men or more were making a meal or a
+carousal.
+
+What feast or what necessity of travel made them keep the night alive
+I neither knew nor asked; but passing almost unobserved amongst them
+between the long tables, I took my place at the end, and the master
+served me with good food and wine. As I ate the clamour of the
+peasants sounded about me, and I mixed with the energy of numbers.
+
+With a little difficulty I made the master understand that I wished to
+sleep till dawn. He led me out to a small granary (for the house was
+full), and showed me where I should sleep in the scented hay. He would
+take no money for such a lodging, and left me after showing me how the
+door latched and unfastened; and out of so many men, he was the last
+man whom I thanked for a service until I passed the gates of Rome.
+
+Above the soft bed which the hay made, a square window, unglazed, gave
+upon the southern night; the mist hardly drifted in or past it, so
+still was the air. I watched it for a while drowsily; then sleep again
+fell on me.
+
+But as I slept, Rome, Rome still beckoned me, and I woke in a
+struggling light as though at a voice calling, and slipping out I
+could not but go on to the end.
+
+The small square paving of the Via Cassia, all even like a palace
+floor, rang under my steps. The parched banks and strips of dry fields
+showed through the fog (for its dampness did not cure the arid soil of
+the Campagna). The sun rose and the vapour lifted. Then, indeed, I
+peered through the thick air--but still I could see nothing of my
+goal, only confused folds of brown earth and burnt-up grasses, and
+farther off rare and un-northern trees.
+
+I passed an old tower of the Middle Ages that was eaten away at its
+base by time or the quarrying of men; I passed a divergent way on the
+right where a wooden sign said 'The Triumphal Way', and I wondered
+whether it could be the road where ritual had once ordained that
+triumphs should go. It seemed lonely and lost, and divorced from any
+approach to sacred hills.
+
+The road fell into a hollow where soldiers were manoeuvring. Even
+these could not arrest an attention that was fixed upon the
+approaching revelation. The road climbed a little slope where a branch
+went off to the left, and where there was a house and an arbour under
+vines. It was now warm day; trees of great height stood shading the
+sun; the place had taken on an appearance of wealth and care. The mist
+had gone before I reached the summit of the rise.
+
+There, from the summit, between the high villa walls on either
+side--at my very feet I saw the City.
+
+And now all you people whatsoever that are presently reading, may have
+read, or shall in the future read, this my many-sided but now-ending
+book; all you also that in the mysterious designs of Providence may
+not be fated to read it for some very long time to come; you then I
+say, entire, englobed, and universal race of men both in gross and
+regardant, not only living and seeing the sunlight, but dead also
+under the earth; shades, or to come in procession afterwards out of
+the dark places into the day for a little, swarms of you, an army
+without end; all you black and white, red, yellow and brown, men,
+women, children and poets--all of you, wherever you are now, or have
+been, or shall be in your myriads and deka myriads and hendeka
+myriads, the time has come when I must bid you farewell--
+
+  _Ludisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti; 
+  Tempus abire tibi est...._
+
+Only Lector I keep by me for a very little while longer with a special
+purpose, but even he must soon leave me; for all good things come to
+an end, and this book is coming to an end--has come to an end. The
+leaves fall, and they are renewed; the sun sets on the Vexin hills,
+but he rises again over the woods of Marly. Human companionship once
+broken can never be restored, and you and I shall not meet or
+understand each other again. It is so of all the poor links whereby we
+try to bridge the impassable gulf between soul and soul. Oh! we spin
+something, I know, but it is very gossamer, thin and strained, and
+even if it does not snap time will at last dissolve it.
+
+Indeed, there is a song on it which you should know, and which runs--
+
+[Bar of music]
+
+So my little human race, both you that have read this book and you
+that have not, good-bye in charity. I loved you all as I wrote. Did
+you all love me as much as I have loved you, by the black stone of
+Rennes I should be rich by now. Indeed, indeed, I have loved you all!
+You, the workers, all puffed up and dyspeptic and ready for the
+asylums; and you, the good-for-nothing lazy drones; you, the strong
+silent men, who have heads quite empty, like gourds; and you also, the
+frivolous, useless men that chatter and gabble to no purpose all day
+long. Even you, that, having begun to read this book, could get no
+further than page 47, and especially you who have read it manfully in
+spite of the flesh, I love you all, and give you here and now my
+final, complete, full, absolving, and comfortable benediction.
+
+To tell the truth, I have noticed one little fault about you. I will
+not call it fatuous, inane, and exasperating vanity or self-
+absorption; I will put it in the form of a parable. Sit you round
+attentively and listen, dispersing yourselves all in order, and do not
+crowd or jostle.
+
+Once, before we humans became the good and self-respecting people we
+are, the Padre Eterno was sitting in heaven with St Michael beside
+him, and He watched the abyss from His great throne, and saw shining
+in the void one far point of light amid some seventeen million others,
+and He said:
+
+'What is that?'
+
+And St Michael answered:
+
+'That is the Earth,' for he felt some pride in it.
+
+'The Earth?' said the Padre Eterno, a little puzzled . . . 'The Earth?
+...?... I do not remember very exactly . . .'
+
+'Why,' answered St Michael, with as much reverence as his annoyance
+could command, 'surely you must recollect the Earth and all the pother
+there was in heaven when it was first suggested to create it, and all
+about Lucifer--'
+
+'Ah!' said the Padre Eterno, thinking twice, 'yes. It is attached to
+Sirius, and--'
+
+'No, no,' said St Michael, quite visibly put out. 'It is the Earth.
+The Earth which has that changing moon and the thing called the sea.'
+
+'Of course, of course,' answered the Padre Eterno quickly, 'I said
+Sirius by a slip of the tongue. Dear me! So that is the Earth! Well,
+well! It is years ago now ... Michael, what are those little things
+swarming up and down all over it?'
+
+'Those,' said St Michael, 'are Men.'
+
+'Men?' said the Padre Eterno, 'Men ... I know the word as well as any
+one, but somehow the connexion escapes me. Men ...' and He mused.
+
+St Michael, with perfect self-restraint, said a few things a trifle
+staccato, defining Man, his dual destiny, his hope of heaven, and all
+the great business in which he himself had fought hard. But from a
+fine military tradition, he said nothing of his actions, nor even of
+his shrine in Normandy, of which he is naturally extremely proud: and
+well he may be.  What a hill!
+
+'I really beg your pardon,' said the Padre Eterno, when he saw the
+importance attached to these little creatures. 'I am sure they are
+worthy of the very fullest attention, and' (he added, for he was sorry
+to have offended) 'how sensible they seem, Michael! There they go,
+buying and selling, and sailing, driving, and wiving, and riding, and
+dancing, and singing, and the rest of it; indeed, they are most
+practical, business-like, and satisfactory little beings. But I notice
+one odd thing.  Here and there are some not doing as the rest, or
+attending to their business, but throwing themselves into all manner
+of attitudes, making the most extraordinary sounds, and clothing
+themselves in the quaintest of garments. What is the meaning of that?'
+
+'Sire!' cried St Michael, in a voice that shook the architraves of
+heaven, 'they are worshipping You!'
+
+'Oh! they are worshipping _me!_ Well, that is the most sensible thing
+I have heard of them yet, and I altogether commend them. _Continuez,'_
+said the Padre Eterno, _'continuez!'_
+
+And since then all has been well with the world; at least where _Us
+continuent._
+
+And so, carissimi, multitudes, all of you good-bye; the day has long
+dawned on the Via Cassia, this dense mist has risen, the city is
+before me, and I am on the threshold of a great experience; I would
+rather be alone.  Good-bye my readers; good-bye the world.
+
+At the foot of the hill I prepared to enter the city, and I lifted up
+my heart.
+
+There was an open space; a tramway: a tram upon it about to be drawn
+by two lean and tired horses whom in the heat many flies disturbed.
+There was dust on everything around.
+
+A bridge was immediately in front. It was adorned with statues in soft
+stone, half-eaten away, but still gesticulating in corruption, after
+the manner of the seventeenth century. Beneath the bridge there
+tumbled and swelled and ran fast a great confusion of yellow water: it
+was the Tiber. Far on the right were white barracks of huge and of
+hideous appearance; over these the Dome of St Peter's rose and looked
+like something newly built. It was of a delicate blue, but made a
+metallic contrast against the sky.
+
+Then (along a road perfectly straight and bounded by factories, mean
+houses and distempered walls: a road littered with many scraps of
+paper, bones, dirt, and refuse) I went on for several hundred yards,
+having the old wall of Rome before me all this time, till I came right
+under it at last; and with the hesitation that befits all great
+actions I entered, putting the right foot first lest I should bring
+further misfortune upon that capital of all our fortunes.
+
+And so the journey ended.
+
+It was the Gate of the Poplar--not of the People. (Ho, Pedant! Did you
+think I missed you, hiding and lurking there?) Many churches were to
+hand; I took the most immediate, which stood just within the wall and
+was called Our Lady of the People--(not 'of the Poplar'. Another fall
+for the learned!  Professor, things go ill with you to-day!). Inside
+were many fine pictures, not in the niminy-piminy manner, but strong,
+full-coloured, and just.
+
+To my chagrin, Mass was ending. I approached a priest and said to him:
+
+_'Pater, quando vel a quella hora e la prossimma Missa?'_
+
+_'Ad nonas,'_ said he.
+
+_'Pol! Hercle!'_ (thought I), 'I have yet twenty minutes to wait!
+Well, as a pilgrimage cannot be said to be over till the first Mass is
+heard in Rome, I have twenty minutes to add to my book.'
+
+So, passing an Egyptian obelisk which the great Augustus had nobly
+dedicated to the Sun, I entered....
+
+LECTOR. But do you intend to tell us nothing of Rome?
+
+AUCTOR. Nothing, dear Lector.
+
+LECTOR. Tell me at least one thing; did you see the Coliseum?
+
+AUCTOR. ... I entered a cafe at the right hand of a very long,
+straight street, called for bread, coffee, and brandy, and
+contemplating my books and worshipping my staff that had been friends
+of mine so long, and friends like all true friends inanimate, I spent
+the few minutes remaining to my happy, common, unshriven, exterior,
+and natural life, in writing down this
+
+
+DITHYRAMBIC 
+
+EPITHALAMIUM OR THRENODY
+
+  In these boots, and with this staff 
+  Two hundred leaguers and a half--
+
+(That means, two and a half hundred leagues. You follow? Not two
+hundred and one half league.... Well--)
+
+  Two hundred leaguers and a half
+  Walked I, went I, paced I, tripped I,
+  Marched I, held I, skelped I, slipped I,
+  Pushed I, panted, swung and dashed I;
+  Picked I, forded, swam and splashed I,
+  Strolled I, climbed I, crawled and scrambled,
+  Dropped and dipped I, ranged and rambled;
+  Plodded I, hobbled I, trudged and tramped I,
+  And in lonely spinnies camped I,
+  And in haunted pinewoods slept I,
+  Lingered, loitered, limped and crept I,
+  Clambered, halted, stepped and leapt I;
+  Slowly sauntered, roundly strode I,
+
+_And_ ... (Oh! Patron saints and Angels 
+               That protect the four evangels! 
+               And you Prophets vel majores 
+               Vel incerti, vel minores,
+               Virgines ac confessores 
+               Chief of whose peculiar glories 
+               Est in Aula Regis stare 
+               Atque orare et exorare 
+               Et clamare et conclamare 
+               Clamantes cum clamoribus 
+               Pro nobis peccatoribus.)
+
+_Let me not conceal it... Rode I. _
+(For who but critics could complain
+Of 'riding' in a railway train?) 
+  _Across the valleys and the high-land, 
+  With all the world on either hand. 
+  Drinking when I had a mind to, 
+  Singing when I felt inclined to; 
+  Nor ever turned my face to home 
+  Till I had slaked my heart at Rome._
+
+
+THE END AGAIN
+
+LECTOR. But this is dogg--
+
+AUCTOR. Not a word!
+
+FINIS
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH TO ROME ***
+
+This file should be named 7tptr10.txt or 7tptr10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 7tptr11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 7tptr10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+ PROJECT GUTENBERG LITERARY ARCHIVE FOUNDATION
+ 809 North 1500 West
+ Salt Lake City, UT 84116
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/7tptr10.zip b/old/7tptr10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bcd0ef9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/7tptr10.zip
diff --git a/old/8tptr10.txt b/old/8tptr10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b7e8792
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/8tptr10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9671 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Path to Rome, by Hilaire Belloc
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Path to Rome
+
+Author: Hilaire Belloc
+
+Release Date: January, 2005  [EBook #7373]
+[This file was first posted on April 22, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH TO ROME ***
+
+
+
+
+Eric Eldred
+
+
+
+The Path to Rome
+
+Hilaire Belloc
+
+
+
+
+'. .. AMORE ANTIQUI RITUS, ALTO SUB NUMINE ROMAE'
+
+
+
+PRAISE OF THIS BOOK
+
+To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book,
+and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit),
+greeting--and whatever else can be had for nothing.
+
+If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this
+way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley
+where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them
+all--when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great
+lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a
+Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note (after so many
+years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more
+than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and
+new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that
+such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the
+work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this
+shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered,
+and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as
+the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had
+been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's
+soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.
+
+Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed behind the high altar a
+statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so different from all I had
+ever seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that I was quite
+taken out of myself and vowed a vow there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage
+and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved; and I said, 'I
+will start from the place where I served in arms for my sins; I will
+walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep
+rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every
+morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St Peter's on the Feast
+of St Peter and St Paul.'
+
+Then I went out of the church still having that Statue in my mind, and
+I walked again farther into the world, away from my native valley, and
+so ended some months after in a place whence I could fulfil my vow;
+and I started as you shall hear. All my other vows I broke one by one.
+For a faggot must be broken every stick singly. But the strict vow I
+kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, and I heard high
+Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, as many can testify--to wit:
+Monsignor this, and Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of
+_so-and-so--o--polis in partibus infidelium;_ for we were all there
+together.
+
+And why (you will say) is all this put by itself in what Anglo-Saxons
+call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface? Why, it is because I have
+noticed that no book can appear without some such thing tied on before
+it; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, be certain that I read
+some eight or nine thousand of them to be sure of how they were
+written and to be safe from generalizing on too frail a basis.
+
+And having read them and discovered first, that it was the custom of
+my contemporaries to belaud themselves in this prolegomenaical ritual
+(some saying in a few words that they supplied a want, others boasting
+in a hundred that they were too grand to do any such thing, but most
+of them baritoning their apologies and chanting their excuses till one
+knew that their pride was toppling over)--since, I say, it seemed a
+necessity to extol one's work, I wrote simply on the lintel of my
+diary, _Praise of this Book,_ so as to end the matter at a blow. But
+whether there will be praise or blame I really cannot tell, for I am
+riding my pen on the snaffle, and it has a mouth of iron.
+
+Now there is another thing book writers do in their Prefaces, which is
+to introduce a mass of nincompoops of whom no one ever heard, and to
+say 'my thanks are due to such and such' all in a litany, as though
+any one cared a farthing for the rats! If I omit this believe me it is
+but on account of the multitude and splendour of those who have
+attended at the production of this volume. For the stories in it are
+copied straight from the best authors of the Renaissance, the music
+was written by the masters of the eighteenth century, the Latin is
+Erasmus' own; indeed, there is scarcely a word that is mine. I must
+also mention the Nine Muses, the Three Graces; Bacchus, the Maenads,
+the Panthers, the Fauns; and I owe very hearty thanks to Apollo.
+
+Yet again, I see that writers are for ever anxious of their style,
+thinking (not saying)--
+
+'True, I used "and which" on page 47, but Martha Brown the stylist
+gave me leave;' or:
+
+'What if I do end a sentence with a preposition? I always follow the
+rules of Mr Twist in his "'Tis Thus 'Twas Spoke", Odd's Body an' I do
+not!'
+
+Now this is a pusillanimity of theirs (the book writers) that they
+think style power, and yet never say as much in their Prefaces. Come,
+let me do so ... Where are you? Let me marshal you, my regiments of
+words!
+
+Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into
+desecrated earth under the doss-house of the Rue St Paul, or do you
+not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on the
+Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that
+you will not lend us the staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered
+and bashed the invaders of the vineyards, who are but a parable for
+the mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of the world?
+
+Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! See them
+how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering
+fellows!
+
+First come the Neologisms, that are afraid of no man; fresh, young,
+hearty, and for the most part very long-limbed, though some few short
+and strong.  There also are the Misprints to confuse the enemy at his
+onrush. Then see upon the flank a company of picked Ambiguities
+covering what shall be a feint by the squadron of Anachronisms led by
+old Anachronos himself; a terrible chap with nigglers and a great
+murderer of fools.
+
+But here see more deeply massed the ten thousand Egotisms shining in
+their armour and roaring for battle. They care for no one. They
+stormed Convention yesterday and looted the cellar of Good-Manners,
+who died of fear without a wound; so they drank his wine and are
+to-day as strong as lions and as careless (saving only their Captain,
+Monologue, who is lantern-jawed).
+
+Here are the Aposiopaesian Auxiliaries, and Dithyramb that killed
+Punctuation in open fight; Parenthesis the giant and champion of the
+host, and Anacoluthon that never learned to read or write but is very
+handy with his sword; and Metathesis and Hendiadys, two Greeks. And
+last come the noble Gallicisms prancing about on their light horses:
+cavalry so sudden that the enemy sicken at the mere sight of them and
+are overcome without a blow. Come then my hearties, my lads, my
+indefatigable repetitions, seize you each his own trumpet that hangs
+at his side and blow the charge; we shall soon drive them all before
+us headlong, howling down together to the Picrocholian Sea.
+
+So! That was an interlude. Forget the clamour.
+
+But there is another matter; written as yet in no other Preface:
+peculiar to this book. For without rhyme or reason, pictures of an
+uncertain kind stand in the pages of the chronicle. Why?
+
+_Because it has become so cheap to photograph on zinc._
+
+In old time a man that drew ill drew not at all. He did well. Then
+either there were no pictures in his book, or (if there were any) they
+were done by some other man that loved him not a groat and would not
+have walked half a mile to see him hanged. But now it is so easy for a
+man to scratch down what he sees and put it in his book that any fool
+may do it and be none the worse--many others shall follow. This is the
+first.
+
+Before you blame too much, consider the alternative. Shall a man march
+through Europe dragging an artist on a cord? God forbid!
+
+Shall an artist write a book? Why no, the remedy is worse than the
+disease.
+
+Let us agree then, that, if he will, any pilgrim may for the future
+draw (if he likes) that most difficult subject, snow hills beyond a
+grove of trees; that he may draw whatever he comes across in order to
+enliven his mind (for who saw it if not he? And was it not his
+loneliness that enabled him to see it?), and that he may draw what he
+never saw, with as much freedom as you readers so very continually see
+what you never draw. He may draw the morning mist on the Grimsel, six
+months afterwards; when he has forgotten what it was like: and he may
+frame it for a masterpiece to make the good draughtsman rage.
+
+The world has grown a boy again this long time past, and they are
+building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes discovered the
+Water of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes.
+
+Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon
+laugh no longer--and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest
+men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for
+that is only to suffer one another.
+
+Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious fellow that sat down
+dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a fan.
+
+When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by his
+epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton
+appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it he
+was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he launched
+among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, _'Ce n'est que le
+premier pas qui coûté'_ and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth
+self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at
+least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five
+hundred and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company
+Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general
+whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up
+and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the
+true breeding soil of Revelation.
+
+For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other blossoms and prides
+of nature, are for lying steady in the shade and letting the Mind
+commune with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking about
+and eager as though it were a duty to force the said Mind to burrow
+and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary
+habitation.
+
+'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing
+something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with
+circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at
+least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.'
+
+Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and the boy takes his
+horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book, alas!); the Poet
+his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the
+Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary
+clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his
+boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and
+Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the
+Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and
+thirsty march. And Authority, when it does this commonly sets to work
+by one of these formulae: as, in England north of Trent, by the
+manifestly false and boastful phrase, 'A thing begun is half ended',
+and in the south by 'The Beginning is half the Battle'; but in France
+by the words I have attributed to the Proverb-Maker, _'Ce n'est que le
+premier pas qui coûte'._
+
+By this you may perceive that the Proverb-Maker, like every other
+Demagogue, Energumen, and Disturber, dealt largely in metaphor--but
+this I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection of
+published and unpublished works it is amply evident that he took the
+silly pride of the half-educated in a constant abuse of metaphor.
+There was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully
+explained to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could
+see a metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie. And
+certainly men who know that the mere truth would be distasteful or
+tedious commonly have recourse to metaphor, and so do those false men
+who desire to acquire a subtle and unjust influence over their
+fellows, and chief among them, the Proverb-Maker. For though his name
+is lost in the great space of time that has passed since he
+flourished, yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the
+many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the
+character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in
+foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm--in
+matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a
+poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a
+wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar
+(as, for instance, '_The longest way round is the shortest way
+home_'), a startling miser (as, _'A penny saved is a penny earned'_},
+one ignorant of largesse and human charity (as, '_Waste not, want
+not_'), and a shocking boor in the point of honour (as, _'Hard words
+break no bones'_--he never fought, I see, but with a cudgel).
+
+But he had just that touch of slinking humour which the peasants have,
+and there is in all he said that exasperating quality for which we
+have no name, which certainly is not accuracy, and which is quite the
+opposite of judgement, yet which catches the mind as brambles do our
+clothes, causing us continually to pause and swear. For he mixes up
+unanswerable things with false conclusions, he is perpetually letting
+the cat out of the bag and exposing our tricks, putting a colour to
+our actions, disturbing us with our own memory, indecently revealing
+corners of the soul. He is like those men who say one unpleasant and
+rude thing about a friend, and then take refuge from their disloyal
+and false action by pleading that this single accusation is true; and
+it is perhaps for this abominable logicality of his and for his
+malicious cunning that I chiefly hate him: and since he himself
+evidently hated the human race, he must not complain if he is hated in
+return.
+
+Take, for instance, this phrase that set me writing, _'Ce nest que le
+premier pas qui coûte'_. It is false. Much after a beginning is
+difficult, as everybody knows who has crossed the sea, and as for the
+first _step_ a man never so much as remembers it; if there is
+difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the first ten
+pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a sermon, or
+the first mile of a walk. The first step is undertaken lightly,
+pleasantly, and with your soul in the sky; it is the five-hundredth
+that counts. But I know, and you know, and he knew (worse luck) that
+he was saying a thorny and catching thing when he made up that phrase.
+It worries one of set purpose. It is as though one had a voice inside
+one saying:
+
+'I know you, you will never begin anything. Look at what you might
+have done! Here you are, already twenty-one, and you have not yet
+written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? Eh? Nothing: you are
+intolerably lazy--and what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings are
+insuperable barriers to you. What about that great work on The
+National Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you
+thought of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your
+head and not on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind,
+you can't help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at
+Jones! Younger than you by half a year, and already on the _Evening
+Yankee_ taking bribes from Company Promoters! And where are you?' &c.,
+&c.--and so forth.
+
+So this threat about the heavy task of Beginning breeds
+discouragement, anger, vexation, irritability, bad style, pomposity
+and infinitives split from helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as
+the Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain fast in the mind,
+caught, as it were, by one finger.  For all things (you will notice)
+are very difficult in their origin, and why, no one can understand.
+_Omne Trinum_: they are difficult also in the shock of maturity and in
+their ending. Take, for instance, the Life of Man, which is the
+Difficulty of Birth, the Difficulty of Death, and the Difficulty of
+the Grand Climacteric.
+
+LECTOR. What is the Grand Climacteric?
+
+AUCTOR. I have no time to tell you, for it would lead us into a
+discussion on Astrology, and then perhaps to a question of physical
+science, and then you would find I was not orthodox, and perhaps
+denounce me to the authorities.
+
+I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not the year or the
+month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second) when a man is
+grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is, backwards), and
+feels solidly himself. Do I make myself clear? No matter, it is the
+Shock of Maturity, and that must suffice for you.
+
+But perhaps you have been reading little brown books on Evolution, and
+you don't believe in Catastrophes, or Climaxes, or Definitions? Eh?
+Tell me, do you believe in the peak of the Matterhorn, and have you
+doubts on the points of needles? Can the sun be said truly to rise or
+set, and is there any exact meaning in the phrase, 'Done to a turn' as
+applied to omelettes?  You know there is; and so also you must believe
+in Categories, and you must admit differences of kind as well as of
+degree, and you must accept exact definition and believe in all that
+your fathers did, that were wiser men than you, as is easily proved if
+you will but imagine yourself for but one moment introduced into the
+presence of your ancestors, and ask yourself which would look the
+fool. Especially must you believe in moments and their importance, and
+avoid with the utmost care the Comparative Method and the argument of
+the Slowly Accumulating Heap. I hear that some scientists are already
+beginning to admit the reality of Birth and Death--let but some brave
+few make an act of Faith in the Grand Climacteric and all shall yet be
+well.
+
+Well, as I was saying, this Difficulty of Beginning is but one of
+three, and is Inexplicable, and is in the Nature of Things, and it is
+very especially noticeable in the Art of Letters. There is in every
+book the Difficulty of Beginning, the Difficulty of the Turning-Point
+(which is the Grand Climacteric of a Book)--
+
+LECTOR. What is that in a Book?
+
+AUCTOR. Why, it is the point where the reader has caught on, enters
+into the Book and desires to continue reading it.
+
+LECTOR. It comes earlier in some books than in others.
+
+AUCTOR. As you say ... And finally there is the Difficulty of Ending.
+
+LECTOR. I do not see how there can be any difficulty in ending a book.
+
+AUCTOR. That shows very clearly that you have never written one, for
+there is nothing so hard in the writing of a book--no, not even the
+choice of the Dedication--as is the ending of it. On this account only
+the great Poets, who are above custom and can snap their divine
+fingers at forms, are not at the pains of devising careful endings.
+Thus, Homer ends with lines that might as well be in the middle of a
+passage; Hesiod, I know not how; and Mr Bailey, the New Voice from
+Eurasia, does not end at all, but is still going on.
+
+Panurge told me that his great work on Conchology would never have
+been finished had it not been for the Bookseller that threatened law;
+and as it is, the last sentence has no verb in it. There is always
+something more to be said, and it is always so difficult to turn up
+the splice neatly at the edges. On this account there are regular
+models for ending a book or a Poem, as there are for beginning one;
+but, for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to rummage
+about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of Fine Writing
+(no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no
+matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to introduce a
+row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the paper below these the
+piece of Fine Writing one has found.
+
+I knew a man once who always wrote the end of a book first, when his
+mind was fresh, and so worked gradually back to the introductory
+chapter, which (he said) was ever a kind of summary, and could not be
+properly dealt with till a man knew all about his subject. He said
+this was a sovran way to write History.
+
+But it seems to me that this is pure extravagance, for it would lead
+one at last to beginning at the bottom of the last page, like the
+Hebrew Bible, and (if it were fully carried out) to writing one's
+sentences backwards till one had a style like the London School of
+Poets: a very horrible conclusion.
+
+However, I am not concerned here with the ending of a book, but with
+its beginning; and I say that the beginning of any literary thing is
+hard, and that this hardness is difficult to explain. And I say more
+than this--I say that an interminable discussion of the difficulty of
+beginning a book is the worst omen for going on with it, and a trashy
+subterfuge at the best.  In the name of all decent, common, and homely
+things, why not begin and have done with it?
+
+It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset,
+that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going
+straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately
+along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till
+I came to the road that goes up alongside the Moselle. For it was by
+the valley of this river that I was to begin my pilgrimage, since, by
+a happy accident, the valley of the Upper Moselle runs straight
+towards Rome, though it takes you but a short part of the way. What a
+good opening it makes for a direct pilgrimage can be seen from this
+little map, where the dotted line points exactly to Rome. There are
+two bends which take one a little out of one's way, and these bends I
+attempted to avoid, but in general, the valley, about a hundred miles
+from Toul to the source, is an evident gate for any one walking from
+this part of Lorraine into Italy. And this map is also useful to show
+what route I followed for my first three days past Epinal and
+Remiremont up to the source of the river, and up over the great hill,
+the Ballon d'Alsace. I show the river valley like a trench, and the
+hills above it shaded, till the mountainous upper part, the Vosges, is
+put in black. I chose the decline of the day for setting out, because
+of the great heat a little before noon and four hours after it.
+Remembering this, I planned to walk at night and in the mornings and
+evenings, but how this design turned out you shall hear in a moment.
+
+I had not gone far, not a quarter of a mile, along my road leaving the
+town, when I thought I would stop and rest a little and make sure that
+I had started propitiously and that I was really on my way to Rome; so
+I halted by a wall and looked back at the city and the forts, and drew
+what I saw in my book. It was a sight that had taken a firm hold of my
+mind in boyhood, and that will remain in it as long as it can make
+pictures for itself out of the past. I think this must be true of all
+conscripts with regard to the garrison in which they have served, for
+the mind is so fresh at twenty-one and the life so new to every
+recruit as he joins it, he is so cut off from books and all the
+worries of life, that the surroundings of the place bite into him and
+take root, as one's school does or one's first home. And I had been
+especially fortunate since I had been with the gunners (notoriously
+the best kind of men) and not in a big place but in a little town,
+very old and silent, with more soldiers in its surrounding circle than
+there were men, women, and children within its useless ramparts. It is
+known to be very beautiful, and though I had not heard of this
+reputation, I saw it to be so at once when I was first marched in, on
+a November dawn, up to the height of the artillery barracks. I
+remembered seeing then the great hills surrounding it on every side,
+hiding their menace and protection of guns, and in the south and east
+the silent valley where the high forests dominate the Moselle, and the
+town below the road standing in an island or ring of tall trees. All
+this, I say, I had permanently remembered, and I had determined,
+whenever I could go on pilgrimage to Rome, to make this place my
+starting-point, and as I stopped here and looked back, a little way
+outside the gates, I took in again the scene that recalled so much
+laughter and heavy work and servitude and pride of arms.
+
+I was looking straight at the great fort of St Michel, which is the
+strongest thing on the frontier, and which is the key to the circle of
+forts that make up this entrenched camp. One could see little or
+nothing of its batteries, only its hundreds of feet of steep brushwood
+above the vineyards, and at the summit a stunted wood purposely
+planted. Next to it on the left, of equal height, was the hog back of
+the Cote Barine, hiding a battery.  Between the Cote Barine and my
+road and wall, I saw the rising ground and the familiar Barracks that
+are called (I know not why) the Barracks of Justice, but ought more
+properly to be called the Barracks of petty tyrannies and good
+fellowship, in order to show the philosophers that these two things
+are the life of armies; for of all the virtues practised in that old
+compulsory home of mine Justice came second at least if not third,
+while Discipline and Comradeship went first; and the more I think of
+it the more I am convinced that of all the suffering youth that was
+being there annealed and forged into soldiery none can have suffered
+like the lawyers. On the right the high trees that stand outside the
+ramparts of the town went dwindling in perspective like a palisade,
+and above them, here and there, was a roof showing the top of the
+towers of the Cathedral or of St Gengoult. All this I saw looking
+backwards, and, when I had noticed it and drawn it, I turned round
+again and took the road.
+
+I had, in a small bag or pocket slung over my shoulder, a large piece
+of bread, half a pound of smoked ham, a sketch-book, two Nationalist
+papers, and a quart of the wine of Brule--which is the most famous
+wine in the neighbourhood of the garrison, yet very cheap. And Brule
+is a very good omen for men that are battered about and given to
+despairing, since it is only called Brule on account of its having
+been burnt so often by Romans, Frenchmen, Burgundians, Germans,
+Flemings, Huns perhaps, and generally all those who in the last few
+thousand years have taken a short cut at their enemies over the neck
+of the Cote Barine. So you would imagine it to be a tumble-down, weak,
+wretched, and disappearing place; but, so far from this, it is a rich
+and proud village, growing, as I have said, better wine than any in
+the garrison. Though Toul stands in a great cup or ring of hills, very
+high and with steep slopes, and guns on all of them, and all these
+hills grow wine, none is so good as Brule wine. And this reminds me of
+a thing that happened in the Manoeuvres of 1891, _quorum pars magna_;
+for there were two divisions employed in that glorious and fatiguing
+great game, and more than a gross of guns--to be accurate, a hundred
+and fifty-six--and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery
+of the eighth--I wonder where you all are now? I suppose I shall not
+see you again; but you were the best companions in the world, my
+friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one,
+and the worst, having on my Livret the note 'conducteur mediocre'. But
+that is neither here nor there; the story is as follows, and the moral
+is that the commercial mind is illogical.
+
+When we had gone some way, clattering through the dust, and were well
+on on the Commercy road, there was a short halt, and during this halt
+there passed us the largest Tun or Barrel that ever went on wheels.
+You talk of the Great Tun of Heidelburg, or of those monstrous Vats
+that stand in cool sheds in the Napa Valley, or of the vast barrels in
+the Catacombs of Rheims; but all these are built _in situ_ and meant
+to remain steady, and there is no limit to the size of a Barrel that
+has not to travel. The point about this enormous Receptacle of Bacchus
+and cavernous huge Prison of Laughter, was that it could move, though
+cumbrously, and it was drawn very slowly by stupid, patient oxen, who
+would not be hurried. On the top of it sat a strong peasant, with a
+face of determination, as though he were at war with his kind, and he
+kept on calling to his oxen, 'Han', and 'Hu', in the tones of a sullen
+challenge, as he went creaking past. Then the soldiers began calling
+out to him singly, 'Where are you off to, Father, with that battery?'
+and 'Why carry cold water to Commercy? They have only too much as it
+is;' and 'What have you got in the little barrelkin, the barrellet,
+the cantiniere's brandy-flask, the gourd, the firkin?' He stopped his
+oxen fiercely and turned round to us and said: 'I will tell you what I
+have here. I have so many hectolitres of Brule wine which I made
+myself, and which I know to be the best wine there is, and I am taking
+it about to see if I cannot tame and break these proud fellows who are
+for ever beating down prices and mocking me. It is worth eight
+'scutcheons the hectolitre, that is, eight sols the litre; what do I
+say? it is worth a Louis a cup: but I will sell it at the price I
+name, and not a penny less.  But whenever I come to a village the
+innkeeper begins bargaining and chaffering and offering six sols and
+seven sols, and I answer, "Eight sols, take it or leave it", and when
+he seems for haggling again I get up and drive away. I know the worth
+of my wine, and I will not be beaten down though I have to go out of
+Lorraine into the Barrois to sell it.'
+
+So when we caught him up again, as we did shortly after on the road, a
+sergeant cried as we passed, 'I will give you seven, seven and a
+quarter, seven and a half', and we went on laughing and forgot all
+about him.
+
+For many days we marched from this place to that place, and fired and
+played a confused game in the hot sun till the train of sick horses
+was a mile long, and till the recruits were all as deaf as so many
+posts; and at last, one evening, we came to a place called Heiltz le
+Maurupt, which was like heaven after the hot plain and the dust, and
+whose inhabitants are as good and hospitable as Angels; it is just
+where the Champagne begins. When we had groomed and watered our
+horses, and the stable guard had been set, and we had all an hour or
+so's leisure to stroll about in the cool darkness before sleeping in
+the barns, we had a sudden lesson in the smallness of the world, for
+what should come up the village street but that monstrous Barrel, and
+we could see by its movements that it was still quite full.
+
+We gathered round the peasant, and told him how grieved we were at his
+ill fortune, and agreed with him that all the people of the Barrois
+were thieves or madmen not to buy such wine for such a song. He took
+his oxen and his barrel to a very high shed that stood by, and there
+he told us all his pilgrimage and the many assaults his firmness
+suffered, and how he had resisted them all. There was much more anger
+than sorrow in his accent, and I could see that he was of the wood
+from which tyrants and martyrs are carved. Then suddenly he changed
+and became eloquent:
+
+'Oh, the good wine! If only it were known and tasted! ... Here, give
+me a cup, and I will ask some of you to taste it, then at least I
+shall have it praised as it deserves. And this is the wine I have
+carried more than a hundred miles, and everywhere it has been
+refused!'
+
+There was one guttering candle on a little stool. The roof of the shed
+was lost up in the great height of darkness; behind, in the darkness,
+the oxen champed away steadily in the manger. The light from the
+candle flame lit his face strongly from beneath and marked it with
+dark shadows. It flickered on the circle of our faces as we pressed
+round, and it came slantwise and waned and disappeared in the immense
+length of the Barrel. He stood near the tap with his brows knit as
+upon some very important task, and all we, gunners and drivers of the
+battery, began unhooking our mugs and passing them to him.
+
+There were nearly a hundred, and he filled them all; not in jollity,
+but like a man offering up a solemn sacrifice. We also, entering into
+his mood, passed our mugs continually, thanking him in a low tone and
+keeping in the main silent. A few linesmen lounged at the door; he
+asked for their cups and filled them. He bade them fetch as many of
+their comrades as cared to come; and very soon there was a circulating
+crowd of men all getting wine of Brule and murmuring their
+congratulations, and he was willing enough to go on giving, but we
+stopped when we saw fit and the scene ended. I cannot tell what
+prodigious measure of wine he gave away to us all that night, but when
+he struck the roof of the cask it already sounded hollow. And when we
+had made a collection which he had refused, he went to sleep by his
+oxen, and we to our straw in other barns. Next day we started before
+dawn, and I never saw him again.
+
+This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it shows that what men
+love is never money itself but their own way, and that human beings
+love sympathy and pageant above all things. It also teaches us not to
+be hard on the rich.
+
+I walked along the valley of the Moselle, and as I walked the long
+evening of summer began to fall. The sky was empty and its deeps
+infinite; the clearness of the air set me dreaming. I passed the turn
+where we used to halt when we were learning how to ride in front of
+the guns, past the little house where, on rare holidays, the boys
+could eat a matelote, which is fish boiled in wine, and so on to the
+place where the river is held by a weir and opens out into a kind of
+lake.
+
+Here I waited for a moment by the wooden railing, and looked up into
+the hills. So far I had been at home, and I was now poring upon the
+last familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods and began my
+experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and pondered
+instead of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to
+reminiscence and to ease.  A flock of sheep passed me with their
+shepherd, who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that
+pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I
+was 'smoking the enchanted cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of
+reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness
+that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow
+many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were altogether his own
+master and controlled by no necessity, not even the necessity of
+expression, all his life would pass away in these sublime imaginings.
+
+This was a place I remembered very well. The rising river of Lorraine
+is caught and barred, and it spreads in a great sheet of water that
+must be very shallow, but that in its reflections and serenity
+resembles rather a profound and silent mere. The steeps surrounding it
+are nearly mountainous, and are crowned with deep forests in which the
+province reposes, and upon which it depends for its local genius. A
+little village, which we used to call 'St Peter of the Quarries', lies
+up on the right between the steep and the water, and just where the
+hills end a flat that was once marshy and is now half fields, half
+ponds, but broken with luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its
+civilization. Along this flat runs, bordered with rare poplars, the
+road which one can follow on and on into the heart of the Vosges. I
+took from this silence and this vast plain of still water the repose
+that introduces night. It was all consonant with what the peasants
+were about: the return from labour, the bleating folds, and the
+lighting of lamps under the eaves. In such a spirit I passed along the
+upper valley to the spring of the hills.
+
+In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight when a man thinks he
+can still read; when the buildings and the bridges are great masses of
+purple that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, but when
+the night birds, surer than men and less troubled by this illusion of
+memory, have discovered that their darkness has conquered.
+
+The peasants sat outside their houses in the twilight accepting the
+cool air; every one spoke to me as I marched through, and I answered
+them all, nor was there in any of their salutations the omission of
+good fellowship or of the name of God. Saving with one man, who was a
+sergeant of artillery on leave, and who cried out to me in an accent
+that was very familiar and asked me to drink; but I told him I had to
+go up into the forest to take advantage of the night, since the days
+were so warm for walking. As I left the last house of the village I
+was not secure from loneliness, and when the road began to climb up
+the hill into the wild and the trees I was wondering how the night
+would pass.
+
+With every step upward a greater mystery surrounded me. A few stars
+were out, and the brown night mist was creeping along the water below,
+but there was still light enough to see the road, and even to
+distinguish the bracken in the deserted hollows. The highway became
+little better than a lane; at the top of the hill it plunged under
+tall pines, and was vaulted over with darkness. The kingdoms that have
+no walls, and are built up of shadows, began to oppress me as the
+night hardened. Had I had companions, still we would only have spoken
+in a whisper, and in that dungeon of trees even my own self would not
+raise its voice within me.
+
+It was full night when I had reached a vague clearing in the woods,
+right up on the height of that flat hill. This clearing was called
+'The Fountain of Magdalen'. I was so far relieved by the broader sky
+of the open field that I could wait and rest a little, and there, at
+last, separate from men, I thought of a thousand things. The air was
+full of midsummer, and its mixture of exaltation and fear cut me off
+from ordinary living. I now understood why our religion has made
+sacred this season of the year; why we have, a little later, the night
+of St John, the fires in the villages, and the old perception of
+fairies dancing in the rings of the summer grass. A general communion
+of all things conspires at this crisis of summer against us reasoning
+men that should live in the daylight, and something fantastic
+possesses those who are foolish enough to watch upon such nights. So
+I, watching, was cut off. There were huge, vague summits, all wooded,
+peering above the field I sat in, but they merged into a confused
+horizon. I was on a high plateau, yet I felt myself to be alone with
+the immensity that properly belongs to plains alone. I saw the stars,
+and remembered how I had looked up at them on just such a night when I
+was close to the Pacific, bereft of friends and possessed with
+solitude. There was no noise; it was full darkness. The woods before
+and behind me made a square frame of silence, and I was enchased here
+in the clearing, thinking of all things.
+
+Then a little wind passed over the vast forests of Lorraine. It seemed
+to wake an indefinite sly life proper to this seclusion, a life to
+which I was strange, and which thought me an invader. Yet I heard
+nothing. There were no adders in the long grass, nor any frogs in that
+dry square of land, nor crickets on the high part of the hill; but I
+knew that little creatures in league with every nocturnal influence,
+enemies of the sun, occupied the air and the land about me; nor will I
+deny that I felt a rebel, knowing well that men were made to work in
+happy dawns and to sleep in the night, and everything in that short
+and sacred darkness multiplied my attentiveness and my illusion.
+Perhaps the instincts of the sentry, the necessities of guard, come
+back to us out of the ages unawares during such experiments. At any
+rate the night oppressed and exalted me.  Then I suddenly attributed
+such exaltation to the need of food.
+
+'If we must try this bookish plan of sleeping by day and walking by
+night,' I thought, 'at least one must arrange night meals to suit it.'
+
+I therefore, with my mind still full of the forest, sat down and lit a
+match and peered into my sack, taking out therefrom bread and ham and
+chocolate and Brûlé wine. For seat and table there was a heathery bank
+still full of the warmth and savour of the last daylight, for
+companions these great inimical influences of the night which I had
+met and dreaded, and for occasion or excuse there was hunger. Of the
+Many that debate what shall be done with travellers, it was the best
+and kindest Spirit that prompted me to this salutary act. For as I
+drank the wine and dealt with the ham and bread, I felt more and more
+that I had a right to the road; the stars became familiar and the
+woods a plaything. It is quite clear that the body must be recognized
+and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing food and
+drink can do so much to make a man.
+
+On this repast I jumped up merrily, lit a pipe, and began singing, and
+heard, to my inexpressible joy, some way down the road, the sound of
+other voices. They were singing that old song of the French infantry
+which dates from Louis XIV, and is called 'Auprès de ma blonde'. I
+answered their chorus, so that, by the time we met under the wood, we
+were already acquainted. They told me they had had a forty-eight
+hours' leave into Nancy, the four of them, and had to be in by
+roll-call at a place called Villey the Dry. I remembered it after all
+those years.
+
+It is a village perched on the brow of one of these high hills above
+the river, and it found itself one day surrounded by earthworks, and a
+great fort raised just above the church. Then, before they knew where
+they were, they learnt that (1) no one could go in or out between
+sunset and sunrise without leave of the officer in command; (2) that
+from being a village they had become the 'buildings situate within
+Fort No. 18'; (3) that they were to be deluged with soldiers; and (4)
+that they were liable to evacuate their tenements on mobilization.
+They had become a fort unwittingly as they slept, and all their
+streets were blocked with ramparts. A hard fate; but they should not
+have built their village just on the brow of a round hill.  They did
+this in the old days, when men used stone instead of iron, because the
+top of a hill was a good place to hold against enemies; and so now,
+these 73,426 years after, they find the same advantage catching them
+again to their hurt. And so things go the round.
+
+Anyway Villey the Dry is a fort, and there my four brothers were
+going. It was miles off, and they had to be in by sunrise, so I
+offered them a pull of my wine, which, to my great joy, they refused,
+and we parted courteously. Then I found the road beginning to fall,
+and knew that I had crossed the hills.  As the forest ended and the
+sloping fields began, a dim moon came up late in the east in the bank
+of fog that masked the river. So by a sloping road, now free from the
+woods, and at the mouth of a fine untenanted valley under the moon, I
+came down again to the Moselle, having saved a great elbow by this
+excursion over the high land. As I swung round the bend of the hills
+downwards and looked up the sloping dell, I remembered that these
+heathery hollows were called 'vallons' by the people of Lorraine, and
+this set me singing the song of the hunters, 'Entends tu dans nos
+vallons, le Chasseur sonner du clairon,' which I sang loudly till I
+reached the river bank, and lost the exhilaration of the hills.
+
+I had now come some twelve miles from my starting-place, and it was
+midnight. The plain, the level road (which often rose a little), and
+the dank air of the river began to oppress me with fatigue. I was not
+disturbed by this, for I had intended to break these nights of
+marching by occasional repose, and while I was in the comfort of
+cities--especially in the false hopes that one got by reading books--I
+had imagined that it was a light matter to sleep in the open. Indeed,
+I had often so slept when I had been compelled to it in Manoeuvres,
+but I had forgotten how essential was a rug of some kind, and what a
+difference a fire and comradeship could make.  Thinking over it all,
+feeling my tiredness, and shivering a little in the chill under the
+moon and the clear sky, I was very ready to capitulate and to sleep in
+bed like a Christian at the next opportunity. But there is some
+influence in vows or plans that escapes our power of rejudgement. All
+false calculations must be paid for, and I found, as you will see,
+that having said I would sleep in the open, I had to keep to it in
+spite of all my second thoughts.
+
+I passed one village and then another in which everything was dark,
+and in which I could waken nothing but dogs, who thought me an enemy,
+till at last I saw a great belt of light in the fog above the Moselle.
+Here there was a kind of town or large settlement where there were
+ironworks, and where, as I thought, there would be houses open, even
+after midnight. I first found the old town, where just two men were
+awake at some cooking work or other.  I found them by a chink of light
+streaming through their door; but they gave me no hope, only advising
+me to go across the river and try in the new town where the forges and
+the ironworks were. 'There,' they said, 'I should certainly find a
+bed.'
+
+I crossed the bridge, being now much too weary to notice anything,
+even the shadowy hills, and the first thing I found was a lot of
+waggons that belonged to a caravan or fair. Here some men were awake,
+but when I suggested that they should let me sleep in their little
+houses on wheels, they told me it was never done; that it was all they
+could do to pack in themselves; that they had no straw; that they were
+guarded by dogs; and generally gave me to understand (though without
+violence or unpoliteness) that I looked as though I were the man to
+steal their lions and tigers. They told me, however, that without
+doubt I should find something open in the centre of the workmen's
+quarter, where the great electric lamps now made a glare over the
+factory.
+
+I trudged on unwillingly, and at the very last house of this
+detestable industrial slavery, a high house with a gable, I saw a
+window wide open, and a blonde man smoking a cigarette at a balcony. I
+called to him at once, and asked him to let me a bed. He put to me all
+the questions he could think of. Why was I there? Where had I come
+from? Where (if I was honest) had I intended to sleep? How came I at
+such an hour on foot? and other examinations. I thought a little what
+excuse to give him, and then, determining that I was too tired to make
+up anything plausible, I told him the full truth; that I had meant to
+sleep rough, but had been overcome by fatigue, and that I had walked
+from Toul, starting at evening. I conjured him by our common Faith to
+let me in. He told me that it was impossible, as he had but one room
+in which he and his family slept, and assured me he had asked all
+these questions out of sympathy and charity alone. Then he wished me
+good-night, honestly and kindly, and went in.
+
+By this time I was very much put out, and began to be angry. These
+straggling French towns give no opportunity for a shelter. I saw that
+I should have to get out beyond the market gardens, and that it might
+be a mile or two before I found any rest. A clock struck one. I looked
+up and saw it was from the belfry of one of those new chapels which
+the monks are building everywhere, nor did I forget to curse the monks
+in my heart for building them. I cursed also those who started
+smelting works in the Moselle valley; those who gave false advice to
+travellers; those who kept lions and tigers in caravans, and for a
+small sum I would have cursed the whole human race, when I saw that my
+bile had hurried me out of the street well into the countryside, and
+that above me, on a bank, was a patch of orchard and a lane leading up
+to it. Into this I turned, and, finding a good deal of dry hay lying
+under the trees, I soon made myself an excellent bed, first building a
+little mattress, and then piling on hay as warm as a blanket.
+
+I did not lie awake (as when I planned my pilgrimage I had promised
+myself I would do), looking at the sky through the branches of trees,
+but I slept at once without dreaming, and woke up to find it was broad
+daylight, and the sun ready to rise. Then, stiff and but little rested
+by two hours of exhaustion, I took up my staff and my sack and
+regained the road.
+
+I should very much like to know what those who have an answer to
+everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great
+men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank
+beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we
+used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of
+stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of
+that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial
+meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in
+this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for
+some hours--I mean those who turn out at four in the morning; I could
+give the name of the watch, but that I forget it and will not be
+plagued to look up technicalities. Dogs eat the first thing they come
+across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get
+up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast,
+coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their
+race is the hardiest in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in
+the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all this? Why is
+breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called
+it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way
+knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of
+food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the
+day?
+
+The provocation to this inquiry (which I have here no time to pursue)
+lies in the extraordinary distaste that I conceived that morning for
+Brule wine.  My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed overnight.
+I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of what
+had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and
+sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but
+a bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this,
+nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the
+forest (and was to seem so good again later on by the canal) should
+now repel me. I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment
+convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once let slip in my
+hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. _'Man,'_ said the
+Director of the State, _'man is but the creature of circumstance.'_
+
+As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled blindly along for miles
+under and towards the brightening east. Just before the sun rose I
+turned and looked backward from a high bridge that recrossed the
+river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my way. I was
+out of the familiar region of the garrison. The great forest-hills
+that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new
+light; heavy, drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed
+above them. The valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of
+save as a half mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of
+long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes.
+The main waterway of the valley was now not the river but the canal
+that fed from it.
+
+The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering the river and the
+canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley as a whole was vague, a
+mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the delicate
+slopes bounding it on either side.
+
+Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, that told me I had
+walked thirty-two kilometres--which is twenty miles--from Toul; that
+it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much to a place
+called Charmes.  The sun rose in the mist that lay up the long even
+trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I pushed on
+my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special providence, I
+found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had left me
+wrecked all these early hours.
+
+As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was a place on which a
+book might easily be written, for it had a church built in the
+seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great towns,
+a convent, and a general air of importance that made of it that grand
+and noble thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that
+best of all Christian associations - a large village.
+
+I say a book might be written upon it, and there is no doubt that a
+great many articles and pamphlets must have been written upon it, for
+the French are furiously given to local research and reviews, and to
+glorifying their native places: and when they cannot discover folklore
+they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it.
+
+There was even a man (I forget his name) who wrote a delightful book
+called _Popular and Traditional Songs of my Province,_ which book,
+after he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own invention,
+and not a word of it familiar to the inhabitants of the soil. He was a
+large, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of hair,
+and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends, and
+talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they
+would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes
+that are to be found even in the little villages, and that commemorate
+solemn, whiskered men, pillars of the state.  For surely this is the
+habit of the true poet, and marks the vigour and recurrent origin of
+poetry, that a man should get his head full of rhythms and catches,
+and that they should jumble up somehow into short songs of his own.
+What could more suggest (for instance) a whole troop of dancing words
+and lovely thoughts than this refrain from the Tourdenoise--
+
+  ... Son beau corps est en terre
+  Son âme en Paradis.
+  Tu ris?
+  Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergère,
+  Ris, ma Bergère, tu ris.
+
+That was the way they set to work in England before the Puritans came,
+when men were not afraid to steal verses from one another, and when no
+one imagined that he could live by letters, but when every poet took a
+patron, or begged or robbed the churches. So much for the poets.
+
+Flavigny then, I say (for I seem to be digressing), is a long street
+of houses all built together as animals build their communities. They
+are all very old, but the people have worked hard since the
+Revolution, and none of them are poor, nor are any of them very rich.
+I saw but one gentleman's house, and that, I am glad to say, was in
+disrepair. Most of the peasants' houses had, for a ground floor,
+cavernous great barns out of which came a delightful smell of morning
+-- that is, of hay, litter, oxen, and stored grains and old wood;
+which is the true breath of morning, because it is the scent that all
+the human race worth calling human first meets when it rises, and is
+the association of sunrise in the minds of those who keep the world
+alive: but not in the wretched minds of townsmen, and least of all in
+the minds of journalists, who know nothing of morning save that it is
+a time of jaded emptiness when you have just done prophesying (for the
+hundredth time) the approaching end of the world, when the floors are
+beginning to tremble with machinery, and when, in a weary kind of way,
+one feels hungry and alone: a nasty life and usually a short one.
+
+To return to Flavigny. This way of stretching a village all along one
+street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at
+college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on the
+Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and fantastic
+nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent truth,
+that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men
+together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the
+phrase goes, in the woods of a hillside in south England, remember
+that all that is savagery; but when you see a hundred white-washed
+houses in a row along a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, for
+you are in civilization again.
+
+But I continue to wander from Flavigny. The first thing I saw as I
+came into the street and noted how the level sun stood in a haze
+beyond, and how it shadowed and brought out the slight irregularities
+of the road, was a cart drawn by a galloping donkey, which came at and
+passed me with a prodigious clatter as I dragged myself forward. In
+the cart were two nuns, each with a scythe; they were going out
+mowing, and were up the first in the village, as Religious always are.
+Cheered by this happy omen, but not yet heartened, I next met a very
+old man leading out a horse, and asked him if there was anywhere where
+I could find coffee and bread at that hour; but he shook his head
+mournfully and wished me good-morning in a strong accent, for he was
+deaf and probably thought I was begging. So I went on still more
+despondent till I came to a really merry man of about middle age who
+was going to the fields, singing, with a very large rake over his
+shoulder.  When I had asked him the same question he stared at me a
+little and said of course coffee and bread could be had at the
+baker's, and when I asked him how I should know the baker's he was
+still more surprised at my ignorance, and said, 'By the smoke coming
+from the large chimney.' This I saw rising a short way off on my
+right, so I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about
+nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf
+before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and
+meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and
+offered me bread.
+
+It is a matter often discussed why bakers are such excellent citizens
+and good men. For while it is admitted in every country I was ever in
+that cobblers are argumentative and atheists (I except the cobbler
+under Plinlimmon, concerning whom would to heaven I had the space to
+tell you all here, for he knows the legends of the mountain), while it
+is public that barbers are garrulous and servile, that millers are
+cheats (we say in Sussex that every honest miller has a large tuft of
+hair on the palm of his hand), yet--with every trade in the world
+having some bad quality attached to it--bakers alone are exempt, and
+every one takes it for granted that they are sterling: indeed, there
+are some societies in which, no matter how gloomy and churlish the
+conversation may have become, you have but to mention bakers for
+voices to brighten suddenly and for a good influence to pervade every
+one. I say this is known for a fact, but not usually explained; the
+explanation is, that bakers are always up early in the morning and can
+watch the dawn, and that in this occupation they live in lonely
+contemplation enjoying the early hours.
+
+So it was with this baker of mine in Flavigny, who was a boy. When he
+heard that I had served at Toul he was delighted beyond measure; he
+told me of a brother of his that had been in the same regiment, and he
+assured me that he was himself going into the artillery by special
+enlistment, having got his father's leave. You know very little if you
+think I missed the opportunity of making the guns seem terrible and
+glorious in his eyes. I told him stories enough to waken a sentry of
+reserve, and if it had been possible (with my youth so obvious) I
+would have woven in a few anecdotes of active service, and described
+great shells bursting under my horses and the teams shot down, and the
+gunners all the while impassive; but as I saw I should not be believed
+I did not speak of such things, but confined myself to what he would
+see and hear when he joined.
+
+Meanwhile the good warm food and the rising morning had done two
+things; they had put much more vigour into me than I had had when I
+slunk in half-an-hour before, but at the same time (and this is a
+thing that often comes with food and with rest) they had made me feel
+the fatigue of so long a night. I rose up, therefore, determined to
+find some place where I could sleep. I asked this friend of mine how
+much there was to pay, and he said 'fourpence'. Then we exchanged
+ritual salutations, and I took the road. I did not leave the town or
+village without noticing one extraordinary thing at the far end of it,
+which was that, whereas most places in France are proud of their
+town-hall and make a great show of it, here in Flavigny they had taken
+a great house and written over it ÉCOLE COMMUNALE in great letters,
+and then they had written over a kind of lean-to or out-house of this
+big place the words 'Hôtel de ville1 in very small letters, so small
+that I had a doubt for a moment if the citizens here were good
+republicans--a treasonable thought on all this frontier.
+
+Then, a mile onward, I saw the road cross the canal and run parallel
+to it.  I saw the canal run another mile or so under a fine bank of
+deep woods. I saw an old bridge leading over it to that inviting
+shade, and as it was now nearly six and the sun was gathering
+strength, I went, with slumber overpowering me and my feet turning
+heavy beneath me, along the tow-path, over the bridge, and lay down on
+the moss under these delightful trees.  Forgetful of the penalty that
+such an early repose would bring, and of the great heat that was to
+follow at midday, I quickly became part of the life of that forest and
+fell asleep.
+
+When I awoke it was full eight o'clock, and the sun had gained great
+power.  I saw him shining at me through the branches of my trees like
+a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through the loopholes
+of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I looked
+below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal
+looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above
+it, and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the
+noise of its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was
+a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope
+slackened into the still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose.
+The rest of the valley was silent except for that under-humming of
+insects which marks the strength of the sun.
+
+Now I saw clearly how difficult it was to turn night into day, for I
+found myself condemned either to waste many hours that ought to be
+consumed on my pilgrimage, or else to march on under the extreme heat;
+and when I had drunk what was left of my Brule wine (which then seemed
+delicious), and had eaten a piece of bread, I stiffly jolted down the
+bank and regained the highway.
+
+In the first village I came to I found that Mass was over, and this
+justly annoyed me; for what is a pilgrimage in which a man cannot hear
+Mass every morning? Of all the things I have read about St Louis which
+make me wish I had known him to speak to, nothing seems to me more
+delightful than his habit of getting Mass daily whenever he marched
+down south, but why this should be so delightful I cannot tell. Of
+course there is a grace and influence belonging to such a custom, but
+it is not of that I am speaking but of the pleasing sensation of order
+and accomplishment which attaches to a day one has opened by Mass; a
+purely temporal, and, for all I know, what the monks back at the
+ironworks would have called a carnal feeling, but a source of
+continual comfort to me. Let them go their way and let me go mine.
+
+This comfort I ascribe to four causes (just above you will find it
+written that I could not tell why this should be so, but what of
+that?), and these causes are:
+
+1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of the day you are silent
+and recollected, and have to put off cares, interests, and passions in
+the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great
+benefit to the body and give it tone.
+
+2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. Now it is the function
+of all ritual (as we see in games, social arrangements and so forth)
+to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to
+catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you
+during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular
+repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and
+judgement.
+
+3. That the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts,
+and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness
+which both working in one's self and received from others is the true
+source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a
+short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds
+come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world.
+
+4. And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is
+that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon
+thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment
+that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried
+right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to
+do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can
+really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what
+is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should
+from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark;
+one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's
+food--and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on
+the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and
+one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God
+put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul.
+Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said
+lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should
+do a little work with his hands.
+
+Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much better it would be if
+rich people, instead of raining the influence of their rank and
+spending their money on leagues for this or that exceptional thing,
+were to spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary living and
+to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I had power for some thirty
+years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their
+inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing,
+dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled by
+force.
+
+Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has
+done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have
+the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his
+Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all
+that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship.
+
+From these considerations it is easy to understand how put out I was
+to find Mass over on this first morning of my pilgrimage. And I went
+along the burning road in a very ill-humour till I saw upon my right,
+beyond a low wall and in a kind of park, a house that seemed built on
+some artificial raised ground surrounded by a wall, but this may have
+been an illusion, the house being really only very tall. At any rate I
+drew it, and in the village just beyond it I learnt something curious
+about the man that owned it.
+
+For I had gone into a house to take a third meal of bread and wine and
+to replenish my bottle when the old woman of the house, who was a
+kindly person, told me she had just then no wine. 'But,' said she, 'Mr
+So and So that lives in the big house sells it to any one who cares to
+buy even in the smallest quantities, and you will see his shed
+standing by the side of the road.'
+
+Everything happened just as she had said. I came to the big shed by
+the park wall, and there was a kind of counter made of boards, and
+several big tuns and two men: one in an apron serving, and the other
+in a little box or compartment writing. I was somewhat timid to ask
+for so little as a quart, but the apron man in the most businesslike
+way filled my bottle at a tap and asked for fourpence. He was willing
+to talk, and told me many things: of good years in wine, of the nature
+of their trade, of the influence of the moon on brewing, of the
+importance of spigots, and what not; but when I tried to get out of
+him whether the owner were an eccentric private gentleman or a
+merchant that had the sense to earn little pennies as well as large
+ones, I could not make him understand my meaning; for his idea of rank
+was utterly different from mine and took no account of idleness and
+luxury and daftness, but was based entirely upon money and clothes.
+Moreover we were both of us Republicans, so the matter was of no great
+moment. Courteously saluting ourselves we parted, he remaining to sell
+wine and I hobbling to Rome, now a little painfully and my sack the
+heavier by a quart of wine, which, as you probably know, weighs almost
+exactly two pounds and a half.
+
+It was by this time close upon eleven, and I had long reached the
+stage when some kinds of men begin talking of Dogged Determination,
+Bull-dog pluck, the stubborn spirit of the Island race and so forth,
+but when those who can boast a little of the sacred French blood are
+in a mood of set despair (both kinds march on, and the mobility of
+either infantry is much the same), I say I had long got to this point
+of exhaustion when it occurred to me that I should need an excellent
+and thorough meal at midday.  But on looking at my map I found that
+there was nothing nearer than this town of Charmes that was marked on
+the milestones, and that was the first place I should come to in the
+department of the Vosges.
+
+It would take much too long to describe the dodges that weary men and
+stiff have recourse to when they are at the close of a difficult task:
+how they divide it up in lengths in their minds, how they count
+numbers, how they begin to solve problems in mental arithmetic: I
+tried them all. Then I thought of a new one, which is really
+excellent, and which I recommend to the whole world. It is to vary the
+road, suddenly taking now the fields, now the river, but only
+occasionally the turnpike. This last lap was very well suited for such
+a method. The valley had become more like a wide and shallow trench
+than ever. The hills on either side were low and exactly even. Up the
+middle of it went the river, the canal and the road, and these two
+last had only a field between them; now broad, now narrow.
+
+First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on the grass, then back
+on the tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into Charmes, that
+lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging
+myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon Angelus;
+nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final effort
+of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk
+it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and
+take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.
+
+The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of this name I had indeed
+been thinking as I went along the last miles of that dusty and
+deplorable road--that a town should be called 'Charms'.
+
+Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves and not hurried,
+have a way of settling into right names suited to the hills about them
+and recalling their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as I remember
+it I must, if only for example, set down my roll-call of such names,
+as--Fittleworth, where the Inn has painted panels; Amberley in the
+marshes; delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill; Arundel,
+that is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set
+on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and
+Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in
+the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the
+spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an
+island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant
+sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list,
+would answer: 'There I was on such and such a day; this I came to
+after such and such a run; and that other is my home.' But it is not
+his recollection alone which moves him, it is sound of the names.  He
+feels the accent of them, and all the men who live between Hind-head
+and the Channel know these names stand for Eden; the noise is enough
+to prove it. So it is also with the hidden valleys of the lie de
+France; and when you say Jouy or Chevreuse to a man that was born in
+those shadows he grows dreamy--yet they are within a walk of Paris.
+
+But the wonderful thing about a name like Charmes is that it hands
+down the dead. For some dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from
+his own immediate delight, and made general what had been a private
+pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town. They say
+the Arabs do this; calling one place 'the rest of the warriors', and
+another 'the end', and another 'the surprise of the horses': let those
+who know them speak for it.  I at least know that in the west of the
+Cotentin (a sea-garden) old Danes married to Gaulish women discovered
+the just epithet, and that you have 'St Mary on the Hill' and 'High
+Town under the Wind' and 'The Borough over the Heath', which are
+to-day exactly what their name describes them. If you doubt that
+England has such descriptive names, consider the great Truth that at
+one junction on a railway where a mournful desolation of stagnant
+waters and treeless, stonewalled fields threatens you with experience
+and awe, a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into your
+carriage and to chant like Charon, 'Change here for Ashton under the
+Wood, Moreton on the Marsh, Bourton on the Water, and Stow in the
+Wold.'
+
+Charmes does not fulfil its name nor preserve what its forgotten son
+found so wonderful in it. For at luncheon there a great commercial
+traveller told me fiercely that it was chiefly known for its
+breweries, and that he thought it of little account. Still even in
+Charmes I found one marvellous corner of a renaissance house, which I
+drew; but as I have lost the drawing, let it go.
+
+When I came out from the inn of Charmes the heat was more terrible
+than ever, and the prospect of a march in it more intolerable. My head
+hung, I went very slowly, and I played with cowardly thoughts, which
+were really (had I known it) good angels. I began to look out
+anxiously for woods, but saw only long whitened wall glaring in the
+sun, or, if ever there were trees, they were surrounded by wooden
+palisades which the owners had put there. But in a little time (now I
+had definitely yielded to temptation) I found a thicket.
+
+You must know that if you yield to entertaining a temptation, there is
+the opportunity presented to you like lightning. A theologian told me
+this, and it is partly true: but not of Mammon or Belphegor, or
+whatever Devil it is that overlooks the Currency (I can see his face
+from here): for how many have yielded to the Desire of Riches and
+professed themselves very willing to revel in them, yet did not get an
+opportunity worth a farthing till they died? Like those two beggars
+that Rabelais tells of, one of whom wished for all the gold that would
+pay for all the merchandise that had ever been sold in Paris since its
+first foundation, and the other for as much gold as would go into all
+the sacks that could be sewn by all the needles (and those of the
+smallest size) that could be crammed into Notre-Dame from the floor to
+the ceiling, filling the smallest crannies. Yet neither had a crust
+that night to rub his gums with.
+
+Whatever Devil it is, however, that tempts men to repose--and for my
+part I believe him to be rather an Aeon than a Devil: that is, a
+good-natured fellow working on his own account neither good nor
+ill--whatever being it is, it certainly suits one's mood, for I never
+yet knew a man determined to be lazy that had not ample opportunity
+afforded him, though he were poorer than the cure of Maigre, who
+formed a syndicate to sell at a scutcheon a gross such souls as were
+too insignificant to sell singly. A man can always find a chance for
+doing nothing as amply and with as ecstatic a satisfaction as the
+world allows, and so to me (whether it was there before I cannot tell,
+and if it came miraculously, so much the more amusing) appeared this
+thicket. It was to the left of the road; a stream ran through it in a
+little ravine; the undergrowth was thick beneath its birches, and just
+beyond, on the plain that bordered it, were reapers reaping in a
+field. I went into it contentedly and slept till evening my third
+sleep; then, refreshed by the cool wind that went before the twilight,
+I rose and took the road again, but I knew I could not go far.
+
+I was now past my fortieth mile, and though the heat had gone, yet my
+dead slumber had raised a thousand evils. I had stiffened to lameness,
+and had fallen into the mood when a man desires companionship and the
+talk of travellers rather than the open plain. But (unless I went
+backward, which was out of the question) there was nowhere to rest in
+for a long time to come. The next considerable village was Thayon,
+which is called 'Thayon of the Vosges', because one is nearing the big
+hills, and thither therefore I crawled mile after mile.
+
+But my heart sank. First my foot limped, and then my left knee
+oppressed me with a sudden pain. I attempted to relieve it by leaning
+on my right leg, and so discovered a singular new law in medicine
+which I will propose to the scientists. For when those excellent men
+have done investigating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where
+the soul is, let them consider this much more practical matter, that
+you cannot relieve the pain in one limb without driving it into some
+other; and so I exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible
+great pain in the right. I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw
+before me hundreds upon hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and
+I asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage. (But, as you
+shall hear, a pilgrimage is not wholly subject to material laws, for
+when I came to Épinal next day I went into a shop which, whatever it
+was to the profane, appeared to me as a chemist's shop, where I bought
+a bottle of some stuff called 'balm', and rubbing myself with it was
+instantly cured.)
+
+Then I looked down from the bridge across the plain, and saw, a long
+way off beyond the railway, the very ugly factory village of Thayon,
+and reached it at last, not without noticing that the people were
+standing branches of trees before their doors, and the little children
+noisily helping to tread the stems firmly into the earth. They told me
+it was for the coming of Corpus Christi, and so proved to me that
+religion, which is as old as these valleys, would last out their
+inhabiting men. Even here, in a place made by a great laundry, a
+modern industrial row of tenements, all the world was putting out
+green branches to welcome the Procession and the Sacrament and the
+Priest. Comforted by this evident refutation of the sad nonsense I had
+read in Cities from the pen of intellectuals--nonsense I had known to
+be nonsense, but that had none the less tarnished my mind--I happily
+entered the inn, ate and drank, praised God, and lay down to sleep in
+a great bed. I mingled with my prayers a firm intention of doing the
+ordinary things, and not attempting impossibilities, such as marching
+by night, nor following out any other vanities of this world. Then,
+having cast away all theories of how a pilgrimage should be conducted,
+and broken five or six vows, I slept steadily till the middle of the
+morning. I had covered fifty miles in twenty-five hours, and if you
+imagine this to be but two miles an hour, you must have a very
+mathematical mind, and know little of the realities of living. I woke
+and threw my shutters open to the bright morning and the masterful
+sun, took my coffee, and set out once more towards Epinal, the
+stronghold a few miles away--delighted to see that my shadow was so
+short and the road so hot to the feet and eyes. For I said, 'This at
+least proves that I am doing like all the world, and walking during
+the day.' It was but a couple of hours to the great garrison. In a
+little time I passed a battery. Then a captain went by on a horse,
+with his orderly behind him.  Where the deep lock stands by the
+roadside--the only suggestion of coolness--I first heard the bugles;
+then I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and
+to cast aside all haste and folly.
+
+There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for instance, that it
+was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds
+of the Gauls, an island city. For the rivers of France are full of
+long, habitable islands, and these were once the rallying-places of
+clans. Then there are the forts which are placed on high hills round
+the town and make it even stronger than Toul; for Epinal stands just
+where the hills begin to be very high. Again, it is the capital of a
+mountain district, and this character always does something peculiar
+and impressive to a town. You may watch its effect in Grenoble, in
+little Aubusson, and, rather less, in Geneva.
+
+For in such towns three quite different kinds of men meet. First there
+are the old plain-men, who despise the highlanders and think
+themselves much grander and more civilized; these are the burgesses.
+Then there are the peasants and wood-cutters, who come in from the
+hill-country to market, and who are suspicious of the plain-men and
+yet proud to depend upon a real town with a bishop and paved streets.
+Lastly, there are the travellers, who come there to enjoy the
+mountains and to make the city a base for their excursions, and these
+love the hill-men and think they understand them, and they despise the
+plain-men for being so middle-class as to lord it over the hill-men:
+but in truth this third class, being outsiders, are equally hated and
+despised by both the others, and there is a combination against them
+and they are exploited.
+
+And there are many other things in which Épinal is wonderful, but in
+nothing is it more wonderful than in its great church.
+
+I suppose that the high Dukes of Burgundy and Lorraine and the rich
+men from Flanders and the House of Luxemburg and the rest, going to
+Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass up this valley of the
+Moselle, which (as I have said) is a road leading to Rome, and would
+halt at fipinal and would at times give money for its church; with
+this result, that the church belongs to every imaginable period and is
+built anyhow, in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most enduring
+record of past forms and of what has pleased the changing mind when it
+has attempted to worship in stone.
+
+Thus the transept is simply an old square barn of rough stone, older,
+I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament. In its lower
+courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two towers,
+northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden roof,
+the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow for
+bells.
+
+Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century,
+with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers. The ambulatory
+is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that Viollet le
+Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us back to
+our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans
+came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the
+transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to
+be a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is
+purely Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round
+door. To match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and
+rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and
+this again is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as
+you sometimes see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle.
+Finally, there is a central tower which is neither Gothic nor
+Romanesque but pure Italian, a loggia, with splendid round airy
+windows taking up all its walls, and with a flat roof and eaves. This
+some one straight from the south must have put on as a memory of his
+wanderings.
+
+The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, the Romanesque porches
+are red, like Strasburg, the Gothic apse is old white as our
+cathedrals are, the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just
+quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are mingled up and
+different in this astonishing building.
+
+I drew it from that point of view in the market-place to the
+north-east which shows most of these contrasts at once, and you must
+excuse the extreme shakiness of the sketch, for it was taken as best I
+could on an apple-cart with my book resting on the apples--there was
+no other desk. Nor did the apple-seller mind my doing it, but on the
+contrary gave me advice and praise saying such things as--
+
+'Excellent; you have caught the angle of the apse ... Come now, darken
+the edge of that pillar ... I fear you have made the tower a little
+confused,' and so forth.
+
+I offered to buy a few apples off him, but he gave me three instead,
+and these, as they incommoded me, I gave later to a little child.
+
+Indeed the people of Épinal, not taking me for a traveller but simply
+for a wandering poor man, were very genial to me, and the best good
+they did me was curing my lameness. For, seeing an apothecary's shop
+as I was leaving the town, I went in and said to the apothecary--
+
+'My knee has swelled and is very painful, and I have to walk far;
+perhaps you can tell me how to cure it, or give me something that
+will.'
+
+'There is nothing easier,' he said; 'I have here a specific for the
+very thing you complain of.'
+
+With this he pulled out a round bottle, on the label of which was
+printed in great letters, 'BALM'.
+
+'You have but to rub your knee strongly and long with this ointment of
+mine,' he said, 'and you will be cured.' Nor did he mention any
+special form of words to be repeated as one did it.
+
+Everything happened just as he had said. When I was some little way
+above the town I sat down on a low wall and rubbed my knee strongly
+and long with this balm, and the pain instantly disappeared. Then,
+with a heart renewed by this prodigy, I took the road again and began
+walking very rapidly and high, swinging on to Rome.
+
+The Moselle above fipinal takes a bend outwards, and it seemed to me
+that a much shorter way to the next village (which is called
+Archettes, or 'the very little arches', because there are no arches
+there) would be right over the hill round which the river curved. This
+error came from following private judgement and not heeding tradition,
+here represented by the highroad which closely follows the river. For
+though a straight tunnel to Archettes would have saved distance, yet a
+climb over that high hill and through the pathless wood on its summit
+was folly.
+
+I went at first over wide, sloping fields, and some hundred feet above
+the valley I crossed a little canal. It was made on a very good
+system, and I recommend it to the riparian owners of the Upper Wye,
+which needs it. They take the water from the Moselle (which is here
+broad and torrential and falls in steps, running over a stony bed with
+little swirls and rapids), and they lead it along at an even gradient,
+averaging, as it were, the uneven descent of the river. In this way
+they have a continuous stream running through fields that would
+otherwise be bare and dry, but that are thus nourished into excellent
+pastures.
+
+Above these fields the forest went up steeply. I had not pushed two
+hundred yards into its gloom and confusion when I discovered that I
+had lost my way. It was necessary to take the only guide I had and to
+go straight upwards wherever the line of greatest inclination seemed
+to lie, for that at least would take me to a summit and probably to a
+view of the valley; whereas if I tried to make for the shoulder of the
+hill (which had been my first intention) I might have wandered about
+till nightfall.
+
+It was an old man in a valley called the Curicante in Colorado that
+taught me this, if one lost one's way going _upwards_ to make at once
+along the steepest line, but if one lost it going _downwards_, to
+listen for water and reach it and follow it. I wish I had space to
+tell all about this old man, who gave me hospitality out there. He was
+from New England and was lonely, and had brought out at great expense
+a musical box to cheer him. Of this he was very proud, and though it
+only played four silly hymn tunes, yet, as he and I listened to it,
+heavy tears came into his eyes and light tears into mine, because
+these tunes reminded him of his home. But I have no time to do more
+than mention him, and must return to my forest.
+
+I climbed, then, over slippery pine needles and under the charged air
+of those trees, which was full of dim, slanting light from the
+afternoon sun, till, nearly at the summit, I came upon a clearing
+which I at once recognized as a military road, leading to what we used
+to call a 'false battery', that is, a dug-out with embrasures into
+which guns could be placed but in which no guns were. For ever since
+the French managed to produce a really mobile heavy gun they have
+constructed any amount of such auxiliary works between the permanent
+forts. These need no fixed guns to be emplaced, since the French can
+use now one such parapet, now another, as occasion serves, and the
+advantage is that your guns are never useless, but can always be
+brought round where they are needed, and that thus six guns will do
+more work than twenty used to do.
+
+This false battery was on the brow of the hill, and when I reached it
+I looked down the slope, over the brushwood that hid the wire
+entanglements, and there was the whole valley of the Moselle at my
+feet.
+
+As this was the first really great height, so this was the first
+really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew it
+carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining
+sun and noting all I saw.  Archettes, just below; the flat valley with
+the river winding from side to side; the straight rows of poplar
+trees; the dark pines on the hills, and the rounded mountains rising"
+farther and higher into the distance until the last I saw, far off to
+the south-east, must have been the Ballon d'Alsace at the sources of
+the Moselle--the hill that marked the first full stage in my journey
+and that overlooked Switzerland.
+
+Indeed, this is the peculiar virtue of walking to a far place, and
+especially of walking there in a straight line, that one gets these
+visions of the world from hill-tops.
+
+When I call up for myself this great march I see it all mapped out in
+landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of
+which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece
+together the whole road. The view here from the Hill of Archettes, the
+view from the Ballon d'Alsace, from Glovelier Hill, from the
+Weissenstein, from the Brienzer Grat, from the Grimsel, from above
+Bellinzona, from the Princi-pessa, from Tizzano, from the ridge of the
+Apennines, from the Wall of Siena, from San Quirico, from Radicofani,
+from San Lorenzo, from Monte-fiascone, from above Viterbo, from
+Roncigleone, and at last from that lift in the Via Cassia, whence one
+suddenly perceives the City. They unroll themselves all in their order
+till I can see Europe, and Rome shining at the end.
+
+But you who go in railways are necessarily shut up in long valleys and
+even sometimes by the walls of the earth. Even those who bicycle or
+drive see these sights but rarely and with no consecution, since roads
+also avoid climbing save where they are forced to it, as over certain
+passes. It is only by following the straight line onwards that any one
+can pass from ridge to ridge and have this full picture of the way he
+has been.
+
+So much for views. I clambered down the hill to Archettes and saw,
+almost the first house, a swinging board 'At the sign of the Trout of
+the Vosges', and as it was now evening I turned in there to dine.
+
+Two things I noticed at once when I sat down to meat. First, that the
+people seated at that inn table were of the middle-class of society,
+and secondly, that I, though of their rank, was an impediment to their
+enjoyment. For to sleep in woods, to march some seventy miles, the
+latter part in a dazzling sun, and to end by sliding down an earthy
+steep into the road, stamps a man with all that this kind of people
+least desire to have thrust upon them. And those who blame the
+middle-class for their conventions in such matters, and who profess to
+be above the care for cleanliness and clothes and social ritual which
+marks the middle-class, are either anarchists by nature, or fools who
+take what is but an effect of their wealth for a natural virtue.
+
+I say it roundly; if it were not for the punctiliousness of the
+middle-class in these matters all our civilization would go to pieces.
+They are the conservators and the maintainers of the standard, the
+moderators of Europe, the salt of society. For the kind of man who
+boasts that he does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a
+man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up and who
+rather hates it, or else (and this is much more common) he is a rich
+man, or accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford to waste
+energy and stuff because he feels in a vague way that more clothes can
+always be bought, that at the end of his vagabondism he can get
+excellent dinners, and that London and Paris are full of luxurious
+baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting effects of wealth there
+is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy (and their
+parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of
+the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious
+living. Heaven keep us all from great riches--I mean from very great
+riches.
+
+Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new clothes whenever they
+feel inclined, neither can they end up a jaunt by a Turkish bath and a
+great feast with wine. So their care is always to preserve intact what
+they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to study cleanliness,
+order, decency, sobriety, and a steady temper, and they fence all this
+round and preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to wit,
+with conventions, and they are quite right.
+
+I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of these my colleagues,
+but I recognize that they are on the just side in the quarrel; let
+none of them go about pretending that I have not defended them in this
+book.
+
+So I thought of how I should put myself right with these people. I saw
+that an elaborate story (as, that I had been set upon by a tramp who
+forced me to change clothes: that I dressed thus for a bet: that I was
+an officer employed as a spy, and was about to cross the frontier into
+Germany in the guise of a labourer: that my doctor forbade me to
+shave--or any other such rhodo-montade): I saw, I say, that by
+venturing upon any such excuses I might unwittingly offend some other
+unknown canon of theirs deeper and more sacred than their rule on
+clothes; it had happened to me before now to do this in the course of
+explanations.
+
+So I took another method, and said, as I sat down--
+
+'Pray excuse this appearance of mine. I have had a most unfortunate
+adventure in the hills, losing my way and being compelled to sleep out
+all night, nor can I remain to get tidy, as it is essential that I
+should reach my luggage (which is at Remiremont) before midnight.'
+
+I took great care to pay for my glass of white wine before dinner with
+a bank-note, and I showed my sketches to my neighbour to make an
+impression.  I also talked of foreign politics, of the countries I had
+seen, of England especially, with such minute exactitude that their
+disgust was soon turned to admiration.
+
+The hostess of this inn was delicate and courteous to a degree, and at
+every point attempting to overreach her guests, who, as regularly as
+she attacked, countered with astonishing dexterity.
+
+Thus she would say: 'Perhaps the joint would taste better if it were
+carved on the table; or do the gentlemen prefer it carved aside?'
+
+To which a banker opposite me said in a deep voice: 'We prefer, madam,
+to have it carved aside.'
+
+Or she would put her head in and say: 'I can recommend our excellent
+beer.  It is really preferable to this local wine.'
+
+And my neighbour, a tourist, answered with decision: 'Madame, we find
+your wine excellent. It could not be bettered.'
+
+Nor could she get round them on a single point, and I pitied her so
+much that I bought bread and wine off her to console her, and I let
+her overcharge me, and went out into the afterglow with her
+benediction, followed also by the farewells of the middle-class, who
+were now taking their coffee at little tables outside the house.
+
+I went hard up the road to Remiremont. The night darkened. I reached
+Remiremont at midnight, and feeling very wakeful I pushed on up the
+valley under great woods of pines; and at last, diverging up a little
+path, I settled on a clump of trees sheltered and, as I thought, warm,
+and lay down there to sleep till morning; but, on the contrary, I lay
+awake a full hour in the fragrance and on the level carpet of the pine
+needles looking up through the dark branches at the waning moon, which
+had just risen, and thinking of how suitable were pine-trees for a man
+to sleep under.
+
+'The beech,' I thought, 'is a good tree to sleep under, for nothing
+will grow there, and there is always dry beech-mast; the yew would be
+good if it did not grow so low, but, all in all, pine-trees are the
+best.' I also considered that the worst tree to sleep under would be
+the upas tree. These thoughts so nearly bordered on nothing that,
+though I was not sleepy, yet I fell asleep. Long before day, the moon
+being still lustrous against a sky that yet contained a few faint
+stars, I awoke shivering with cold.
+
+In sleep there is something diminishes us. This every one has noticed;
+for who ever suffered a nightmare awake, or felt in full consciousness
+those awful impotencies which lie on the other side of slumber? When
+we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, yet by the force of nature,
+to powers before which we melt and are nothing. And among the strange
+frailties of sleep I have noticed cold.
+
+Here was a warm place under the pines where I could rest in great
+comfort on pine needles still full of the day; a covering for the
+beasts underground that love an even heat--the best of floors for a
+tired man.  Even the slight wind that blew under the waning moon was
+warm, and the stars were languid and not brilliant, as though
+everything were full of summer, and I knew that the night would be
+short; a midsummer night; and I had lived half of it before attempting
+repose. Yet, I say, I woke shivering and also disconsolate, needing
+companionship. I pushed down through tall, rank grass, drenched with
+dew, and made my way across the road to the bank of the river. By the
+time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.
+
+For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of
+trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day,
+because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.
+
+The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so much to shine through
+the air as to be part of it, took all colour out of the woods and
+fields and the high slopes above me, leaving them planes of grey and
+deeper grey. The woods near me were a silhouette, black and
+motionless, emphasizing the east beyond.  The river was white and
+dead, not even a steam rose from it, but out of the further pastures a
+gentle mist had lifted up and lay all even along the flanks of the
+hills, so that they rose out of it, indistinct at their bases,
+clear-cut above against the brightening sky; and the farther they were
+the more their mouldings showed in the early light, and the most
+distant edges of all caught the morning.
+
+At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an-hour without moving,
+and took in vigour from it as a man takes in food and wine. When I
+stirred and looked about me it had become easy to see the separate
+grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted chirrups in the
+bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the silence,
+the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared. In a
+solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the
+neighbouring sources of the river.
+
+I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I was approaching the
+end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had become part of my
+adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small stream,
+mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow.
+There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible
+accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers
+(however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain
+roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their
+stone cottages and their lonely paths off the road.
+
+So it was here. The hills had grown much higher and come closer to the
+river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and then an aged and
+uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring stone: part of
+the hills.  Then again there were present here and there on the spurs
+lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the
+mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be
+so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but
+especially in the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said,
+here in the upper parts of valleys in the great hills. In such shrines
+Mass is to be said but rarely, sometimes but once a year in a special
+commemoration. The rest of the time they stand empty, and some of the
+older or simpler, one might take for ruins. They mark everywhere some
+strong emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and they anchor
+these wild places to their own past, making them up in memories what
+they lack in multitudinous life.
+
+I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place where the road crosses
+the river, and then I determined I would have hot coffee as well, and
+seeing in front of me a village called Rupt, which means 'the cleft'
+(for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it and
+had my coffee.  Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of
+the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar
+baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have
+noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and
+have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great
+crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock,
+glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my
+way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown
+impatient as he wandered on about 'leaving on your left the stone we
+call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you
+come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and so forth. Long-shoremen
+and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely rivers near the
+sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's eye now a short
+stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, yet they
+all have names, and are called 'The House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot,
+Mall, and the Patch.'
+
+But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment, there was no such
+universal and human instinct. For I said to the old man who poured me
+out my coffee under the trellis (it was full morning, the sun was well
+up, and the clouds were all dappled high above the tops of the
+mountains): 'Father, what do you call this hill?' And with that I
+pointed to a very remarkable hill and summit that lie sheer above the
+village.
+
+'That,' he said, 'is called the hill over above Rupt.'
+
+'Yes, of course,' I said, 'but what is its name?'
+
+'That is its name,' he answered.
+
+And he was quite right, for when I looked at my map, there it was
+printed, 'Hill above Rupt'. I thought how wearisome it would be if
+this became a common way of doing things, and if one should call the
+Thames 'the River of London', and Essex 'the North side', and Kent
+'the South side'; but considering that this fantastic method was only
+indulged in by one wretched village, I released myself from fear,
+relegated such horrors to the colonies, and took the road again.
+
+All this upper corner of the valley is a garden. It is bound in on
+every side from the winds, it is closed at the end by the great mass
+of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness is
+used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow about it as
+though they had been planted to please the eye.
+
+Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their character of
+isolation and repose. Here what are afterwards to become the
+influences of the plains are nurtured and tended as though in an
+orchard, and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with its regal
+towns is determined. Something about these places prevents ingress or
+spoliation. They will endure no settlements save of peasants; the
+waters are too young to be harnessed; the hills forbid an easy
+commerce with neighbours. Throughout the world I have found the heads
+of rivers to be secure places of silence and content. And as they are
+themselves a kind of youth, the early home of all that rivers must at
+last become--I mean special ways of building and a separate state of
+living, a local air and a tradition of history, for rivers are always
+the makers of provinces--so they bring extreme youth back to one, and
+these upper glens of the world steep one in simplicity and childhood.
+
+It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road and to draw what I
+saw before me, which was the tender stream of the Moselle slipping
+through fields quite flat and even and undivided by fences; its banks
+had here a strange effect of Nature copying man's art: they seemed a
+park, and the river wound through it full of the positive innocence
+that attaches to virgins: it nourished and was guarded by trees.
+
+There was about that scene something of creation and of a beginning,
+and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness of the first
+experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs. I mused
+upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a
+name--were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how
+at last they reached the sea.
+
+But while I was thinking of these things, and seeing in my mind a kind
+of picture of The River Valley, and of men clustering around their
+home stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on either side, and of
+the white line of the sea beyond all, a woman passed me. She was very
+ugly, and was dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and shining, and,
+as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand a book known to the
+French as 'The Roman Parishioner', which is a prayer-book. Her hair
+was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet; she walked rapidly, with her eyes
+on the ground. When I saw this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I
+cried out profanely, 'Devil take me!  It is Corpus Christi, and my
+third day out. It would be a wicked pilgrimage if I did not get Mass
+at last.' For my first day (if you remember) I had slept in a wood
+beyond Mass-time, and my second (if you remember) I had slept in a
+bed. But this third day, a great Feast into the bargain, I was bound
+to hear Mass, and this woman hurrying along to the next village proved
+that I was not too late.
+
+So I hurried in her wake and came to the village, and went into the
+church, which was very full, and came down out of it (the Mass was low
+and short--they are a Christian people) through an avenue of small
+trees and large branches set up in front of the houses to welcome the
+procession that was to be held near noon. At the foot of the street
+was an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there another man--I
+take him to have been a shopkeeper--I determined to talk politics, and
+began as follows:
+
+'Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?'
+
+'It is not my town,' he said, 'but there is anti-Semitism. It
+flourishes.'
+
+'Why then?' I asked. 'How many Jews have you in your town?'
+
+He said there were seven.
+
+'But,' said I, 'seven families of Jews--'
+
+'There are not seven families,' he interrupted; 'there are seven Jews
+all told. There are but two families, and I am reckoning in the
+children. The servants are Christians.'
+
+'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that the Jewish families
+from beyond the frontier should have local Christian people to wait on
+them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say was that so
+very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the
+anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'
+
+'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men
+for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus
+brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the
+ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed
+their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.'
+
+When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the
+politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the
+following remarkable phrase--
+
+'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each go his own way: the
+Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.'
+
+I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley
+road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this
+remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it
+was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends.
+
+I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, at the sources of
+the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the Ballon
+d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For
+some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either
+side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now
+stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine
+that forbid a passage south.  Up through these the main road has been
+pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very
+top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is
+impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of
+Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain
+with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block the end
+of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and out
+of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road
+over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the
+country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the dark
+stands for the valley and the light for the high places, will show
+better than a long description. Not that this map is of the Ballon
+d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I mean.
+
+Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to find a low point
+suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are rare, but when one
+does get them they are the finest travel in the world, for they
+furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads
+going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From
+their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey
+to be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite
+step from one province and people to another.
+
+I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags of the road, which
+had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy slope. I went along
+the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a little path
+that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was marked
+by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I saw
+the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from
+the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees
+took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced
+me--for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army
+arrested upon a downward march -- seemed something unusual and
+gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe than the extreme
+darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in the sky that
+introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple.
+Great clouds, so charged with rain that you would have thought them
+lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering
+me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day
+waned suddenly in their shade: it seemed suddenly as though summer was
+over or as though the mountains demanded an uncertain summer of their
+own, and shot the sunshine with the chill of their heights. A little
+wind ran along the grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of
+the first trees, rain was falling.
+
+The silence of the interior wood was enhanced by a bare drip of water
+from the boughs that stood out straight and tangled I know not how far
+above me.  Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by the half-light
+and lowering of the sky which the ceiling of branches concealed.
+Height, stillness, and a sort of expectancy controlled the memories of
+the place, and I passed silently and lightly between the high columns
+of the trees from night (as it seemed) through a kind of twilight
+forward to a near night beyond. On every side the perspective of these
+bare innumerable shafts, each standing apart in order, purple and
+fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light
+disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded
+me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my
+feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making
+distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees been so much greater and
+more enduring than my own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by
+their regard, I should have felt afraid. As it was I pushed upward
+through their immovable host in some such catching of the breath as
+men have when they walk at night straining for a sound, and I felt
+myself to be continually in a hidden companionship.
+
+When I came to the edge of this haunted forest it ceased as suddenly
+as it had begun. I left behind me such a rank of trees aligned as I
+had entered thousands of feet below, and I saw before me, stretching
+shapely up to the sky, the round dome-like summit of the mountain--a
+great field of grass. It was already evening; and, as though the tall
+trees had withdrawn their virtue from me, my fatigue suddenly came
+upon me. My feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the last
+hundred feet and looked down under the rolling clouds, lit from
+beneath by the level light of evening, to the three countries that met
+at my feet.
+
+For the Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering
+up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men.
+To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of
+Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls,
+who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They
+stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saône and are
+vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they
+go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the
+peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide
+homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.
+
+Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused
+and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen
+for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again
+and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from
+visions.
+
+Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to
+Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to
+see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all
+feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the
+Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by
+us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the
+horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled,
+lit from beneath with evening.
+
+I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken
+than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the
+slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones
+of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To this I
+addressed myself.
+
+It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant
+woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of
+great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of
+Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was
+a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner,
+until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great
+placard was framed in the three colours which once brought a little
+hope to the oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black letters
+were the three words, 'Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'.
+Underneath these was the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to
+be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again was printed in enormous
+italics--
+
+  Quand ce coq chantera
+  Ici crédit l'on fera.
+
+Which means--
+
+  When you hear him crowing
+  Then's the time for owing.
+  Till that day--Pay.
+
+While I was still wondering at this epitome of the French people, and
+was attempting to combine the French military tradition with the
+French temper in the affairs of economics; while I was also delighting
+in the memory of the solid coin that I carried in a little leathern
+bag in my pocket, the hard-working, God-fearing, and honest woman that
+governs the little house and the three great daughters, within a yard
+of the frontier, and on the top of this huge hill, had brought back
+all her troops into line and had the time to attend to me. This she
+did with the utmost politeness, though cold by race, and through her
+politeness ran a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once
+have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world,
+and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue.
+
+She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle
+valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic-- (she had a little
+tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion
+is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each
+other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So
+once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by
+the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so
+much love his own nation as hate his neighbours, and even the twilight
+of chivalry is mixed up with a detestable patronage of the poor. But
+as I was saying--) she also was a Catholic, and I knew myself to be
+with friends. She was moreover not exactly of- what shall I say? the
+words Celtic and Latin mean nothing-- not of those who delight in a
+delicate manner; and her good heart prompted her to say, very loudly--
+
+'What do you want?'
+
+'I want a bed,' I said, and I pulled out a silver coin. 'I must lie
+down at once.'
+
+Then I added, 'Can you make omelettes?'
+
+Now it is a curious thing, and one I will not dwell on--
+
+LECTOR. You do nothing but dwell.
+
+AUCTOR. It is the essence of lonely travel; and if you have come to
+this book for literature you have come to the wrong booth and counter.
+As I was saying: it is a curious thing that some people (or races)
+jump from one subject to another naturally, as some animals (I mean
+the noble deer) go by bounds. While there are other races (or
+individuals--heaven forgive me, I am no ethnologist) who think you a
+criminal or a lunatic unless you carefully plod along from step to
+step like a hippopotamus out of water.  When, therefore, I asked this
+family-drilling, house-managing, mountain-living woman whether she
+could make omelettes, she shook her head at me slowly, keeping her
+eyes fixed on mine, and said in what was the corpse of French with a
+German ghost in it, 'The bed is a franc.'
+
+'Motherkin,' I answered, 'what I mean is that I would sleep until I
+wake, for I have come a prodigious distance and have last slept in the
+woods. But when I wake I shall need food, for which,' I added, pulling
+out yet another coin, 'I will pay whatever your charge may be; for a
+more delightful house I have rarely met with. I know most people do
+not sleep before sunset, but I am particularly tired and broken.'
+
+She showed me my bed then much more kindly, and when I woke, which was
+long after dusk, she gave me in the living room of the hut eggs beaten
+up with ham, and I ate brown bread and said grace.
+
+Then (my wine was not yet finished, but it is an abominable thing to
+drink your own wine in another person's house) I asked whether I could
+have something to drink.
+
+'What you like,' she said.
+
+'What have you?' said I.
+
+'Beer,' said she.
+
+'Anything else?' said I.
+
+'No,' said she.
+
+'Why, then, give me some of that excellent beer.'
+
+I drank this with delight, paid all my bill (which was that of a
+labourer), and said good-night to them.
+
+In good-nights they had a ceremony; for they all rose together and
+curtsied. Upon my soul I believe such people to be the salt of the
+earth. I bowed with real contrition, for at several moments I had
+believed myself better than they. Then I went to my bed and they to
+theirs. The wind howled outside; my boots were stiff like wood and I
+could hardly take them off; my feet were so martyrized that I doubted
+if I could walk at all on the morrow.  Nevertheless I was so wrapped
+round with the repose of this family's virtues that I fell asleep at
+once. Next day the sun was rising in angry glory over the very distant
+hills of Germany, his new light running between the pinnacles of the
+clouds as the commands of a conqueror might come trumpeted down the
+defiles of mountains, when I fearlessly forced my boots on to my feet
+and left their doors.
+
+The morning outside came living and sharp after the gale--almost
+chilly.  Under a scattered but clearing sky I first limped, then, as
+my blood warmed, strode down the path that led between the trees of
+the farther vale and was soon following a stream that leaped from one
+fall to another till it should lead me to the main road, to Belfort,
+to the Jura, to the Swiss whom I had never known, and at last to
+Italy.
+
+But before I call up the recollection of that hidden valley, I must
+describe with a map the curious features of the road that lay before
+me into Switzerland. I was standing on the summit of that knot of
+hills which rise up from every side to form the Ballon d'Alsace, and
+make an abrupt ending to the Vosges. Before me, southward and
+eastward, was a great plain with the fortress of Belfort in the midst
+of it. This plain is called by soldiers 'the Gap of Belfort', and is
+the only break in the hill frontier that covers France all the way
+from the Mediterranean to Flanders. On the farther side of this plain
+ran the Jura mountains, which are like a northern wall to Switzerland,
+and just before you reach them is the Frontier. The Jura are fold on
+fold of high limestone ridges, thousands of feet high, all parallel,
+with deep valleys, thousands of feet deep, between them; and beyond
+their last abrupt escarpment is the wide plain of the river Aar.
+
+Now the straight line to Rome ran from where I stood, right across
+that plain of Belfort, right across the ridges of the Jura, and cut
+the plain of the Aar a few miles to the west of a town called
+Solothurn or Soleure, which stands upon that river.
+
+It was impossible to follow that line exactly, but one could average
+it closely enough by following the high road down the mountain through
+Belfort to a Swiss town called Porrentruy or Portrut--so far one was a
+little to the west of the direct line.
+
+From Portrut, by picking one's way through forests, up steep banks,
+over open downs, along mule paths, and so forth, one could cross the
+first ridge called the 'Terrible Hill', and so reach the profound
+gorge of the river Doubs, and a town called St Ursanne. From St
+Ursanne, by following a mountain road and then climbing some rocks and
+tracking through a wood, one could get straight over the second ridge
+to Glovelier. From Glovelier a highroad took one through a gap to
+Undervelier and on to a town called Moutier or Munster. Then from
+Munster, the road, still following more or less the line to Rome but
+now somewhat to the east of it, went on southward till an abrupt turn
+in it forced one to leave it. Then there was another rough climb by a
+difficult path up over the last ridge, called the Weissenstein, and
+from its high edge and summit it was but a straight fall of a mile or
+two on to Soleure.
+
+So much my map told me, and this mixture of roads and paths and rock
+climbs that I had planned out, I exactly followed, so as to march on
+as directly as possible towards Rome, which was my goal. For if I had
+not so planned it, but had followed the highroads, I should have been
+compelled to zig-zag enormously for days, since these ridges of the
+Jura are but little broken, and the roads do not rise above the
+crests, but follow the parallel valleys, taking advantage only here
+and there of the rare gaps to pass from one to another.
+
+Here is a sketch of the way I went, where my track is a white line,
+and the round spots in it are the towns and villages whose names are
+written at the side. In this sketch the plains and low valleys are
+marked dark, and the crests of the mountains left white. The shading
+is lighter according to the height, and the contour lines (which are
+very far from accurate) represent, I suppose, about a thousand feet
+between each, or perhaps a little more; and as for the distance, from
+the Ballon d'Alsace to Soleure might be two long days' march on a flat
+road, but over mountains and up rocks it was all but three, and even
+that was very good going. My first stage was across the plain of
+Belfort, and I had determined to sleep that night in Switzerland.
+
+I wandered down the mountain. A little secret path, one of many, saved
+me the long windings of the road. It followed down the central hollow
+of the great cleft and accompanied the stream. All the way for miles
+the water tumbled in fall after fall over a hundred steps of rock, and
+its noise mixed with the freshness of the air, and its splashing
+weighted the overhanging branches of the trees. A little rain that
+fell from time to time through the clear morning seemed like a sister
+to the spray of the waterfalls; and what with all this moisture and
+greenery, and the surrounding silence, all the valley was inspired
+with content. It was a repose to descend through its leaves and
+grasses, and find the lovely pastures at the foot of the descent, a
+narrow floor between the hills. Here there were the first houses of
+men; and, from one, smoke was already going up thinly into the
+morning. The air was very pure and cold; it was made more nourishing
+and human by the presence and noise of the waters, by the shining wet
+grasses and the beaded leaves all through that umbrageous valley. The
+shreds of clouds which, high above the calm, ran swiftly in the upper
+air, fed it also with soft rains from time to time as fine as dew; and
+through those clear and momentary showers one could see the sunlight.
+
+When I had enjoyed the descent through this place for but a few miles,
+everything changed. The road in front ran straight and bordered--it
+led out and onwards over a great flat, set here and there with
+hillocks. The Vosges ended abruptly. Houses came more thickly, and by
+the ceaseless culture of the fields, by the flat slate roofs, the
+white-washed walls, and the voices, and the glare, I knew myself to be
+once more in France of the plains; and the first town I came to was
+Giromagny.
+
+Here, as I heard a bell, I thought I would go up and hear Mass; and I
+did so, but my attention at the holy office was distracted by the
+enormous number of priests that I found in the church, and I have
+wondered painfully ever since how so many came to be in a little place
+like Giromagny. There were three priests at the high altar, and nearly
+one for each chapel, and there was such a buzz of Masses going on,
+beginning and ending, that I am sure I need not have gone without my
+breakfast in my hurry to get one. With all this there were few people
+at Mass so early; nothing but these priests going in and out, and
+continual little bells. I am still wondering.  Giromagny is no place
+for relics or for a pilgrimage, it cures no one, and has nothing of a
+holy look about it, and all these priests--
+
+LECTOR. Pray dwell less on your religion, and--
+
+AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel.
+For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you
+expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always
+find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far
+more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And
+that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can explain these
+priests---
+
+LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and they were swarming.
+
+AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of what interests me,
+I see no reason for setting down with minute care what interests you,
+and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only speak
+German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of
+Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally
+entertaining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an
+open quarrel. You must imagine for yourself about six miles of road,
+and then--then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in spite of the
+morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the sound of
+bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums.
+
+It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from one great garrison
+to another all the way down the frontier. I had started from the busy
+order of Toul; I had passed through the silence and peace of all that
+Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to the
+guns and the tramp of Épinal. I had left Épinal and counted the miles
+and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the great hills and
+come down into quite another plain draining to another sea, and I
+heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking
+backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new
+system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an
+army, the ungarnished gaps between.
+
+As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going at a trot down a
+side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my right, a long way
+off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety of the
+French line.  The sun here and there glinted on the ends of
+rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their
+tramp loud and thudding. They were singing a song.
+
+I had already passed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the
+road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly
+suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle
+houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw written
+up the words,
+
+Wine; shut or open.
+
+As it is a great rule to examine every new thing, and to suck honey
+out of every flower, I did not--as some would--think the phrase odd
+and pass on. I stood stock-still gazing at the house and imagining a
+hundred explanations.  I had never in my life heard wine divided into
+shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more great
+experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as
+the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and
+standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed
+labels, '30', '40', and '50', and they were brimming with wine. I
+spoke to the woman, and pointing at the tin cans, said--
+
+'Is this what you call open wine?'
+
+'Why, yes,' said she. 'Cannot you see for yourself that it is open?'
+
+That was true enough, and it explained a great deal. But it did not
+explain how--seeing that if you leave a bottle of wine uncorked for
+ten minutes you spoil it--you can keep gallons of it in a great wide
+can, for all the world like so much milk, milked from the Panthers of
+the God. I determined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing
+the middle price, at fourpence a quart, I said--
+
+'Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug.'
+
+This the woman at once did, and when I came to drink it, it was
+delicious.  Sweet, cool, strong, lifting the heart, satisfying, and
+full of all those things wine-merchants talk of, bouquet, and body,
+and flavour. It was what I have heard called a very pretty wine.
+
+I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel, but accepted it as one
+of those mysteries of which this pilgrimage was already giving me
+examples, and of which more were to come--(wait till you hear about
+the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself-
+
+'When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and away from the strong and
+excellent government of the Republic, when I am lost in the Jura Hills
+to-morrow there will be no such wine as this.'
+
+So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very tight, put it in my sack,
+and held it in store against the wineless places on the flanks of the
+hill called Terrible, where there are no soldiers, and where Swiss is
+the current language. Then I went on into the centre of the town.
+
+As I passed over the old bridge into the market-place, where I
+proposed to lunch (the sun was terrible--it was close upon eleven), I
+saw them building parallel with that old bridge a new one to replace
+it. And the way they build a bridge in Belfort is so wonderfully
+simple, and yet so new, that it is well worth telling.
+
+In most places when a bridge has to be made, there is an infinite
+pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven
+knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and
+some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a
+thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water
+has run away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down into the dry
+bed of the river and dig the foundations feverishly, and begin
+building the piers in great haste. Soon the water comes back, but the
+piers are already above it, and the rest of the work is done from
+boats. This is absolutely true. Not only did I see the men in the bed
+of the river, but a man whom I asked told me that it seemed to him the
+most natural way to build bridges, and doubted if they were ever made
+in any other fashion.
+
+There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in rock to commemorate
+the siege of 1870. This lion is part of the precipice under the
+castle, and is of enormous size--- how large I do not know, but I saw
+that a man looked quite small by one of his paws. The precipice was
+first smoothed like a stone slab or tablet, and then this lion was
+carved into and out of it in high relief by Bartholdi, the same man
+that made the statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.
+
+The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history in yet another way, and
+one that shows you how the Church works on from one stem continually.
+For there is a little church somewhere near or in Belfort (I do not
+know where, I only heard of it) which, a local mason and painter being
+told to decorate for so much, he amused himself by painting all round
+it little pictures of the siege--of the cold, and the wounds, and the
+heroism. This is indeed the way such things should be done, I mean by
+men doing them for pleasure and of their own thought. And I have a
+number of friends who agree with me in thinking this, that art should
+not be competitive or industrial, but most of them go on to the very
+strange conclusion that one should not own one's garden, nor one's
+beehive, nor one's great noble house, nor one's pigsty, nor one's
+railway shares, nor the very boots on one's feet. I say, out upon such
+nonsense. Then they say to me, what about the concentration of the
+means of production? And I say to them, what about the distribution of
+the ownership of the concentrated means of production? And they shake
+their heads sadly, and say it would never endure; and I say, try it
+first and see. Then they fly into a rage.
+
+When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by the way, a poor man asked
+me to use _all my influence_ for his son, who was an engineer in the
+navy, and this he did because I had been boasting of my travels,
+experiences, and grand acquaintances throughout the world)--when, I
+say, I had lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set out again on
+my road, and was very much put out to find that showers still kept on
+falling.
+
+In the early morning, under such delightful trees, up in the
+mountains, the branches had given me a roof, the wild surroundings
+made me part of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to marry
+itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. But here, on a road and
+in a town, all its tradition of discomfort came upon me. I was angry,
+therefore, with the weather and the road for some miles, till two
+things came to comfort me. First it cleared, and a glorious sun showed
+me from a little eminence the plain of Alsace and the mountains of the
+Vosges all in line; secondly, I came to a vast powder-magazine.
+
+To most people there is nothing more subtle or pleasing in a
+powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the same in
+the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides
+and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my
+part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with
+two very good feelings--- laughter and companionship. For it was my
+good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two
+men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been
+some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots--and for
+the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the
+anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty
+cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous
+noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the
+over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two
+friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a
+loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders
+to challenge once and then to fire.
+
+Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a
+conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than
+an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night
+they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of
+a growing tree.
+
+This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached
+it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking
+eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became
+quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt,
+and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its
+carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to
+explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the
+seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were
+longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.
+
+Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I
+went down the road.
+
+Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
+and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
+even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
+always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
+with the lapse of time.  At last I found a side road going off from
+the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
+the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
+because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
+wide turnpike.
+
+Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and
+at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses--
+
+_Ave Crux Spes Unica._
+
+I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I
+looked backward along the road I had come.
+
+There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the
+plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they
+stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent. The mind
+of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily overleap even
+the high hills.
+
+Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a kind of farewell to
+the influences that had followed me for so many miles--the solemn
+quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of
+Lorraine--1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk, and
+pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages.
+
+The afternoon and the evening followed as I put one mile after another
+behind me. The frontier seemed so close that I would not rest. I left
+my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, untasted, and I
+plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment
+for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer the
+last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to
+a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my
+fourth day.
+
+The light still fell, and my resolution stood, though my exhaustion
+undermined it. The line of the mountains rose higher against the sky,
+and there entered into my pilgrimage for the first time the loneliness
+and the mystery of meres. Something of what a man feels in East
+England belonged to this last of the plain under the guardian hills.
+Everywhere I passed ponds and reeds, and saw the level streaks of
+sunset reflected in stagnant waters.
+
+The marshy valley kept its character when I had left the lane and
+regained the highroad. Its isolation dominated the last effort with
+which I made for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight, and as
+I blundered on my whole spirit was caught or lifted in the influence
+of the waste waters and of the birds of evening.
+
+I wished, as I had often wished in such opportunities of recollection
+and of silence, for a complete barrier that might isolate the mind.
+With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a
+pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved
+and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men
+have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose
+holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are
+incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover,
+there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with
+the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same
+thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus.
+But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning
+of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union
+between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms,
+revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of
+pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know
+nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether
+they could make the matter clearer in Rome.
+
+But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good spirit in me that is
+so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of things, that is a
+very different story. _That_, I do indeed desire to have to myself at
+whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of autumn
+closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one, as
+one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from
+without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some
+mystery it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more
+desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So
+also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the
+songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in
+by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than
+these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial
+there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that
+our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert
+and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.
+
+As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely
+ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of
+evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling
+slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my
+sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the
+miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half
+round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open
+Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat
+down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little
+thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had
+carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful
+march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth
+drinking after I had passed the frontier.
+
+I consoled myself more or less by thinking about torments and evils to
+which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then I rose to go on
+into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a
+wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched
+jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the
+Mount Terrible.  It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.
+
+So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to
+cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know where the point
+came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last French
+town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I had
+covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis
+and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and
+said--
+
+'Am I in Switzerland?'
+
+A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a Bavarian commercial
+traveller, and a colleague of his from Marseilles, all said together
+in varying accents: 'Yes.'
+
+'Why then,' I said, 'I will come in and drink.'
+
+This book would never end if I were to attempt to write down so much
+as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things that I saw and
+heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least mention the
+Commercial Traveller from Marseilles.
+
+He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He had seen all the
+cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was
+extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large,
+his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of
+the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar god. He
+came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent
+of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in
+dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions);
+then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the
+memory of such a revelation.
+
+For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my
+wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the
+Phocean.  He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black;
+slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small,
+black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid
+gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet
+lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.
+
+That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of
+France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls.
+It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught
+the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.
+
+I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three
+thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains
+talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and
+travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the
+changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.
+
+When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned
+off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing
+water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this:
+
+'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So
+on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such
+and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of
+St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so
+many years and so many yards, ...' &c., and so forth ... exactly like
+a mill.
+
+I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the
+Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the
+villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man.
+
+He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he had arranged with
+the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most
+unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next morning I was
+off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the table such
+money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper.
+
+It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were watery thin clouds
+left here and there from the day before, a cold wind drove them) when,
+with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other and resting
+continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road, and
+pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France,
+and I was fairly in a strange country.
+
+The valley through which I was now passing resembled that of the
+lovely river Jed where it runs down from the Cheviots, and leads like
+a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as there,
+steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale, all green grass
+and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with perpetual
+woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and
+upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this
+winding cleft was a natural passage through the first ridge of the
+Jura; the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm.
+
+I had, as I passed on along this turning way, all the pleasures of
+novelty; it was quite another country from the governed and ordered
+France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less carefully
+tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old, and
+marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything.
+Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees.
+I did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through
+the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French
+neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as
+hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds
+and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the
+Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once 'Slow
+Water'.
+
+I was wondering what its name might be, and how far I stood from
+Porrentruy (which I knew to be close by), when I saw a tunnel across
+the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills that the
+river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I had
+been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short
+cut up through the forest over a spur of hill--a short cut most
+legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used--and I
+walked up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods
+and beneath small, dripping trees. When this short silence of the
+forest was over, I saw an excellent sight.
+
+There, below me, where the lane began to fall, was the first of the
+German cities.
+
+LECTOR. How 'German'?
+
+AUCTOR. Let me explain. There is a race that stretches vaguely,
+without defined boundaries, from the Baltic into the high hills of the
+south. I will not include the Scandinavians among them, for the
+Scandinavians (from whom we English also in part descend) are
+long-headed, lean, and fierce, with a light of adventure in their pale
+eyes. But beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic to the
+high hills a race which has a curious unity. Yes; I know that great
+patches of it are Catholic, and that other great patches hold varying
+philosophies; I know also that within them are counted long-headed and
+round-headed men, dark and fair, violent and silent; I know also that
+they have continually fought among themselves and called in Welch
+allies; still I go somewhat by the language, for I am concerned here
+with the development of a modern European people, and I say that the
+Germans run from the high hills to the northern sea. In all of them
+you find (it is not race, it is something much more than race, it is
+the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of ease. In all of them
+you find music. They are those Germans whose countries I had seen a
+long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose language and
+traditions I now first touched in the town that stood before me.
+
+LECTOR. But in Porrentruy they talk French!
+
+AUCTOR. They are welcome; it is an excellent tongue. Nevertheless,
+they are Germans. Who but Germans would so preserve--would so rebuild
+the past? Who but Germans would so feel the mystery of the hills, and
+so fit their town to the mountains? I was to pass through but a narrow
+wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They began at Porrentruy,
+they ended at the watershed of the Adriatic, in the high passes of the
+Alps; but in that little space of four days I made acquaintance with
+their influence, and I owe them a perpetual gratitude for their
+architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is full of
+an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger plains of
+Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in
+Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and
+barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin
+tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic
+dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them
+neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were
+contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort.
+
+The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with
+Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this
+gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have
+seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it
+was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told
+later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can
+believe it. The Germans hate to destroy.  It overwhelmed me as visions
+overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see
+the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and
+propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing.
+
+As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed under its deep
+gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main
+street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began
+to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house
+I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said
+that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me
+nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do
+very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of
+the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin,
+when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I
+remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the
+bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and
+estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double.  God
+rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or
+twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine.
+
+I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But,
+oh!  my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous,
+introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant
+friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an
+idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the god?
+Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and
+kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that
+lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz
+le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get
+no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the
+genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little
+attendant gods by name that will come to the festival.
+
+What a wine!
+
+I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a
+good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I see there is a
+providence for pilgrims.'
+
+So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle of this wonderful
+stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth, desirable, and
+went up on my way to Rome.
+
+Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was infinite, I would tell
+you about the shifty priest whom I met on the platform of the church
+where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the anarchist whom I met
+when I recovered the highroad--- he was a sad, good man, who had
+committed some sudden crime and so had left France, and his hankering
+for France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he
+wished there were no property, no armies, and no governments.
+
+But I said that we live as parts of a nation, and that there was no
+fate so wretched as to be without a country of one's own--what else
+was exile which so many noble men have thought worse than death, and
+which all have feared?  I also told him that armies fighting in a just
+cause were the happiest places for living, and that a good battle for
+justice was the beginning of all great songs; and that as for
+property, a man on his own land was the nearest to God.
+
+He therefore not convinced, and I loving and pitying him, we
+separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him
+instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him
+brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying
+God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would
+certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in
+Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not
+(as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.
+What is more, nothing makes property run into a few hands but the
+worst of the capital sins, and you who say it is 'the modern
+facilities of distribution' are like men who cannot read large print
+without spectacles; or again, you are like men who should say that
+their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was caused by
+matches.
+
+But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way over so many hills to
+talk economics? Very far from it! I will pray for all poor men when I
+get to St Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what capital St Peter
+had in that highly capitalistic first century), and, meanwhile, do you
+discuss the margin of production while I go on the open way; there are
+no landlords here, and if you would learn at least one foreign
+language, and travel but five miles off a railway, you town-talkers,
+you would find how much landlordism has to do with your 'necessities'
+and your 'laws'.
+
+LECTOR. I thought you said you were not going to talk economics?
+
+AUCTOR. Neither am I. It is but the backwash of a wave ... Well, then,
+I went up the open way, and came in a few miles of that hot afternoon
+to the second ridge of the Jura, which they call 'the Terrible Hill',
+or 'the Mount Terrible'--and, in truth, it is very jagged. A steep,
+long crest of very many miles lies here between the vale of Porrentruy
+and the deep gorge of the Doubs. The highroad goes off a long way
+westward, seeking for a pass or neck in the chain, but I determined to
+find a straight road across, and spoke to some wood-cutters who were
+felling trees just where the road began to climb. They gave me this
+curious indication. They said--
+
+'Go you up this muddy track that has been made athwart the woods and
+over the pastures by our sliding logs' (for they had cut their trunks
+higher up the mountains), 'and you will come to the summit easily.
+From thence you will see the Doubs running below you in a very deep
+and dark ravine.'
+
+I thanked them, and soon found that they had told me right. There,
+unmistakable, a gash in the forest and across the intervening fields
+of grass, was the run of the timber.
+
+When I had climbed almost to the top, I looked behind me to take my
+last view of the north. I saw just before me a high isolated rock;
+between me and it was the forest. I saw beyond it the infinite plain
+of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff of limestone that bounded
+that height fell sheer upon the tree-tops; its sublimity arrested me,
+and compelled me to record it.
+
+'Surely,' I said, 'if Switzerland has any gates on the north they are
+these.' Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of what I had seen, I
+went up, panting, to the summit, and, resting there, discovered
+beneath me the curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a dark gulf
+thousands of feet below. The shape of this extraordinary turn I will
+describe in a moment.  Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no
+precipice or rock between me and the river, only a down, down, down
+through other trees and pastures, not too steep for a man to walk, but
+steeper than our steep downs and fells in England, where a man
+hesitates and picks his way. It was so much of a descent, and so long,
+that one looked above the tree-tops. It was a place where no one would
+care to ride.
+
+I found a kind of path, sideways on the face of the mountain, and
+followed it till I came to a platform with a hut perched thereon, and
+men building.  Here a good woman told me just how to go. I was not to
+attempt the road to Brune-Farine--that is, 'Whole-Meal Farm'--as I had
+first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take a gully she
+would show me, and follow it till I reached the river. She came out,
+and led me steeply across a hanging pasture; all the while she had
+knitting in her hands, and I noticed that on the levels she went on
+with her knitting. Then, when we got to the gully, she said I had but
+to follow it. I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home.
+
+This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down
+it--thousands of feet--warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very
+gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or
+village.  It was St Ursanne.
+
+The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary
+shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran
+along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but
+much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach
+that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as
+though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows
+out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a
+man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way,
+others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say--
+
+LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of
+a window?
+
+AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are
+everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building
+takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is
+framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town,
+a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have
+such luck!), would you not call your architect up before you and say--
+
+'Sir, see that the windows of my house are _tall, narrow, thick_, and
+have a _round top to them'?_
+
+Of course you would, for thus you would best catch in separate
+pictures the sunlit things outside your home.
+
+Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that many fall to their
+deaths. By windows love often enters. Through a window went the bolt
+that killed King Richard. King William's father spied Arlette from a
+window (I have looked through it myself, but not a soul did I see
+washing below).  When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and
+when a patriot would save her, he taxes them. Out of windows we walk
+on to lawns in summer and meet men and women, and in winter windows
+are drums for the splendid music of storms that makes us feel so
+masterly round our fires. The windows of the great cathedrals are all
+their meaning. But for windows we should have to go out-of-doors to
+see daylight. After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing so
+beneficent as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful man that has no
+window-god in his house, and thinks himself too great a philosopher to
+bow down to windows! May he live in a place without windows for a
+while to teach him the value of windows. As for me, I will keep up the
+high worship of windows till I come to the windowless grave. Talk to
+me of windows!
+
+Yes. There are other things in St Ursanne. It is a little tiny town,
+and yet has gates. It is full of very old houses, people, and speech.
+It was founded (or named) by a Bear Saint, and the statue of the saint
+with his bear is carved on the top of a column in the market-place.
+But the chief thing about it, so it seemed to me, was its remoteness.
+
+The gorge of the Doubs, of which I said a word or two above, is of
+that very rare shape which isolates whatever may be found in such
+valleys. It turns right back upon itself, like a very narrow U, and
+thus cannot by any possibility lead any one anywhere; for though in
+all times travellers have had to follow river valleys, yet when they
+come to such a long and sharp turn as this, they have always cut
+across the intervening bend.
+
+Here is the shape of this valley with the high hills round it and in
+its core, which will show better than description what I mean. The
+little picture also shows what the gorge looked like as I came down on
+it from the heights above.
+
+In the map the small white 'A' shows where the railway bridge was, and
+in this map, as in the others, the dark is for the depth and the light
+is for the heights. As for the picture, it is what one sees when one
+is coming over the ridge at the north or top of the map, and when one
+first catches the river beneath one.
+
+I thought a good deal about what the Romans did to get through the
+Mont Terrible, and how they negotiated this crook in the Doubs (for
+they certainly passed into Gaul through the gates of Porrentruy, and
+by that obvious valley below it). I decided that they probably came
+round eastward by Delemont. But for my part, I was on a straight path
+to Rome, and as that line lay just along the top of the river bend I
+was bound to take it.
+
+Now outside St Ursanne, if one would go along the top of the river
+bend and so up to the other side of the gorge, is a kind of subsidiary
+ravine--awful, deep, and narrow--and this was crossed, I could see, by
+a very high railway bridge.
+
+Not suspecting any evil, and desiring to avoid the long descent into
+the ravine, the looking for a bridge or ford, and the steep climb up
+the other side, I made in my folly for the station which stood just
+where the railway left solid ground to go over this high, high bridge.
+I asked leave of the stationmaster to cross it, who said it was
+strictly forbidden, but that he was not a policeman, and that I might
+do it at my own risk. Thanking him, therefore, and considering how
+charming was the loose habit of small uncentralized societies, I went
+merrily on to the bridge, meaning to walk across it by stepping from
+sleeper to sleeper. But it was not to be so simple. The powers of the
+air, that hate to have their kingdom disturbed, watched me as I began.
+
+I had not been engaged upon it a dozen yards when I was seized with
+terror.
+
+I have much to say further on in this book concerning terror: the
+panic that haunts high places and the spell of many angry men. This
+horrible affection of the mind is the delight of our modern
+scribblers; it is half the plot of their insane 'short stories', and
+is at the root of their worship of what they call 'strength', a
+cowardly craving for protection, or the much more despicable
+fascination of brutality. For my part I have always disregarded it as
+something impure and devilish, unworthy of a Christian. Fear I think,
+indeed, to be in the nature of things, and it is as much part of my
+experience to be afraid of the sea or of an untried horse as it is to
+eat and sleep; but terror, which is a sudden madness and paralysis of
+the soul, that I say is from hell, and not to be played with or
+considered or put in pictures or described in stories. All this I say
+to preface what happened, and especially to point out how terror is in
+the nature of a possession and is unreasonable.
+
+For in the crossing of this bridge there was nothing in itself
+perilous.  The sleepers lay very close together--I doubt if a man
+could have slipped between them; but, I know not how many hundred feet
+below, was the flashing of the torrent, and it turned my brain. For
+the only parapet there was a light line or pipe, quite slender and low
+down, running from one spare iron upright to another. These rather
+emphasized than encouraged my mood. And still as I resolutely put one
+foot in front of the other, and resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss
+and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was
+diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught
+half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went
+uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height
+with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I could
+bear.
+
+I dared not turn round and I dared not stop. Words and phrases began
+repeating themselves in my head as they will under a strain: so I know
+at sea a man perilously hanging on to the tiller makes a kind of
+litany of his instructions. The central part was passed, the
+three-quarters; the tension of that enduring effort had grown
+intolerable, and I doubted my ability to complete the task. Why? What
+could prevent me? I cannot say; it was all a bundle of imaginaries.
+Perhaps at bottom what I feared was sudden giddiness and the fall--
+
+At any rate at this last supreme part I vowed one candle to Our Lady
+of Perpetual Succour if she would see that all went well, and this
+candle I later paid in Rome; finding Our Lady of Succour not hung up
+in a public place and known to all, as I thought She would be, but
+peculiar to a little church belonging to a Scotchman and standing
+above his high altar. Yet it is a very famous picture, and extremely
+old.
+
+Well, then, having made this vow I still went on, with panic aiding
+me, till I saw that the bank beneath had risen to within a few feet of
+the bridge, and that dry land was not twenty yards away. Then my
+resolution left me and I ran, or rather stumbled, rapidly from sleeper
+to sleeper till I could take a deep breath on the solid earth beyond.
+
+I stood and gazed back over the abyss; I saw the little horrible strip
+between heaven and hell--the perspective of its rails. I was made ill
+by the relief from terror. Yet I suppose railway-men cross and recross
+it twenty times a day. Better for them than for me!
+
+There is the story of the awful bridge of the Mont Terrible, and it
+lies to a yard upon the straight line--_quid dicam_--the segment of
+the Great Circle uniting Toul and Rome.
+
+The high bank or hillside before me was that which ends the gorge of
+the Doubs and looks down either limb of the sharp bend. I had here not
+to climb but to follow at one height round the curve. My way ran by a
+rather ill-made lane and passed a village. Then it was my business to
+make straight up the farther wall of the gorge, and as there was wood
+upon this, it looked an easy matter.
+
+But when I came to it, it was not easy. The wood grew in loose rocks
+and the slope was much too steep for anything but hands and knees, and
+far too soft and broken for true climbing. And no wonder this ridge
+seemed a wall for steepness and difficulty, since it was the watershed
+between the Mediterranean and the cold North Sea. But I did not know
+this at the time.  It must have taken me close on an hour before I had
+covered the last thousand feet or so that brought me to the top of the
+ridge, and there, to my great astonishment, was a road. Where could
+such a road lead, and why did it follow right along the highest edge
+of the mountains? The Jura with their unique parallels provide twenty
+such problems.
+
+Wherever it led, however, this road was plainly perpendicular to my
+true route, and I had but to press on my straight line. So I crossed
+it, saw for a last time through the trees the gorge of the Doubs, and
+then got upon a path which led down through a field more or less in
+the direction of my pilgrimage.
+
+Here the country was so broken that one could make out but little of
+its general features, but of course, on the whole, I was following
+down yet another southern slope, the southern slope of the _third_
+chain of the Jura, when, after passing through many glades and along a
+stony path, I found a kind of gate between two high rocks, and emerged
+somewhat suddenly upon a wide down studded with old trees and also
+many stunted yews, and this sank down to a noble valley which lay all
+before me.
+
+The open down or prairie on which I stood I afterwards found to be
+called the 'Pasturage of Common Right', a very fine name; and, as a
+gallery will command a great hall, so this field like a platform
+commanded the wide and fading valley below.
+
+It was a very glad surprise to see this sight suddenly unrolled as I
+stood on the crest of the down. The Jura had hitherto been either
+lonely, or somewhat awful, or naked and rocky, but here was a true
+vale in which one could imagine a spirit of its own; there were corn
+lands and no rocks. The mountains on either side did not rise so high
+as three thousand feet. Though of limestone they were rounded in form,
+and the slanting sun of the late afternoon (all the storm had left the
+sky) took them full and warm. The valley remaining wide and fruitful
+went on out eastward till the hills became mixed up with brume and
+distance. As I did not know its name I called it after the village
+immediately below me for which I was making; and I still remember it
+as the Valley of Glovelier, and it lies between the third and fourth
+ridges of the Jura.
+
+Before leaving the field I drew what I saw but I was much too tired by
+the double and prodigious climb of the past hours to draw definitely
+or clearly. Such as it is, there it is. Then I went down over the
+smooth field.
+
+There is something that distinguishes the rugged from the gracious in
+landscape, and in our Europe this something corresponds to the use and
+presence of men, especially in mountainous places. For men's habits
+and civilization fill the valleys and wash up the base of the hills,
+making, as it were, a tide mark. Into this zone I had already passed.
+The turf was trodden fine, and was set firm as it can only become by
+thousands of years of pasturing. The moisture that oozed out of the
+earth was not the random bog of the high places but a human spring,
+caught in a stone trough.  Attention had been given to the trees.
+Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard
+thing men pile up in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of
+chosen stones, and these bound together with mortar.  On my right was
+a deep little dale with children playing in it--and this' I afterwards
+learned was called a 'combe': delightful memory! All our deeper
+hollows are called the same at home, and even the Welsh have the word,
+but they spell it _cwm_; it is their mountain way. Well, as I was
+saying, everything surrounding me was domestic and grateful, and I was
+therefore in a mood for charity and companionship when I came down the
+last dip and entered Glovelier. But Glovelier is a place of no
+excellence whatever, and if the thought did not seem extravagant I
+should be for putting it to the sword and burning it all down.
+
+For just as I was going along full of kindly thoughts, and had turned
+into the sign of (I think it was) the 'Sun' to drink wine and leave
+them my benediction--
+
+LECTOR. Why your benediction?
+
+AUCTOR. Who else can give benedictions if people cannot when they are
+on pilgrimage? Learn that there are three avenues by which blessing
+can be bestowed, and three kinds of men who can bestow it.
+
+(1) There is the good man, whose goodness makes him of himself a giver
+of blessings. His power is not conferred or of office, but is
+_inhaerens persona_; part of the stuff of his mind. This kind can
+confer the solemn benediction, or _Benedictio major_, if they choose;
+but besides this their every kind thought, word, or action is a
+_Benedictio generalise_ and even their frowns, curses, angry looks and
+irritable gestures may be called _Benedictiones minores vel incerti_.
+I believe I am within the definitions.  I avoid heresy. All this is
+sound theology. I do not smell of the faggot.  And this kind of
+Benedictory Power is the fount or type or natural origin, as it were,
+of all others.
+
+(2) There is the Official of Religion who, in the exercise of his
+office--
+
+LECTOR. For Heaven's sake--
+
+AUCTOR. Who began it? You protested my power to give benediction, and
+I must now prove it at length; otherwise I should fall under the
+accusation of lesser Simony--that is, the false assumption of
+particular powers. Well, then, there is the Official who _ex officio_,
+and when he makes it quite clear that it is _qua sponsus_ and not
+_sicut ut ipse_, can give formal benediction. This power belongs
+certainly to all Bishops, mitred Abbots, and Archimandrates; to
+Patriarchs of course, and _a fortiori_ to the Pope.  In Rome they will
+have it that Monsignores also can so bless, and I have heard it
+debated whether or no the same were not true in some rustic way of
+parish priests. However this may be, all their power proceeds, not
+from themselves, but from the accumulation of goodness left as a
+deposit by the multitudes of exceptionally good men who have lived in
+times past, and who have now no use for it.
+
+(3) Thirdly--and this is my point--any one, good or bad, official or
+non-official, who is for the moment engaged in an _opusfaustum_ can
+act certainly as a conductor or medium, and the influence of what he
+is touching or doing passes to you from him. This is admitted by every
+one who worships trees, wells, and stones; and indeed it stands to
+reason, for it is but a branch of the well-known _'Sanctificatio ex
+loco, opere, tactu vel conditione.'_ I will admit that this power is
+but vague, slight, tenuous, and dissipatory, still there it is: though
+of course its poor effect is to that of the _Benedictio major_ what a
+cat's-paw in the Solent is to a north-east snorter on Lindsey Deeps.
+
+I am sorry to have been at such length, but it is necessary to have
+these things thrashed out once for all. So now you see how I, being on
+pilgrimage, could give a kind of little creeping blessing to the
+people on the way, though, as St Louis said to the Hascisch-eaters,
+_'May it be a long time before you can kiss my bones.'_
+
+So I entered the 'Sun' inn and saw there a woman sewing, a great
+dull-faced man like an ox, and a youth writing down figures in a
+little book. I said--
+
+'Good morning, madam, and sirs, and the company. Could you give me a
+little red wine?' Not a head moved.
+
+True I was very dirty and tired, and they may have thought me a
+beggar, to whom, like good sensible Christians who had no nonsense
+about them, they would rather have given a handsome kick than a cup of
+cold water. However, I think it was not only my poverty but a native
+churlishness which bound their bovine souls in that valley.
+
+I sat down at a very clean table. I notice that those whom the Devil
+has made his own are always spick and span, just as firemen who have
+to go into great furnaces have to keep all their gear highly polished.
+I sat down at it, and said again, still gently--
+
+'It is, indeed, a fine country this of yours. Could you give me a
+little red wine?'
+
+Then the ox-faced man who had his back turned to me, and was the worst
+of the lot, said sulkily, not to me, but to the woman--
+
+'He wants wine.'
+
+The woman as sulkily said to me, not looking me in the eyes--
+
+'How much will you pay?'
+
+I said, 'Bring the wine. Set it here. See me drink it. Charge me your
+due.'
+
+I found that this brutal way of speaking was just what was needed for
+the kine and cattle of this pen. She skipped off to a cupboard, and
+set wine before me, and a glass. I drank quite quietly till I had had
+enough, and asked what there was to pay. She said 'Threepence,' and I
+said 'Too much,' as I paid it. At this the ox-faced man grunted and
+frowned, and I was afraid; but hiding my fear I walked out boldly and
+slowly, and made a noise with my stick upon the floor of the hall
+without. Neither did I bid them farewell. But I made a sign at the
+house as I left it. Whether it suffered from this as did the house at
+Dorchester which the man in the boat caused to wither in one night, is
+more than I can tell.
+
+The road led straight across the valley and approached the further
+wall of hills. These I saw were pierced by one of the curious gaps
+which are peculiar to limestone ranges. Water cuts them, and a torrent
+ran through this one also. The road through it, gap though it was,
+went up steeply, and the further valley was evidently higher than the
+one I was leaving. It was already evening as I entered this narrow
+ravine; the sun only caught the tops of the rock-walls. My fatigue was
+very great, and my walking painful to an extreme, when, having come to
+a place where the gorge was narrowest and where the two sides were
+like the posts of a giant's stile, where also the fifth ridge of the
+Jura stood up beyond me in the further valley, a vast shadow, I sat
+down wearily and drew what not even my exhaustion could render
+unremarkable.
+
+While I was occupied sketching the slabs of limestone, I heard wheels
+coming up behind me, and a boy in a waggon stopped and hailed me.
+
+What the boy wanted to know was whether I would take a lift, and this
+he said in such curious French that I shuddered to think how far I had
+pierced into the heart of the hills, and how soon I might come to
+quite strange people. I was greatly tempted to get into his cart, but
+though I had broken so many of my vows one remained yet whole and
+sound, which was that I would ride upon no wheeled thing. Remembering
+this, therefore, and considering that the Faith is rich in
+interpretation, I clung on to the waggon in such a manner that it did
+all my work for me, and yet could not be said to be actually carrying
+me. _Distinguo_. The essence of a vow is its literal meaning. The
+spirit and intention are for the major morality, and concern Natural
+Religion, but when upon a point of ritual or of dedication or special
+worship a man talks to you of the Spirit and Intention, and complains
+of the dryness of the Word, look at him askance. He is not far removed
+from Heresy.
+
+I knew a man once that was given to drinking, and I made up this rule
+for him to distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil. To wit: that he
+should never drink what has been made and sold since the
+Reformation--I mean especially spirits and champagne. Let him (said I)
+drink red wine and white, good beer and mead--if he could get
+it--liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding,
+fortifying, and confirming beverages that our fathers drank in old
+time; but not whisky, nor brandy, nor sparkling wines, not absinthe,
+nor the kind of drink called gin. This he promised to do, and all went
+well. He became a merry companion, and began to write odes. His prose
+clarified and set, that had before been very mixed and cloudy. He
+slept well; he comprehended divine things; he was already half a
+republican, when one fatal day--it was the feast of the eleven
+thousand virgins, and they were too busy up in heaven to consider the
+needs of us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of
+men--I went with him to the Society for the Prevention of Annoyances
+to the Rich, where a certain usurer's son was to read a paper on the
+cruelty of Spaniards to their mules. As we were all seated there round
+a table with a staring green cloth on it, and a damnable gas pendant
+above, the host of that evening offered him whisky and water, and, my
+back being turned, he took it. Then when I would have taken it from
+him he used these words--
+
+'After all, it is the intention of a pledge that matters;' and I saw
+that all was over, for he had abandoned definition, and was plunged
+back into the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural Religion.
+
+What do you think, then, was the consequence? Why, he had to take some
+nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever, and become a
+spectacle and a judgement, whereas if he had kept his exact word he
+might by this time have been a happy man.
+
+Remembering him and pondering upon the advantage of strict rule, I
+hung on to my cart, taking care to let my feet still feel the road,
+and so passed through the high limestone gates of the gorge, and was
+in the fourth valley of the Jura, with the fifth ridge standing up
+black and huge before me against the last of the daylight. There were
+as yet no stars.
+
+There, in this silent place, was the little village of Undervelier,
+and I thanked the boy, withdrew from his cart, and painfully
+approached the inn, where I asked the woman if she could give me
+something to eat, and she said that she could in about an hour, using,
+however, with regard to what it was I was to have, words which I did
+not understand. For the French had become quite barbaric, and I was
+now indeed lost in one of the inner places of the world.
+
+A cigar is, however, even in Undervelier, a cigar; and the best cost a
+penny. One of these, therefore, I bought, and then I went out smoking
+it into the village square, and, finding a low wall, leaned over it
+and contemplated the glorious clear green water tumbling and roaring
+along beneath it on the other side; for a little river ran through the
+village.
+
+As I leaned there resting and communing I noticed how their church,
+close at hand, was built along the low banks of the torrent. I admired
+the luxuriance of the grass these waters fed, and the generous arch of
+the trees beside it. The graves seemed set in a natural place of rest
+and home, and just beyond this churchyard was that marriage of hewn
+stone and water which is the source of so peculiar a satisfaction; for
+the church tower was built boldly right out into the stream and the
+current went eddying round it. But why it is that strong human
+building when it dips into water should thus affect the mind I cannot
+say, only I know that it is an emotion apart to see our device and
+structure where it is most enduring come up against and challenge that
+element which we cannot conquer, and which has always in it something
+of danger for men. It is therefore well to put strong mouldings on to
+piers and quays, and to make an architecture of them, and so it was a
+splendid thought of the Romans to build their villas right out to sea;
+so they say does Venice enthrall one, but where I have most noticed
+this thing is at the Mont St Michel--only one must take care to shut
+one's eyes or sleep during all the low tide.
+
+As I was watching that stream against those old stones, my cigar being
+now half smoked, a bell began tolling, and it seemed as if the whole
+village were pouring into the church. At this I was very much
+surprised, not having been used at any time of my life to the
+unanimous devotion of an entire population, but having always thought
+of the Faith as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity
+only in places where some sham religion or other glozed over our
+tragedies and excused our sins. Certainly to see all the men, women,
+and children of a place taking Catholicism for granted was a new
+sight, and so I put my cigar carefully down under a stone on the top
+of the wall and went in with them. I then saw that what they were at
+was vespers.
+
+All the village sang, knowing the psalms very well, and I noticed that
+their Latin was nearer German than French; but what was most pleasing
+of all was to hear from all the men and women together that very noble
+good-night and salutation to God which begins--
+
+_Te, lucis ante terminum._
+
+My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by this collective act,
+and I saw for a moment the Catholic Church quite plain, and I
+remembered Europe, and the centuries. Then there left me altogether
+that attitude of difficulty and combat which, for us others, is always
+associated with the Faith. The cities dwindled in my imagination, and
+I took less heed of the modern noise. I went out with them into the
+clear evening and the cool. I found my cigar and lit it again, and
+musing much more deeply than before, not without tears, I considered
+the nature of Belief.
+
+Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an indifference. Those who
+believe nothing but only think and judge cannot understand this. Of
+its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth is full on
+us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight content with
+natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who follow down
+the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and
+forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look
+back and see our home.
+
+What is it, do you think, that causes the return? I think it is the
+problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil, demands a
+solution.  That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme
+which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again ... But
+I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power; only I
+know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf
+between us and many companions.  We are perpetually thrust into
+minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we
+are troubled by the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman
+revelation; we are over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger
+of violent decisions.
+
+And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make one abandon the old
+way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest grow uncertain. We
+see things from within and consider one mind or a little group as a
+salt or leaven.  The very nature of social force seems changed to us.
+And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is happy only
+with his fellows.
+
+And this again is very hard, that we must once more take up that awful
+struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in
+spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny what is
+certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble. We
+are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the
+duty of that wrestling.
+
+But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us away, as by a
+command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which there is no
+keener joy known to man.
+
+I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, thinking of this
+deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great for them, and
+accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with my eyes
+upon the ground ...
+
+There was to be no more of that studious content, that security in
+historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an appetite which
+never cloyed.  A wisdom more imperative and more profound was to put a
+term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance of
+judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the
+vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable
+life--all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely
+to be despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no
+longer entirely to be admired.
+
+The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She will permit no
+comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that
+see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion of
+our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things.
+
+By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a
+great love. There came back into my mind a relic that I have in my
+house. It is a panel of the old door of my college, having carved on
+it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield, _Haec fuit,
+Haec almae janua sacra domus._ Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as
+first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.
+
+It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a child, and it is a
+good thing not to have to return to the Faith.
+
+They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the
+possible exception of Omaha, Neb.
+
+LECTOR. Why do you use phrases like _'possible exception'?_
+
+AUCTOR. Why not? I see that all the religion I have stuck into the
+book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry Maine.
+You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would avoid the
+_cliché_ and the commonplace, and the _phrase toute faite_. Why? Not
+because you naturally write odd prose--contrariwise, left to yourself
+you write pure journalese; but simply because you are swelled and
+puffed up with a desire to pose. You want what the Martha Brown school
+calls 'distinction' in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done,
+and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed,
+putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as
+pale as a film of dirty wax--sometimes even they dictate to a
+typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully
+transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and
+take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and
+generally put the Queen's English--yes, the Queen's English--on the
+rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no
+real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique
+meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the
+cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can
+understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written
+by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and
+are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being
+on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel'--a good word.
+
+Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward
+English!  Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men who write
+twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but _their_ honesty is
+proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you higglers
+and sticklers? Perhaps a bad triolet every six months, and a book of
+criticism on something thoroughly threadbare once in five years. If I
+had my way--
+
+LECTOR. I am sorry to have provoked all this.
+
+AUCTOR. Not at all! Not at all! I trust I have made myself clear.
+
+Well, as I was saying, they cook worse at Undervelier than any place I
+was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb. However, I
+forgave them, because they were such good people, and after a short
+and bitter night I went out in the morning before the sun rose and
+took the Moutier road.
+
+The valley in which I was now engaged--the phrase seems familiar--was
+more or less like an H. That is, there were two high parallel ranges
+bounding it, but across the middle a low ridge of perhaps a thousand
+feet. The road slowly climbed this ridge through pastures where cows
+with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and where
+one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All
+the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the
+night before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread
+or coffee, which was a folly.
+
+When I got to the top of the ridge there was a young man chopping wood
+outside a house, and I asked him in French how far it was to Moutier.
+He answered in German, and I startled him by a loud cry, such as
+sailors give when they see land, for at last I had struck the boundary
+of the languages, and was with pure foreigners for the first time in
+my life. I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him
+to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all
+such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over
+me and grew deeper as I descended.
+
+And my first verse was--
+
+  Heretics all, whoever you be,
+  In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
+  You never shall have good words from me.
+  _Caritas non conturbat me._
+
+If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end, it was because I had
+to show that it was a song connected with the Universal Fountain and
+with European culture, and with all that Heresy combats. I sang it to
+a lively hymn-tune that I had invented for the occasion.
+
+I then thought what a fine fellow I was, and how pleasant were my
+friends when I agreed with them. I made up this second verse, which I
+sang even more loudly than the first; and the forest grew deeper,
+sending back echoes--
+
+  But Catholic men that live upon wine
+  Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;
+  Wherever I travel I find it so,
+  _Benedicamus Domino._
+
+There is no doubt, however, that if one is really doing a catholic
+work, and expressing one's attitude to the world, charity, pity, and a
+great sense of fear should possess one, or, at least, appear. So I
+made up this third verse and sang it to suit--
+
+  On childing women that are forlorn,
+  And men that sweat in nothing but scorn:
+  That is on all that ever were born,
+  _Miserere Domine._
+
+Then, as everything ends in death, and as that is just what Heretics
+least like to be reminded of, I ended thus--
+
+  To my poor self on my deathbed,
+  And all my dear companions dead,
+  Because of the love that I bore them,
+  _Dona Eis Requiem._
+
+I say 'I ended.' But I did not really end there, for I also wrote in
+the spirit of the rest a verse of Mea Culpa and Confession of Sin, but
+I shall not print it here.
+
+So my song over and the woods now left behind, I passed up a dusty
+piece of road into Moutier, a detestable town, all whitewashed and
+orderly, down under the hills.
+
+I was tired, for the sun was now long risen and somewhat warm, and I
+had walked ten miles, and that over a high ridge; and I had written a
+canticle and sung it--- and all that without a sup or a bite. I
+therefore took bread, coffee, and soup in Moutier, and then going a
+little way out of the town I crossed a stream off the road, climbed a
+knoll, and, lying under a tree, I slept.
+
+I awoke and took the road.
+
+The road after Moutier was not a thing for lyrics; it stirred me in no
+way.  It was bare in the sunlight, had fields on either side; and in
+the fields stood houses. In the houses were articulately-speaking
+mortal men.
+
+There is a school of Poets (I cannot read them myself) who treat of
+common things, and their admirers tell us that these men raise the
+things of everyday life to the plane of the supernatural. Note that
+phrase, for it is a shaft of light through a cloud revealing their
+disgusting minds.
+
+Everyday life! As _La Croix_ said in a famous leading article: _'La
+Presse?'_ POOH!' I know that everyday life. It goes with sandals and
+pictures of lean ugly people all just like one another in browny
+photographs on the wall, and these pictures are called, one 'The House
+of Life', or another, 'The Place Beautiful', or yet again a third,
+'The Lamp of the Valley', and when you complain and shift about
+uneasily before these pictures, the scrub-minded and dusty-souled
+owners of them tell you that of course in photographs you lose the
+marvellous colour of the original. This everyday life has mantelpieces
+made of the same stuff as cafe-tables, so that by instinct I try to
+make rings on them with my wine-glass, and the people who suffer this
+life get up every morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the house
+slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and
+more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to
+local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether
+this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins
+crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no
+simplicity, and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of
+that life where they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or
+Pietas.
+
+LECTOR. Then--
+
+AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest
+dust.  Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from
+one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss
+Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which
+makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts,
+they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their
+souls.
+
+LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?
+
+AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I
+will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this
+road from Moutier.
+
+LECTOR. By all means.
+
+AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly
+bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!
+
+LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!
+
+AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night.
+
+LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman.
+
+AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction.
+
+LECTOR. Yes, indeed.
+
+AUCTOR. Indeed, yes.
+
+LECTOR. I cannot go on like this.
+
+AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One cannot treat of
+common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I were the
+editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of
+dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would
+count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some
+quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to
+pad out their work.
+
+So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next time I come to a bit
+of road about which there is nothing to say, I will tell a story or
+sing a song, and to that I pledge myself.
+
+By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you know those books and
+stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no words at all?
+Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I wonder what
+the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn a mint of money,
+for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this--
+
+There. That seems to me worth a good deal more money than all the
+modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense ever written.
+What verve!  What terseness! And yet how clear!
+
+LECTOR. Let us be getting on.
+
+AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more enduring things.
+
+After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed through another gap
+in the hills and--
+
+LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon that little tragedy
+of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess?
+
+AUCTOR. Well, it was a short play and modern, was it not?
+
+LECTOR. Yes. And therefore, of course, you must have a title in it. I
+know that. I do not object to it. What I want to know is, why a
+duchess?
+
+AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the concentration of the
+thing. You see in the full play there would have been a lord, two
+baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable words
+into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the
+element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one
+startling moment. Do you follow?  Is it not art?
+
+I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of
+great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic
+nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of
+Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him
+into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the
+youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting
+beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even
+going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich
+in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with
+another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him
+out of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or
+Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to
+stray dogs.
+
+When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing like a pagan, and
+asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the gallows as well as
+a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son very
+humbly and contritely said--
+
+'It is not my fault but the contact with the things of the Church that
+makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil they say is a good enough
+fellow left to himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you put
+him into holy water all the world is witness how he hisses and boils.'
+
+The boy then taking a little lamb which happened to be in the
+drawing-room, said--
+
+'Father, see this little lamb; how demure he is and how simple and
+innocent, and how foolish and how tractable. Yet observe!' With that
+he whipped the cassock from his arm where he was carrying it and threw
+it all over the lamb, covering his head and body; and the lamb began
+plunging and kicking and bucking and rolling and heaving and sliding
+and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling with the clerical
+and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and bleating all
+the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world like the
+great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on
+All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock
+again, the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became
+quite gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed.
+
+'There, father,' said the boy, 'is proof to you of how the meekest may
+be driven to desperation by the shackles I speak of, and which I pray
+you never lay upon me again.'
+
+His father finding him so practical and wise made over his whole
+fortune and business to him, and thus escaped the very heavy Heriot
+and Death Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant of St Remi in
+Double Burgage. But we stopped all that here in England by the statute
+of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark
+catches me.
+
+As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and there was there a
+house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses was an inn.
+Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley; the very
+last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight before
+me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line
+against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather
+misleading, and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein.
+
+So before that last effort which should lead me over those thousands
+of feet, and to nourish Instinct (which would be of use to me when I
+got into that impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn for wine.
+
+A very old woman having the appearance of a witch sat at a dark table
+by the little criss-cross window of the dark room. She was crooning to
+herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and asked her in French
+for wine; but French she did not understand. Catching, however, two
+words which sounded like the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw'
+after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly
+good red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily.
+
+Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of
+small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one
+Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up
+angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal
+with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse
+which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his
+now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian
+twaddle of accents I intoned to her--and so left her astounded to
+repentance or to shame.
+
+Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing over running water put
+myself out of her power.
+
+The wood went up darkly and the path branched here and there so that I
+was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally what seemed to
+me the most southerly course, and so came at last up steeply through a
+dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge.
+
+Just as I came to the end of the rise, after perhaps an hour, perhaps
+two, of that great curtain of forest which had held the mountain side,
+the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a gate, and then the path
+was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very top of the Jura and
+the coping of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. I had
+crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning out of my way.
+
+It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a moment to breathe
+and look about me.
+
+It was evident that nothing higher remained, for though a new line of
+wood--firs and beeches--stood before me, yet nothing appeared above
+them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. I
+approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence of
+post and rails bounding it, and as I was looking for the entry of a
+path (for my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp
+grass of the little down) there came to me one of those great
+revelations which betray to us suddenly the higher things and stand
+afterwards firm in our minds.
+
+There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the
+ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.
+
+What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I
+am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.
+
+I saw between the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the
+sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great
+surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop
+breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something
+I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the
+branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.
+
+I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the
+fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees
+stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a
+tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply
+below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast
+cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further,
+beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God.
+For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an
+illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the
+dim bluish sky that overhangs an horizon.
+
+There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge
+of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up--a belt in
+that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote,
+remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a
+steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the
+immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away,
+they stood up like the walls of Eden.  I say it again, they stopped my
+breath. I had seen them.
+
+So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed in our muddy and
+immediate interests that we think, by numbers and recitals, to
+comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting infinities. Here
+were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now
+for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and because they
+were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two
+high, they were become something different from us others, and could
+strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in
+the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling
+colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the
+things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of
+summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their
+quality as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown
+array) they occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things
+proper to the sky were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed.
+
+To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment? So, in first love
+one finds that _this_ can belong to _me._
+
+Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my
+adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky,
+but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing
+creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow
+movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at
+home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and
+that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to
+interpret them for others.
+
+These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one's
+immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those
+few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more.
+Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it
+were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of
+height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of
+reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration
+also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I
+know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and
+it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of
+merriment in the soul of a sane man.
+
+Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in
+my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I
+felt.
+
+This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not
+me, for I am afraid of slipping down.
+
+Then you will say, if I felt all this, why do I draw it, and put it in
+my book, seeing that my drawings are only for fun? My jest drags down
+such a memory and makes it ludicrous. Well, I said in my beginning
+that I would note down whatever most impressed me, except figures,
+which I cannot draw (I mean figures of human beings, for mathematical
+figures I can draw well enough), and I have never failed in this
+promise, except where, as in the case of Porrentruy, my drawing was
+blown away by the wind and lost--- if anything ever is lost. So I put
+down here this extraordinary drawing of what I saw, which is about as
+much like it as a printed song full of misprints is to that same song
+sung by an army on the march. And I am consoled by remembering that if
+I could draw infinitely well, then it would become sacrilege to
+attempt to draw that sight. Moreover, I am not going to waste any more
+time discussing why I put in this little drawing. If it disturbs your
+conception of what it was I saw, paste over it a little bit of paper.
+I have made it small for the purpose; but remember that the paper
+should be thin and opaque, for thick paper will interfere with the
+shape of this book, and transparent paper will disturb you with a
+memory of the picture.
+
+It was all full of this, as a man is full of music just after hearing
+it, that I plunged down into the steep forest that led towards the
+great plain; then, having found a path, I worked zig-zag down it by a
+kind of gully that led through to a place where the limestone cliffs
+were broken, and (so my map told me) to the town of Soleure, which
+stands at the edge of the plain upon the river Aar.
+
+I was an hour or more going down the enormous face of the Jura, which
+is here an escarpment, a cliff of great height, and contains but few
+such breaks by which men can pick their way. It was when I was about
+half-way down the mountain side that its vastness most impressed me.
+And yet it had been but a platform as it were, from which to view the
+Alps and their much greater sublimity.
+
+This vastness, even of these limestone mountains, took me especially
+at a place where the path bordered a steep, or rather precipitous,
+lift of white rock to which only here and there a tree could cling.
+
+I was still very high up, but looking somewhat more eastward than
+before, and the plain went on inimitably towards some low vague hills;
+nor in that direction could any snow be seen in the sky. Then at last
+I came to the slopes which make a little bank under the mountains, and
+there, finding a highroad, and oppressed somewhat suddenly by the
+afternoon heat of those low places, I went on more slowly towards
+Soleure.
+
+Beside me, on the road, were many houses, shaded by great trees, built
+of wood, and standing apart. To each of them almost was a little
+water-wheel, run by the spring which came down out of the ravine. The
+water-wheel in most cases worked a simple little machine for sawing
+planks, but in other cases it seemed used for some purpose inside the
+house, which I could not divine; perhaps for spinning.
+
+All this place was full of working, and the men sang and spoke at
+their work in German, which I could not understand. I did indeed find
+one man, a young hay-making man carrying a scythe, who knew a little
+French and was going my way. I asked him, therefore, to teach me
+German, but he had not taught me much before we were at the gates of
+the old town and then I left him. It is thus, you will see, that for
+my next four days or five, which were passed among the German-speaking
+Swiss, I was utterly alone.
+
+This book must not go on for ever; therefore I cannot say very much
+about Soleure, although there is a great deal to be said about it. It
+is distinguished by an impression of unity, and of civic life, which I
+had already discovered in all these Swiss towns; for though men talk
+of finding the Middle Ages here or there, I for my part never find it,
+save where there has been democracy to preserve it. Thus I have seen
+the Middle Ages especially alive in the small towns of Northern
+France, and I have seen the Middle Ages in the University of Paris.
+Here also in Switzerland. As I had seen it at St Ursanne, so I found
+it now at Soleure. There were huge gates flanking the town, and there
+was that evening a continual noise of rifles, at which the Swiss are
+for ever practising. Over the church, however, I saw something
+terribly seventeenth century, namely, Jaweh in great Hebrew letters
+upon its front.
+
+Well, dining there of the best they had to give me (for this was
+another milestone in my pilgrimage), I became foolishly refreshed and
+valiant, and instead of sleeping in Soleure, as a wise man would have
+done, I determined, though it was now nearly dark, to push on upon the
+road to Burgdorf.
+
+I therefore crossed the river Aar, which is here magnificently broad
+and strong, and has bastions jutting out into it in a very bold
+fashion. I saw the last colourless light of evening making its waters
+seem like dull metal between the gloomy banks; I felt the beginnings
+of fatigue, and half regretted my determination. But as it is quite
+certain that one should never go back, I went on in the darkness, I do
+not know how many miles, till I reached some cross roads and an inn.
+
+This inn was very poor, and the people had never heard in their lives,
+apparently, that a poor man on foot might not be able to talk German,
+which seemed to me an astonishing thing; and as I sat there ordering
+beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for this would
+have me their butt, and even as it was found something monstrous in
+me), I pondered during my continual attempts to converse with them
+(for I had picked up some ten words of their language) upon the folly
+of those who imagine the world to be grown smaller by railways.
+
+I suppose this place was more untouched, as the phrase goes, that is,
+more living, more intense, and more powerful to affect others,
+whenever it may be called to do so, than are even the dear villages of
+Sussex that lie under my downs. For those are haunted by a nearly
+cosmopolitan class of gentry, who will have actors, financiers, and
+what not to come and stay with them, and who read the paper, and from
+time to time address their village folk upon matters of politics. But
+here, in this broad plain by the banks of the Emmen, they knew of
+nothing but themselves and the Church which is the common bond of
+Europe, and they were in the right way. Hence it was doubly hard on me
+that they should think me such a stranger.
+
+When I had become a little morose at their perpetual laughter, I asked
+for a bed, and the landlady, a woman of some talent, showed me on her
+fingers that the beds were 50c., 75c., and a franc. I determined upon
+the best, and was given indeed a very pleasant room, having in it the
+statue of a saint, and full of a country air. But I had done too much
+in this night march, as you will presently learn, for my next day was
+a day without salt, and in it appreciation left me. And this breakdown
+of appreciation was due to what I did not know at the time to be
+fatigue, but to what was undoubtedly a deep inner exhaustion.
+
+When I awoke next morning it was as it always is: no one was awake,
+and I had the field to myself, to slip out as I chose. I looked out of
+the window into the dawn. The race had made its own surroundings.
+
+These people who suffocated with laughter at the idea of one's knowing
+no German, had produced, as it were, a German picture by the mere
+influence of years and years of similar thoughts.
+
+Out of my window I saw the eaves coming low down. I saw an apple-tree
+against the grey light. The tangled grass in the little garden, the
+dog-kennel, and the standing butt were all what I had seen in those
+German pictures which they put into books for children, and which are
+drawn in thick black lines: nor did I see any reason why tame faces
+should not appear in that framework. I expected the light lank hair
+and the heavy unlifting step of the people whose only emotions are in
+music.
+
+But it was too early for any one to be about, and my German garden,
+_si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi,_ had to suffice me for an impression of
+the Central Europeans. I gazed at it a little while as it grew
+lighter. Then I went downstairs and slipped the latch (which, being
+German, was of a quaint design). I went out into the road and sighed
+profoundly.
+
+All that day was destined to be covered, so far as my spirit was
+concerned, with a motionless lethargy. Nothing seemed properly to
+interest or to concern me, and not till evening was I visited by any
+muse. Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a
+subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation
+that had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind. I had
+the feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that
+their language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men
+who travel, I had never felt before.
+
+The reason being this: that if a man has English thoroughly he can
+wander over a great part of the world familiarly, and meet men with
+whom he can talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy, and I
+suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to him. Not perhaps that he
+will understand what he hears or will be understood of others, but
+that the order and nature of the words and the gestures accompanying
+them are his own. Here, however, I, to whom English and French were
+the same, was to spend (it seemed) whole days among a people who put
+their verbs at the end, where the curses or the endearments come in
+French and English, and many of whose words stand for ideas we have
+not got. I had no room for good-fellowship. I could not sit at tables
+and expand the air with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about
+their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or sadness by my tales.
+It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken among dumb men.
+
+Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality,
+for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with
+which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such
+frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it
+saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights
+had I been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed in the open.
+Seven great heights had I climbed: the Forest, Archettes, the Ballon,
+the Mont Terrible, the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, the
+Weissenstein. Seven depths had I fallen to: twice to the Moselle, the
+gap of Belfort, the gorge of the Doubs, Glovelier valley, the hole of
+Moutier, and now this plain of the Aar. I had marched 180 miles. It
+was no wonder that on this eighth day I was oppressed and that all the
+light long I drank no good wine, met no one to remember well, nor sang
+any songs. All this part of my way was full of what they call Duty,
+and I was sustained only by my knowledge that the vast mountains
+(which had disappeared) would be part of my life very soon if I still
+went on steadily towards Rome.
+
+The sun had risen when I reached Burgdorf, and I there went to a
+railway station, and outside of it drank coffee and ate bread. I also
+bought old newspapers in French, and looked at everything wearily and
+with sad eyes.  There was nothing to draw. How can a man draw pain in
+the foot and knee?  And that was all there was remarkable at that
+moment.
+
+I watched a train come in. It was full of tourists, who (it may have
+been a subjective illusion) seemed to me common and worthless people,
+and sad into the bargain. It was going to Interlaken; and I felt a
+languid contempt for people who went to Interlaken instead of driving
+right across the great hills to Rome.
+
+After an hour, or so of this melancholy dawdling, I put a map before
+me on a little marble table, ordered some more coffee, and blew into
+my tepid life a moment of warmth by the effort of coming to a
+necessary decision. I had (for the first time since I had left
+Lorraine) the choice of two roads; and why this was so the following
+map will make clear.
+
+Here you see that there is no possibility of following the straight
+way to Rome, but that one must go a few miles east or west of it. From
+Burgundy one has to strike a point on the sources of the Emmen, and
+Burgdorf is on the Emmen. Therefore one might follow the Emmen all the
+way up. But it seemed that the road climbed up above a gorge that way,
+whereas by the other (which is just as straight) the road is good (it
+seemed) and fairly level.  So I chose this latter Eastern way, which,
+at the bifurcation, takes one up a tributary of the Emmen, then over a
+rise to the Upper Emmen again.
+
+Do you want it made plainer than that? I should think not. And, tell
+me--what can it profit you to know these geographical details? Believe
+me, I write them down for my own gratification, not yours.
+
+I say a day without salt. A trudge. The air was ordinary, the colours
+common; men, animals, and trees indifferent. Something had stopped
+working.
+
+Our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it, even
+if we can cover thirty miles day after day (as I can), or bend a peony
+in one's hand as could Frocot, the driver in my piece--a man you never
+knew--or write bad verse very rapidly as can so many moderns. I say
+our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it as
+though it were from ourselves, but we should accept it as a kind of
+present, and we should be thankful for it; just as a man should thank
+God for his reason, as did the madman in the Story of the Rose, who
+thanked God that he at least was sane though all the rest of the world
+had recently lost their reason.
+
+Indeed, this defaillance and breakdown which comes from time to time
+over the mind is a very sad thing, but it can be made of great use to
+us if we will draw from it the lesson that we ourselves are nothing.
+Perhaps it is a grace. Perhaps in these moments our minds repose ...
+Anyhow, a day without salt.
+
+You understand that under (or in) these circumstances--
+
+When I was at Oxford there was a great and terrible debate that shook
+the Empire, and that intensely exercised the men whom we send out to
+govern the Empire, and which, therefore, must have had its effect upon
+the Empire, as to whether one should say 'under these circumstances'
+or 'in these circumstances'; nor did I settle matters by calling a
+conclave and suggesting _Quae quum ita sint_ as a common formula,
+because a new debate arose upon when you should say _sint_ and when
+you should say _sunt,_ and they all wrangled like kittens in a basket.
+
+Until there rose a deep-voiced man from an outlying college, who said,
+'For my part I will say that under these circumstances, or in these
+circumstances, or in spite of these circumstances, or hovering
+playfully above these circumstances, or--
+
+I take you all for Fools and Pedants, in the Chief, in the Chevron,
+and in the quarter Fess. Fools absolute, and Pedants lordless. Free
+Fools, unlanded Fools, and Fools incommensurable, and Pedants
+displayed and rampant of the Tierce Major. Fools incalculable and
+Pedants irreparable; indeed, the arch Fool-pedants in a universe of
+pedantic folly and foolish pedantry, O you pedant-fools of the world!'
+
+But by this time he was alone, and thus was this great question never
+properly decided.
+
+Under these circumstances, then (or in these circumstances), it would
+profit you but little if I were to attempt the description of the
+Valley of the Emmen, of the first foot-hills of the Alps, and of the
+very uninteresting valley which runs on from Langnau.
+
+I had best employ my time in telling the story of the Hungry Student.
+
+LECTOR. And if you are so worn-out and bereft of all emotions, how can
+you tell a story?
+
+AUCTOR. These two conditions permit me. First, that I am writing some
+time after, and that I have recovered; secondly, that the story is not
+mine, but taken straight out of that nationalist newspaper which had
+served me so long to wrap up my bread and bacon in my haversack. This
+is the story, and I will tell it you.
+
+Now, I think of it, it would be a great waste of time. Here am I no
+farther than perhaps a third of my journey, and I have already
+admitted so much digression that my pilgrimage is like the story of a
+man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and
+straightforward narrative of fact. I will therefore postpone the Story
+of the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the
+barren hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of
+Tuscany, or in some other place where a little padding will do neither
+you nor me any great harm.
+
+On the other hand, do not imagine that I am going to give you any kind
+of description of this intolerable day's march. If you want some kind
+of visual Concept (pretty word), take all these little châlets which
+were beginning and make what you can of them.
+
+LECTOR. Where are they?
+
+AUCTOR. They are still in Switzerland; not here. They were
+overnumerous as I maundered up from where at last the road leaves the
+valley and makes over a little pass for a place called Schangnau. But
+though it is not a story, on the contrary, an exact incident and the
+truth--a thing that I would swear to in the court of justice, or quite
+willingly and cheerfully believe if another man told it to me; or even
+take as historical if I found it in a modern English history of the
+Anglo-Saxon Church--though, I repeat, it is a thing actually lived,
+yet I will tell it you.
+
+It was at the very end of the road, and when an enormous weariness had
+begun to add some kind of interest to this stuffless episode of the
+dull day, that a peasant with a brutal face, driving a cart very
+rapidly, came up with me. I said to him nothing, but he said to me
+some words in German which I did not understand. We were at that
+moment just opposite a little inn upon the right hand of the road, and
+the peasant began making signs to me to hold his horse for him while
+he went in and drank.
+
+How willing I was to do this you will not perhaps understand, unless
+you have that delicate and subtle pleasure in the holding of horses'
+heads, which is the boast and glory of some rare minds. And I was the
+more willing to do it from the fact that I have the habit of this kind
+of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a horse
+for no less a person than a General of Division, who gave me a franc
+for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery,
+purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher said
+when he published the popular edition of _Pamela,_ I held the horse
+for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit understanding
+that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink, which I, of
+course, expected him to bring in his own hands.
+
+Far from it. I can understand the anger which some people feel against
+the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold
+that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord,
+and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is
+Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen
+that you find there.
+
+Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the peasant sat in
+there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters of an hour.
+Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and cough and
+spit and turn round again and say something to the people within in
+German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I
+held this horse.
+
+I was already in a very angry and irritable mood, for the horse was
+restive and smelt his stable, and wished to break away from me. And
+all angry and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if this man
+were coming to relieve me; but I saw him laughing and joking with the
+people inside; and they were all looking my way out of their window as
+they laughed. I may have been wrong, but I thought they were laughing
+at me. A man who knows the Swiss intimately, and who has written a
+book upon 'The Drink Traffic: The Example of Switzerland', tells me
+they certainly were not laughing at me; at any rate, I thought they
+were, and moved by a sudden anger I let go the reins, gave the horse a
+great clout, and set him off careering and galloping like a whirlwind
+down the road from which he had come, with the bit in his teeth and
+all the storms of heaven in his four feet. Instantly, as you may
+imagine, all the scoffers came tumbling out of the inn, hullabooling,
+gesticulating, and running like madmen after the horse, and one old
+man even turned to protest to me. But I, setting my teeth, grasping my
+staff, and remembering the purpose of my great journey, set on up the
+road again with my face towards Rome.
+
+I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will
+not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to
+me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot
+seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all
+the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going
+to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.
+
+Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living!
+For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be
+skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and
+eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of
+his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing--
+
+  Can fix the high elusive hour
+  And stand in things divine.
+
+And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the
+way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash
+of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad
+master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills.
+
+So. It was already evening. I was coming, more tired than ever, to a
+kind of little pass by which my road would bring me back again to the
+Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope down the other side of
+the little pass (three or four hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a
+village, called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was a large
+school on my right and a great number of children there dancing round
+in a ring and singing songs.  The sight so cheered me that I
+determined to press on up the valley, though with no definite goal for
+the night. It was a foolish decision, for I was really in the heart of
+an unknown country, at the end of roads, at the sources of rivers,
+beyond help. I knew that straight before me, not five miles away, was
+the Brienzer Grat, the huge high wall which it was my duty to cross
+right over from side to side. I did not know whether or not there was
+an inn between me and that vast barrier.
+
+The light was failing. I had perhaps some vague idea of sleeping out,
+but that would have killed me, for a heavy mist that covered all the
+tops of the hills and that made a roof over the valley, began to drop
+down a fine rain; and, as they sing in church on Christmas Eve, 'the
+heavens sent down their dews upon a just man'. But that was written in
+Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing; there and then in the cold
+evening they would have done better to have warmed the righteous.
+There is no controlling them; they mean well, but they bungle
+terribly.
+
+The road stopped being a road, and became like a Californian trail. I
+approached enormous gates in the hills, high, precipitous, and narrow.
+The mist rolled over them, hiding their summits and making them seem
+infinitely lifted up and reaching endlessly into the thick sky; the
+straight, tenuous lines of the rain made them seem narrower still.
+Just as I neared them, hobbling, I met a man driving two cows, and
+said to him the word, 'Guest-house?' to which he said 'Yaw!' and
+pointed out a clump of trees to me just under the precipice and right
+in the gates I speak of. So I went there over an old bridge, and found
+a wooden house and went in.
+
+It was a house which one entered without ceremony. The door was open,
+and one walked straight into a great room. There sat three men playing
+at cards. I saluted them loudly in French, English, and Latin, but
+they did not understand me, and what seemed remarkable in an hotel
+(for it was an hotel rather than an inn), no one in the house
+understood me--neither the servants nor any one; but the servants did
+not laugh at me as had the poor people near Burgdorf, they only stood
+round me looking at me patiently in wonder as cows do at trains. Then
+they brought me food, and as I did not know the names of the different
+kinds of food, I had to eat what they chose; and the angel of that
+valley protected me from boiled mutton. I knew, however, the word
+Wein, which is the same in all languages, and so drank a quart of it
+consciously and of a set purpose. Then I slept, and next morning at
+dawn I rose up, put on my thin, wet linen clothes, and went
+downstairs. No one was about. I looked around for something to fill my
+sack. I picked up a great hunk of bread from the dining-room table,
+and went out shivering into the cold drizzle that was still falling
+from a shrouded sky. Before me, a great forbidding wall, growing
+blacker as it went upwards and ending in a level line of mist, stood
+the Brienzer Grat.
+
+To understand what I next had to do it is necessary to look back at
+the little map on page 105.
+
+You will observe that the straight way to Rome cuts the Lake of Brienz
+rather to the eastward of the middle, and then goes slap over
+Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen.
+That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in
+Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some
+old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for
+instance, the bones of the Dodo....  But I digress. The point is that
+the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and
+then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever
+of it was possible had to be done, and among the possible things was
+clambering over the high ridge of the Brienzer Grat instead of going
+round like a coward by Interlaken. After I had clambered over it,
+however, needs must I should have to take a pass called the Grimsel
+Pass and reach the Rhone Valley that way. It was with such a
+determination that I had come here to the upper waters of the Emmen,
+and stood now on a moist morning in the basin where that stream rises,
+at the foot of the mountain range that divided me from the lake.
+
+The Brienzer Grat is an extraordinary thing. It is quite straight; its
+summits are, of course, of different heights, but from below they seem
+even, like a ridge: and, indeed, the whole mountain is more like a
+ridge than any other I have seen. At one end is a peak called the 'Red
+Horn', the other end falls suddenly above Interlaken, and wherever you
+should cut it you would get a section like this, for it is as steep as
+anything can be short of sheer rock. There are no precipices on it,
+though there are nasty slabs quite high enough to kill a man--I saw
+several of three or four hundred feet. It is about five or six
+thousand feet high, and it stands right up and along the northern
+shore of the lake of Brienz. I began the ascent.
+
+Spongy meads, that soughed under the feet and grew steeper as one
+rose, took up the first few hundred feet. Little rivulets of mere
+dampness ran in among the under moss, and such very small hidden
+flowers as there were drooped with the surfeit of moisture. The rain
+was now indistinguishable from a mist, and indeed I had come so near
+to the level belt of cloud, that already its gloom was exchanged for
+that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them
+their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me,
+clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many
+turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped
+me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive
+drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to gauge one's progress.
+
+Now and then a higher mass of rock, a peak on the ridge, would showr
+clear through a corridor of cloud and be hidden again; also at times I
+would stand hesitating before a sharp wall or slab, and wait for a
+shifting of the fog to make sure of the best way round. I struck what
+might have been a loose path or perhaps only a gully; lost it again
+and found it again. In one place I climbed up a jagged surface for
+fifty feet, only to find when it cleared that it was no part of the
+general ascent, but a mere obstacle which might have been outflanked.
+At another time I stopped for a good quarter of an hour at an edge
+that might have been an indefinite fall of smooth rock, but that
+turned out to be a short drop, easy for a man, and not much longer
+than my body. So I went upwards always, drenched and doubting, and not
+sure of the height I had reached at any time.
+
+At last I came to a place where a smooth stone lay between two
+pillared monoliths, as though it had been put there for a bench.
+Though all around me was dense mist, yet I could see above me the
+vague shape of a summit looming quite near. So I said to myself--
+
+'I will sit here and wait till it grows lighter and clearer, for I
+must now be within two or three hundred feet of the top of the ridge,
+and as anything at all may be on the other side, I had best go
+carefully and knowing my way.'
+
+So I sat down facing the way I had to go and looking upwards, till
+perhaps a movement of the air might show me against a clear sky the
+line of the ridge, and so let me estimate the work that remained to
+do. I kept my eyes fixed on the point where I judged that sky line to
+lie, lest I should miss some sudden gleam revealing it; and as I sat
+there I grew mournful and began to consider the folly of climbing this
+great height on an empty stomach. The soldiers of the Republic fought
+their battles often before breakfast, but never, I think, without
+having drunk warm coffee, and no one should attempt great efforts
+without some such refreshment before starting.  Indeed, my fasting,
+and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and the dampness that
+had soaked my thin clothes through and through, quite lowered my blood
+and left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered and demanded
+the sun.
+
+Then I bethought me of the hunk of bread I had stolen, and pulling it
+out of my haversack I began to munch that ungrateful breakfast. It was
+hard and stale, and gave me little sustenance; I still gazed upwards
+into the uniform meaningless light fog, looking for the ridge.
+
+Suddenly, with no warning to prepare the mind, a faint but distinct
+wind blew upon me, the mist rose in a wreath backward and upward, and
+I was looking through clear immensity, not at any ridge, but over an
+awful gulf at great white fields of death. The Alps were right upon me
+and before me, overwhelming and commanding empty downward distances of
+air. Between them and me was a narrow dreadful space of nothingness
+and silence, and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that
+prodigious hollow, lay the little lake.
+
+My stone had not been a halting-place at all, but was itself the
+summit of the ridge, and those two rocks on either side of it framed a
+notch upon the very edge and skyline of the high hills of Brienz.
+
+Surprise and wonder had not time to form in my spirit before both were
+swallowed up by fear. The proximity of that immense wall of cold, the
+Alps, seen thus full from the level of its middle height and
+comprehended as it cannot be from the depths; its suggestion of
+something never changing throughout eternity--yet dead--was a threat
+to the eager mind. They, the vast Alps, all wrapped round in ice,
+frozen, and their immobility enhanced by the delicate, roaming veils
+which (as from an attraction) hovered in their hollows, seemed to halt
+the process of living. And the living soul whom they thus perturbed
+was supported by no companionship. There were no trees or blades of
+grass around me, only the uneven and primal stones of that height.
+There were no birds in the gulf; there was no sound. And the whiteness
+of the glaciers, the blackness of the snow-streaked rocks beyond, was
+glistening and unsoftened. There had come something evil into their
+sublimity. I was afraid.
+
+Nor could I bear to look downwards. The slope was in no way a danger.
+A man could walk up it without often using his hands, and a man could
+go down it slowly without any direct fall, though here and there he
+would have to turn round at each dip or step and hold with his hands
+and feel a little for his foothold. I suppose the general slope, down,
+down, to where the green began was not sixty degrees, but have you
+ever tried looking down five thousand feet at sixty degrees? It drags
+the mind after it, and I could not bear to begin the descent.
+
+However I reasoned with myself. I said to myself that a man should
+only be afraid of real dangers. That nightmare was not for the
+daylight. That there was now no mist but a warm sun. Then choosing a
+gully where water sometimes ran, but now dry, I warily began to
+descend, using my staff and leaning well backwards.
+
+There was this disturbing thing about the gully, that it went in
+steps, and before each step one saw the sky just a yard or two ahead:
+one lost the comforting sight of earth. One knew of course that it
+would only be a little drop, and that the slope would begin again, but
+it disturbed one.  And it is a trial to drop or clamber down, say
+fourteen or fifteen feet, sometimes twenty, and then to find no flat
+foothold but that eternal steep beginning again. And this outline in
+which I have somewhat, but not much, exaggerated the slope, will show
+what I mean. The dotted line is the line of vision just as one got to
+a 'step'. The little figure is AUCTOR. LECTOR is up in the air looking
+at him. Observe the perspective of the lake below, but make no
+comments.
+
+I went very slowly. When I was about half-way down and had come to a
+place where a shoulder of heaped rock stood on my left and where
+little parallel ledges led up to it, having grown accustomed to the
+descent and easier in my mind, I sat down on a slab and drew
+imperfectly the things I saw: the lake below me, the first forests
+clinging to the foot of the Alps beyond, their higher slopes of snow,
+and the clouds that had now begun to gather round them and that
+altogether hid the last third of their enormous height.
+
+Then I saw a steamer on the lake. I felt in touch with men. The slope
+grew easier. I snapped my fingers at the great devils that haunt high
+mountains.  I sniffed the gross and comfortable air of the lower
+valleys, I entered the belt of wood and was soon going quite a pace
+through the trees, for I had found a path, and was now able to sing.
+So I did.
+
+At last I saw through the trunks, but a few hundred feet below me, the
+highroad that skirts the lake. I left the path and scrambled straight
+down to it. I came to a wall which I climbed, and found myself in
+somebody's garden. Crossing this and admiring its wealth and order (I
+was careful not to walk on the lawns), I opened a little private gate
+and came on to the road, and from there to Brienz was but a short way
+along a fine hard surface in a hot morning sun, with the gentle lake
+on my right hand not five yards away, and with delightful trees upon
+my left, caressing and sometimes even covering me with their shade.
+
+I was therefore dry, ready and contented when I entered by mid morning
+the curious town of Brienz, which is all one long street, and of which
+the population is Protestant. I say dry, ready and contented; dry in
+my clothes, ready for food, contented with men and nature. But as I
+entered I squinted up that interminable slope, I saw the fog wreathing
+again along the ridge so infinitely above me, and I considered myself
+a fool to have crossed the Brienzer Grat without breakfast. But I
+could get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no one thought I
+had done it, though several people there could talk French.
+
+The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar; it is also the eastern
+flank of that great _massif,_ or bulk and mass of mountains called the
+Bernese Oberland. Western Switzerland, you must know, is not (as I
+first thought it was when I gazed down from the Weissenstein) a plain
+surrounded by a ring of mountains, but rather it is a plain in its
+northern half (the plain of the lower Aar), and in its southern half
+it is two enormous parallel lumps of mountains. I call them 'lumps',
+because they are so very broad and tortuous in their plan that they
+are hardly ranges. Now these two lumps are the Bernese Oberland and
+the Pennine Alps, and between them runs a deep trench called the
+valley of the Rhone. Take Mont Blanc in the west and a peak called the
+Crystal Peak over the Val Bavona on the east, and they are the
+flanking bastions of one great wall, the Pennine Alps. Take the
+Diablerets on the west, and the Wetterhorn on the east, and they are
+the flanking bastions of another great wall, the Bernese Oberland. And
+these two walls are parallel, with the Rhone in between.
+
+Now these two walls converge at a point where there is a sort of knot
+of mountain ridges, and this point may be taken as being on the
+boundary between Eastern and Western Switzerland. At this wonderful
+point the Ticino, the Rhone, the Aar, and the Reuss all begin, and it
+is here that the simple arrangement of the Alps to the west turns into
+the confused jumble of the Alps to the east.
+
+When you are high up on either wall you can catch the plan of all
+this, but to avoid a confused description and to help you to follow
+the marvellous, Hannibalian and never-before-attempted charge and
+march which I made, and which, alas! ended only in a glorious
+defeat--to help you to picture faintly to yourselves the mirific and
+horripilant adventure whereby I nearly achieved superhuman success in
+spite of all the powers of the air, I append a little map which is
+rough but clear and plain, and which I beg you to study closely, for
+it will make it easy for you to understand what next happened in my
+pilgrimage.
+
+The dark strips are the deep cloven valleys, the shaded belt is that
+higher land which is yet passable by any ordinary man. The part left
+white you may take to be the very high fields of ice and snow with
+great peaks which an ordinary man must regard as impassable, unless,
+indeed, he can wait for his weather and take guides and go on as a
+tourist instead of a pilgrim.
+
+You will observe that I have marked five clefts or valleys. A is that
+of the _Aar,_ and the little white patch at the beginning is the lake
+of Brienz. B is that of the _Reuss._ C is that of the _Rhone;_ and all
+these three are _north_ of the great watershed or main chain, and all
+three are full of German-speaking people.
+
+On the other hand, D is the valley of the _Toccia,_ E of the _Maggia,_
+and F of the _Ticino._ All these three are _south_ of the great
+watershed, and are inhabited by Italian-speaking people. All these
+three lead down at last to Lake Major, and so to Milan and so to Rome.
+
+The straight line to Rome is marked on my map by a dotted line ending
+in an arrow, and you will see that it was just my luck that it should
+cross slap over that knot or tangle of ranges where all the rivers
+spring. The problem was how to negotiate a passage from the valley of
+the Aar to one of the three Italian valleys, without departing too far
+from my straight line. To explain my track I must give the names of
+all the high passes between the valleys. That between A and C is
+called the _Grimsel;_ that between B and C the _Furka._ That between D
+and C is the _Gries_ Pass, that between F and C the _Nufenen,_ and
+that between E and F is not the easy thing it looks on the map; indeed
+it is hardly a pass at all but a scramble over very high peaks, and it
+is called the Crystalline Mountain. Finally, on the far right of my
+map, you see a high passage between B and F. This is the famous St
+Gothard.
+
+The straightest way of all was (1) over the _Grimsel,_ then, the
+moment I got into the valley of the Rhone (2), up out of it again over
+the _Nufenen,_ then the moment I was down into the valley of the
+_Ticino_ (F), up out of it again (3) over the Crystalline to the
+valley of the _Maggia_ (E). Once in the Maggia valley (the top of it
+is called the _Val Bavona),_ it is a straight path for the lakes and
+Rome. There were also these advantages: that I should be in a place
+very rarely visited--all the guide-books are doubtful on it; that I
+should be going quite straight; that I should be accomplishing a feat,
+viz. the crossing of those high passes one after the other (and you
+must remember that over the Nufenen there is no road at all).
+
+But every one I asked told me that thus early in the year (it was not
+the middle of June) I could not hope to scramble over the Crystalline.
+No one (they said) could do it and live. It was all ice and snow and
+cold mist and verglas, and the precipices were smooth--a man would
+never get across; so it was not worth while crossing the Nufenen Pass
+if I was to be balked at the Crystal, and I determined on the Gries
+Pass. I said to myself: 'I will go on over the Grimsel, and once in
+the valley of the Rhone, I will walk a mile or two down to where the
+Gries Pass opens, and I will go over it into Italy.' For the Gries
+Pass, though not quite in the straight line, had this advantage, that
+once over it you are really in Italy. In the Ticino valley or in the
+Val Bavona, though the people are as Italian as Catullus, yet
+politically they count as part of Switzerland; and therefore if you
+enter Italy thereby, you are not suddenly introduced to that country,
+but, as it were, inoculated, and led on by degrees, which is a pity.
+For good things should come suddenly, like the demise of that wicked
+man, Mr _(deleted by the censor),_ who had oppressed the poor for some
+forty years, when he was shot dead from behind a hedge, and died in
+about the time it takes to boil an egg, and there was an end of him.
+
+Having made myself quite clear that I had a formed plan to go over the
+Grimsel by the new road, then up over the Gries, where there is no
+road at all, and so down into the vale of the Tosa, and having
+calculated that on the morrow I should be in Italy, I started out from
+Brienz after eating a great meal, it being then about midday, and I
+having already, as you know, crossed the Brienzer Grat since dawn.
+
+The task of that afternoon was more than I could properly undertake,
+nor did I fulfil it. From Brienz to the top of the Grimsel is, as the
+crow flies, quite twenty miles, and by the road a good twenty-seven.
+It is true I had only come from over the high hills; perhaps six miles
+in a straight line. But what a six miles! and all without food. Not
+certain, therefore, how much of the pass I could really do that day,
+but aiming at crossing it, like a fool, I went on up the first miles.
+
+For an hour or more after Brienz the road runs round the base of and
+then away from a fine great rock. There is here an alluvial plain like
+a continuation of the lake, and the Aar runs through it, canalized and
+banked and straight, and at last the road also becomes straight. On
+either side rise gigantic cliffs enclosing the valley, and (on the day
+I passed there) going up into the clouds, which, though high, yet made
+a roof for the valley. From the great mountains on the left the noble
+rock jutted out alone and dominated the little plain; on the right the
+buttresses of the main Alps all stood in a row, and between them went
+whorls of vapour high, high up--just above the places where snow still
+clung to the slopes. These whorls made the utmost steeps more and more
+misty, till at last they were lost in a kind of great darkness, in
+which the last and highest banks of ice seemed to be swallowed up. I
+often stopped to gaze straight above me, and I marvelled at the
+silence.
+
+It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called
+Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little
+more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a
+yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it
+was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has
+given them a chance of living in awe and worship.
+
+For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and
+tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that
+way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the
+never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my
+illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very
+quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as
+to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this
+vulgarity and beastliness.
+
+If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be
+good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I
+drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean
+Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on
+banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.'
+Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their
+recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters
+and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it
+goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches
+that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even
+by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag.
+All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me
+leave to keep off them.
+
+Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La Delivrande (next time I
+should be passing there) because I was delivered from being a tourist,
+and because all this horrible noise was not being dinned at me (who
+was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no kind of prey for these cabmen,
+and busmen, and guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad,
+jaded tourists that had come in by a train.
+
+Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed the first step upwards
+in the valley, going round a rock on the other side of which the Aar
+had cut itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids. Then the road
+went on and on weary mile after weary mile, and I stuck to it, and it
+rose slowly all the time, and all the time the Aar went dashing by,
+roaring and filling the higher valley with echoes.
+
+I got beyond the villages. The light shining suffused through the
+upper mist began to be the light of evening. Rain, very fine and
+slight, began to fall. It was cold. There met and passed me, going
+down the road, a carriage with a hood up, driving at full speed. It
+could not be from over the pass, for I knew that it was not yet open
+for carriages or carts. It was therefore from a hotel somewhere, and
+if there was a hotel I should find it. I looked back to ask the
+distance, but they were beyond earshot, and so I went on.
+
+My boots in which I had sworn to walk to Rome were ruinous. Already
+since the Weissenstein they had gaped, and now the Brienzer Grat had
+made the sole of one of them quite free at the toe. It flapped as I
+walked. Very soon I should be walking on my uppers. I limped also, and
+I hated the wet cold rain. But I had to go on. Instead of flourishing
+my staff and singing, I leant on it painfully and thought of duty, and
+death, and dereliction, and every other horrible thing that begins
+with a D. I had to go on. If I had gone back there was nothing for
+miles.
+
+Before it was dark--indeed one could still read--I saw a group of
+houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass
+them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first,
+saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep
+here.'
+
+There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they
+were French-speaking, from the Vaud country. They had faces like
+Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, being Calvinist. I said,
+'Have you any beans?' They said, 'Yes.' I suggested they should make
+me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle of wine, while I
+dried myself at their great stove. All this they readily did for me,
+and I ate heartily and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards to
+stop the night and pay them for it; but I was so set up by my food and
+wine that I excused myself and went out again and took the road. It
+was not yet dark.
+
+By some reflection from the fields of snow, which were now quite near
+at hand through the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late.
+The cold grew bitter as I went on through the gloaming. There were no
+trees save rare and stunted pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling
+torrent, thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse grass grew on
+the rocks sparsely; there were no flowers. The mist overhead was now
+quite near, and I still went on and steadily up through the
+half-light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of
+the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which
+hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind--I felt it
+growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered me. The occasional steeps
+beside the road, one especially beneath a high bridge where a
+tributary falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me. They were
+like the emptiness of dreams. At last it being now dark, and I having
+long since entered the upper mist, or rather cloud (for I was now as
+high as the clouds), I saw a light gleaming through the fog, just off
+the road, through pine-trees. It was time. I could not have gone much
+farther.
+
+To this I turned and found there one of those new hotels, not very
+large, but very expensive. They knew me at once for what I was, and
+welcomed me with joy. They gave me hot rum and sugar, a fine warm bed,
+told me I was the first that had yet stopped there that year, and left
+me to sleep very deep and yet in pain, as men sleep who are stunned.
+But twice that night I woke suddenly, staring at darkness. I had
+outworn the physical network upon which the soul depends, and I was
+full of terrors.
+
+Next morning I had fine coffee and bread and butter and the rest, like
+a rich man; in a gilded dining-room all set out for the rich, and
+served by a fellow that bowed and scraped. Also they made me pay a
+great deal, and kept their eyes off my boots, and were still courteous
+to me, and I to them.  Then I bought wine of them--the first wine not
+of the country that I had drunk on this march, a Burgundy--and putting
+it in my haversack with a nice white roll, left them to wait for the
+next man whom the hills might send them.
+
+The clouds, the mist, were denser than ever in that early morning; one
+could only see the immediate road. The cold was very great; my clothes
+were not quite dried, but my heart was high, and I pushed along well
+enough, though stiffly, till I came to what they call the Hospice,
+which was once a monk-house, I suppose, but is now an inn. I had
+brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood at the foot of a
+sharp ridge which was the true Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the
+Bernese Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. This ridge or
+neck was steep like a pitched roof--very high I found it, and all of
+black glassy rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, sloping
+sheets just holding to it. I could see but little of it at a time on
+account of the mist.
+
+Hitherto for all these miles the Aar had been my companion, and the
+road, though rising always, had risen evenly and not steeply. Now the
+Aar was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and the road went
+in an artificial and carefully built set of zig-zags up the face of
+the cliff.  There is a short cut, but I could not find it in the mist.
+It is the old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was possible to
+cut off long corners by scrambling over the steep black rock and
+smooth ice, and all the while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out
+around me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the top of the
+Grimsel, but not before I had passed a place where an avalanche had
+destroyed the road and where planks were laid. Also before one got to
+the very summit, no short cuts or climbing were possible.  The road
+ran deep in a cutting like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks
+were solid snow.
+
+Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed
+the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped
+all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen
+water, then--as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as
+on the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted
+and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been
+fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear
+hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and
+thousands of feet below.
+
+LECTOR. Pray are we to have any more of that fine writing?
+
+AUCTOR. I saw there as in a cup things that I had thought (when I
+first studied the map at home) far too spacious and spread apart to go
+into the view. Yet here they were all quite contained and close
+together, on so vast a scale was the whole place conceived. It was the
+comb of mountains of which I have written; the meeting of all the
+valleys.
+
+There, from the height of a steep bank, as it were (but a bank many
+thousands of feet high), one looked down into a whole district or
+little world. On the map, I say, it had seemed so great that I had
+thought one would command but this or that portion of it; as it was,
+one saw it all.
+
+And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all mountains, and have
+never been able to understand--- namely, that if you draw a plan or
+section to scale, your mountain does not seem a very important thing.
+One should not, in theory, be able to dominate from its height, nor to
+feel the world small below one, nor to hold a whole countryside in
+one's hand--yet one does. The mountains from their heights reveal to
+us two truths. They suddenly make us feel our insignificance, and at
+the same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it feel its
+greatness, and they release it from the earth. But I say again, in
+theory, when one considers the exact relation of their height to the
+distances one views from them, they ought to claim no such effect, and
+that they can produce that effect is related to another thing--the way
+in which they exaggerate their own steepness.
+
+For instance, those noble hills, my downs in Sussex, when you are upon
+them overlooking the weald, from Chanctonbury say, feel like this--or
+even lower.  Indeed, it is impossible to give them truly, so
+insignificant are they; if the stretch of the Weald were made nearly a
+yard long, Chanctonbury would not, in proportion, be more than a fifth
+of an inch high! And yet, from the top of Chanctonbury, how one seems
+to overlook it and possess it all!
+
+Well, so it was here from the Grimsel when I overlooked the springs of
+the Rhone. In true proportion the valley I gazed into and over must
+have been somewhat like this--
+
+It felt for all the world as deep and utterly below me as this other--
+
+Moreover, where there was no mist, the air was so surprisingly clear
+that I could see everything clean and sharp wherever I turned my eyes.
+The mountains forbade any very far horizons to the view, and all that
+I could see was as neat and vivid as those coloured photographs they
+sell with bright green grass and bright white snow, and blue glaciers
+like precious stones.
+
+I scrambled down the mountain, for here, on the south side of the
+pass, there was no snow or ice, and it was quite easy to leave the
+road and take the old path cutting off the zig-zags. As the air got
+heavier, I became hungry, and at the very end of my descent, two
+hundred feet or so above the young Rhone, I saw a great hotel. I went
+round to their front door and asked them whether I could eat, and at
+what price. 'Four francs,' they said.
+
+'What!' said I, 'four francs for a meal! Come, let me eat in the
+kitchen, and charge me one.' But they became rude and obstinate, being
+used only to deal with rich people, so I cursed them, and went down
+the road. But I was very hungry.
+
+The road falls quite steeply, and the Rhone, which it accompanies in
+that valley, leaps in little falls. On a bridge I passed a sad
+Englishman reading a book, and a little lower down, two American women
+in a carriage, and after that a priest (it was lucky I did not see him
+first. Anyhow, I touched iron at once, to wit, a key in my pocket),
+and after that a child minding a goat. Altogether I felt myself in the
+world again, and as I was on a good road, all down hill, I thought
+myself capable of pushing on to the next village. But my hunger was
+really excessive, my right boot almost gone, and my left boot nothing
+to exhibit or boast of, when I came to a point where at last one
+looked down the Rhone valley for miles. It is like a straight trench,
+and at intervals there are little villages, built of most filthy
+chalets, the said chalets raised on great stones. There are pine-trees
+up, up on either slope, into the clouds, and beyond the clouds I could
+not see. I left on my left a village called 'Between the Waters'. I
+passed through another called 'Ehringen', but it has no inn. At last,
+two miles farther, faint from lack of food, I got into Ulrichen, a
+village a little larger than the rest, and the place where I believed
+one should start to go either over the Gries or Nufenen Pass. In
+Ulrichen was a warm, wooden, deep-eaved, frousty, comfortable,
+ramshackle, dark, anyhow kind of a little inn called 'The Bear'. And
+entering, I saw one of the women whom god loves.
+
+She was of middle age, very honest and simple in the face, kindly and
+good.  She was messing about with cooking and stuff, and she came up
+to me stooping a little, her eyes wide and innocent, and a great spoon
+in her hand. Her face was extremely broad and flat, and I have never
+seen eyes set so far apart. Her whole gait, manner, and accent proved
+her to be extremely good, and on the straight road to heaven. I
+saluted her in the French tongue. She answered me in the same, but
+very broken and rustic, for her natural speech was a kind of mountain
+German. She spoke very slowly, and had a nice soft voice, and she did
+what only good people do, I mean, looked you in the eyes as she spoke
+to you.
+
+Beware of shifty-eyed people. It is not only nervousness, it is also a
+kind of wickedness. Such people come to no good. I have three of them
+now in my mind as I write. One is a Professor.
+
+And, by the way, would you like to know why universities suffer from
+this curse of nervous disease? Why the great personages stammer or
+have St Vitus' dance, or jabber at the lips, or hop in their walk, or
+have their heads screwed round, or tremble in the fingers, or go
+through life with great goggles like a motor car? Eh? I will tell you.
+It is the punishment of their _intellectual pride,_ than which no sin
+is more offensive to the angels.
+
+What! here are we with the jolly world of God all round us, able to
+sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses,
+to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and
+memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty,
+our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned,
+underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or
+analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell
+till it eats up every other function? Away with such foolery.
+
+LECTOR. When shall we get on to ...
+
+AUCTOR. Wait a moment. I say, away with such foolery. Note that
+pedants lose all proportion. They never can keep sane in a discussion.
+They will go wild on matters they are wholly unable to judge, such as
+Armenian Religion or the Politics of Paris or what not. Never do they
+use one of those three phrases which keep a man steady and balance his
+mind, I mean the words (1) _After all it is not my business. (2) Tut!
+tut! You don't say so! and (3) _Credo in Unum Deum Patrem
+Omnipotentem, Factorem omnium visibilium atque invisibilium;_ in which
+last there is a power of synthesis that can jam all their analytical
+dust-heap into such a fine, tight, and compact body as would make them
+stare to see. I understand that they need six months' holiday a year.
+Had I my way they should take twelve, and an extra day on leap years.
+
+LECTOR. Pray, pray return to the woman at the inn.
+
+AUCTOR. I will, and by this road: to say that on the day of Judgement,
+when St Michael weighs souls in his scales, and the wicked are led off
+by the Devil with a great rope, as you may see them over the main
+porch of Notre Dame (I will heave a stone after them myself I hope),
+all the souls of the pedants together will not weigh as heavy and
+sound as the one soul of this good woman at the inn.
+
+She put food before me and wine. The wine was good, but in the food
+was some fearful herb or other I had never tasted before--a pure spice
+or scent, and a nasty one. One could taste nothing else, and it was
+revolting; but I ate it for her sake.
+
+Then, very much refreshed, I rose, seized my great staff, shook myself
+and said, 'Now it is about noon, and I am off for the frontier.'
+
+At this she made a most fearful clamour, saying that it was madness,
+and imploring me not to think of it, and running out fetched from the
+stable a tall, sad, pale-eyed man who saluted me profoundly and told
+me that he knew more of the mountains than any one for miles. And this
+by asking many afterwards I found out to be true. He said that he had
+crossed the Nufenen and the Gries whenever they could be crossed since
+he was a child, and that if I attempted it that day I should sleep
+that night in Paradise. The clouds on the mountain, the soft snow
+recently fallen, the rain that now occupied the valleys, the glacier
+on the Gries, and the pathless snow in the mist on the Nufenen would
+make it sheer suicide for him, an experienced guide, and for me a
+worse madness. Also he spoke of my boots and wondered at my poor coat
+and trousers, and threatened me with intolerable cold.
+
+It seems that the books I had read at home, when they said that the
+Nufenen had no snow on it, spoke of a later season of the year; it was
+all snow now, and soft snow, and hidden by a full mist in such a day
+from the first third of the ascent. As for the Gries, there was a
+glacier on the top which needed some kind of clearness in the weather.
+Hearing all this I said I would remain--but it was with a heavy heart.
+Already I felt a shadow of defeat over me. The loss of time was a
+thorn. I was already short of cash, and my next money was Milan. My
+return to England was fixed for a certain date, and stronger than
+either of these motives against delay was a burning restlessness that
+always takes men when they are on the way to great adventures.
+
+I made him promise to wake me next morning at three o'clock, and,
+short of a tempest, to try and get me across the Gries. As for the
+Nufenen and Crystalline passes which I had desired to attempt, and
+which were (as I have said) the straight line to Rome, he said (and he
+was right), that let alone the impassability of the Nufenen just then,
+to climb the Crystal Mountain in that season would be as easy as
+flying to the moon. Now, to cross the Nufenen alone, would simply land
+me in the upper valley of the Ticino, and take me a great bend out of
+my way by Bellinzona. Hence my bargain that at least he should show me
+over the Gries Pass, and this he said, if man could do it, he would do
+the next day; and I, sending my boots to be cobbled (and thereby
+breaking another vow), crept up to bed, and all afternoon read the
+school-books of the children. They were in French, from lower down the
+valley, and very Genevese and heretical for so devout a household. But
+the Genevese civilization is the standard for these people, and they
+combat the Calvinism of it with missions, and have statues in their
+rooms, not to speak of holy water stoups.
+
+The rain beat on my window, the clouds came lower still down the
+mountain.  Then (as is finely written in the Song of Roland), 'the day
+passed and the night came, and I slept.' But with the coming of the
+small hours, and with my waking, prepare yourselves for the most
+extraordinary and terrible adventure that befell me out of all the
+marvels and perils of this pilgrimage, the most momentous and the most
+worthy of perpetual record, I think, of all that has ever happened
+since the beginning of the world.
+
+At three o'clock the guide knocked at my door, and I rose and came out
+to him. We drank coffee and ate bread. We put into our sacks ham and
+bread, and he white wine and I brandy. Then we set out. The rain had
+dropped to a drizzle, and there was no wind. The sky was obscured for
+the most part, but here and there was a star. The hills hung awfully
+above us in the night as we crossed the spongy valley. A little wooden
+bridge took us over the young Rhone, here only a stream, and we
+followed a path up into the tributary ravine which leads to the
+Nufenen and the Gries. In a mile or two it was a little lighter, and
+this was as well, for some weeks before a great avalanche had fallen,
+and we had to cross it gingerly. Beneath the wide cap of frozen snow
+ran a torrent roaring. I remembered Colorado, and how I had crossed
+the Arkansaw on such a bridge as a boy. We went on in the uneasy dawn.
+The woods began to show, and there was a cross where a man had slipped
+from above that very April and been killed. Then, most ominous and
+disturbing, the drizzle changed to a rain, and the guide shook his
+head and said it would be snowing higher up. We went on, and it grew
+lighter. Before it was really day (or else the weather confused and
+darkened the sky), we crossed a good bridge, built long ago, and we
+halted at a shed where the cattle lie in the late summer when the snow
+is melted. There we rested a moment.
+
+But on leaving its shelter we noticed many disquieting things. The
+place was a hollow, the end of the ravine--a bowl, as it were; one way
+out of which is the Nufenen, and the other the Gries.
+
+Here it is in a sketch map. The heights are marked lighter and
+lighter, from black in the valleys to white in the impassable
+mountains. E is where we stood, in a great cup or basin, having just
+come up the ravine B. C is the Italian valley of the Tosa, and the
+neck between it and E is the Gries.  D is the valley of the Ticino,
+and the neck between E and it is the Nufenen. A is the Crystal
+Mountain. You may take the necks or passes to be about 8000, and the
+mountains 10,000 or 11,000 feet above the sea.
+
+We noticed, I say, many disquieting things. First, all, that bowl or
+cup below the passes was a carpet of snow, save where patches of black
+water showed, and all the passes and mountains, from top to bottom,
+were covered with very thick snow; the deep surface of it soft and
+fresh fallen.  Secondly, the rain had turned into snow. It was falling
+thickly all around.  Nowhere have I more perceived the immediate
+presence of great Death.  Thirdly, it was far colder, and we felt the
+beginning of a wind. Fourthly, the clouds had come quite low down.
+
+The guide said it could not be done, but I said we must attempt it. I
+was eager, and had not yet felt the awful grip of the cold. We left
+the Nufenen on our left, a hopeless steep of new snow buried in fog,
+and we attacked the Gries. For half-an-hour we plunged on through snow
+above our knees, and my thin cotton clothes were soaked. So far the
+guide knew we were more or less on the path, and he went on and I
+panted after him. Neither of us spoke, but occasionally he looked back
+to make sure I had not dropped out.
+
+The snow began to fall more thickly, and the wind had risen somewhat.
+I was afraid of another protest from the guide, but he stuck to it
+well, and I after him, continually plunging through soft snow and
+making yard after yard upwards. The snow fell more thickly and the
+wind still rose.
+
+We came to a place which is, in the warm season, an alp; that is, a
+slope of grass, very steep but not terrifying; having here and there
+sharp little precipices of rock breaking it into steps, but by no
+means (in summer) a matter to make one draw back. Now, however, when
+everything was still Arctic it was a very different matter. A sheer
+steep of snow whose downward plunge ran into the driving storm and was
+lost, whose head was lost in the same mass of thick cloud above, a
+slope somewhat hollowed and bent inwards, had to be crossed if we were
+to go any farther; and I was terrified, for I knew nothing of
+climbing. The guide said there was little danger, only if one slipped
+one might slide down to safety, or one might (much less probably) get
+over rocks and be killed. I was chattering a little with cold; but as
+he did not propose a return, I followed him. The surface was
+alternately slabs of frozen snow and patches of soft new snow. In the
+first he cut steps, in the second we plunged, and once I went right in
+and a mass of snow broke off beneath me and went careering down the
+slope. He showed me how to hold my staff backwards as he did his
+alpenstock, and use it as a kind of brake in case I slipped.
+
+We had been about twenty minutes crawling over that wall of snow and
+ice; and it was more and more apparent that we were in for danger.
+Before we had quite reached the far side, the wind was blowing a very
+full gale and roared past our ears. The surface snow was whirring
+furiously like dust before it: past our faces and against them drove
+the snow-flakes, cutting the air: not falling, but making straight
+darts and streaks. They seemed like the form of the whistling wind;
+they blinded us. The rocks on the far side of the slope, rocks which
+had been our goal when we set out to cross it, had long ago
+disappeared in the increasing rush of the blizzard.  Suddenly as we
+were still painfully moving on, stooping against the mad wind, these
+rocks loomed up over as large as houses, and we saw them through the
+swarming snow-flakes as great hulls are seen through a fog at sea. The
+guide crouched under the lee of the nearest; I came up close to him
+and he put his hands to my ear and shouted to me that nothing further
+could be done--he had so to shout because in among the rocks the
+hurricane made a roaring sound, swamping the voice.
+
+I asked how far we were from the summit. He said he did not know where
+we were exactly, but that we could not be more than 800 feet from it.
+I was but that from Italy and I would not admit defeat. I offered him
+all I had in money to go on, but it was folly in me, because if I had
+had enough to tempt him and if he had yielded we should both have
+died. Luckily it was but a little sum. He shook his head. He would not
+go on, he broke out, for all the money there was in the world. He
+shouted me to eat and drink, and so we both did.
+
+Then I understood his wisdom, for in a little while the cold began to
+seize me in my thin clothes. My hands were numb, my face already gave
+me intolerable pain, and my legs suffered and felt heavy. I learnt
+another thing (which had I been used to mountains I should have
+known), that it was not a simple thing to return. The guide was
+hesitating whether to stay in this rough shelter, or to face the
+chances of the descent. This terror had not crossed my mind, and I
+thought as little of it as I could, needing my courage, and being near
+to breaking down from the intensity of the cold.
+
+It seems that in a _tourmente_ (for by that excellent name do the
+mountain people call such a storm) it is always a matter of doubt
+whether to halt or go back. If you go back through it and lose your
+way, you are done for. If you halt in some shelter, it may go on for
+two or three days, and then there is an end of you.
+
+After a little he decided for a return, but he told me honestly what
+the chances were, and my suffering from cold mercifully mitigated my
+fear. But even in that moment, I felt in a confused but very conscious
+way that I was defeated. I had crossed so many great hills and rivers,
+and pressed so well on my undeviating arrow-line to Rome, and I had
+charged this one great barrier manfully where the straight path of my
+pilgrimage crossed the Alps--and I had failed! Even in that fearful
+cold I felt it, and it ran through my doubt of return like another and
+deeper current of pain. Italy was there, just above, right to my hand.
+A lifting of a cloud, a little respite, and every downward step would
+have been towards the sunlight. As it was, I was being driven back
+northward, in retreat and ashamed. The Alps had conquered me.
+
+Let us always after this combat their immensity and their will, and
+always hate the inhuman guards that hold the gates of Italy, and the
+powers that lie in wait for men on those high places. But now I know
+that Italy will always stand apart. She is cut off by no ordinary
+wall, and Death has all his army on her frontiers.
+
+Well, we returned. Twice the guide rubbed my hands with brandy, and
+once I had to halt and recover for a moment, failing and losing my
+hold. Believe it or not, the deep footsteps of our ascent were already
+quite lost and covered by the new snow since our halt, and even had
+they been visible, the guide would not have retraced them. He did what
+I did not at first understand, but what I soon saw to be wise. He took
+a steep slant downward over the face of the snow-slope, and though
+such a pitch of descent a little unnerved me, it was well in the end.
+For when we had gone down perhaps 900 feet, or a thousand, in
+perpendicular distance, even I, half numb and fainting, could feel
+that the storm was less violent. Another two hundred, and the flakes
+could be seen not driving in flashes past, but separately falling.
+Then in some few minutes we could see the slope for a very long way
+downwards quite clearly; then, soon after, we saw far below us the
+place where the mountain-side merged easily into the plain of that cup
+or basin whence we had started.
+
+When we saw this, the guide said to me, 'Hold your stick thus, if you
+are strong enough, and let yourself slide.' I could just hold it, in
+spite of the cold. Life was returning to me with intolerable pain. We
+shot down the slope almost as quickly as falling, but it was evidently
+safe to do so, as the end was clearly visible, and had no break or
+rock in it.
+
+So we reached the plain below, and entered the little shed, and thence
+looking up, we saw the storm above us; but no one could have told it
+for what it was. Here, below, was silence, and the terror and raging
+above seemed only a great trembling cloud occupying the mountain. Then
+we set our faces down the ravine by which we had come up, and so came
+down to where the snow changed to rain. When we got right down into
+the valley of the Rhone, we found it all roofed with cloud, and the
+higher trees were white with snow, making a line like a tide mark on
+the slopes of the hills.
+
+I re-entered 'The Bear', silent and angered, and not accepting the
+humiliation of that failure. Then, having eaten, I determined in equal
+silence to take the road like any other fool; to cross the Furka by a
+fine highroad, like any tourist, and to cross the St Gothard by
+another fine highroad, as millions had done before me, and not to look
+heaven in the face again till I was back after my long detour, on the
+straight road again for Rome.
+
+But to think of it! I who had all that planned out, and had so nearly
+done it! I who had cut a path across Europe like a shaft, and seen so
+many strange places!--now to have to recite all the litany of the
+vulgar; Bellinzona, Lugano, and this and that, which any railway
+travelling fellow can tell you. Not till Como should I feel a man
+again ...
+
+Indeed it is a bitter thing to have to give up one's sword.
+
+I had not the money to wait; my defeat had lowered me in purse as well
+as in heart. I started off to enter by the ordinary gates--not Italy
+even, but a half-Italy, the canton of the Ticino. It was very hard.
+
+This book is not a tragedy, and I will not write at any length of such
+pain. That same day, in the latter half of it, I went sullenly over
+the Furka; exactly as easy a thing as going up St James' Street and
+down Piccadilly. I found the same storm on its summit, but on a
+highroad it was a different affair. I took no short cuts. I drank at
+all the inns--at the base, half-way up, near the top, and at the top.
+I told them, as the snow beat past, how I had attacked and all but
+conquered the Gries that wild morning, and they took me for a liar; so
+I became silent even within my own mind. I looked sullenly at the
+white ground all the way. And when on the far side I had got low
+enough to be rid of the snow and wind and to be in the dripping rain
+again, I welcomed the rain, and let it soothe like a sodden friend my
+sodden uncongenial mind.
+
+I will not write of Hospenthal. It has an old tower, and the road to
+it is straight and hideous. Much I cared for the old tower! The people
+of the inn (which I chose at random) cannot have loved me much.
+
+I will not write of the St Gothard. Get it out of a guide-book. I rose
+when I felt inclined; I was delighted to find it still raining. A
+dense mist above the rain gave me still greater pleasure. I had
+started quite at my leisure late in the day, and I did the thing
+stolidly, and my heart was like a dully-heated mass of coal or iron
+because I was acknowledging defeat. You who have never taken a
+straight line and held it, nor seen strange men and remote places, you
+do not know what it is to have to go round by the common way.
+
+Only in the afternoon, and on those little zig-zags which are sharper
+than any other in the Alps (perhaps the road is older), something
+changed.
+
+A warm air stirred the dense mist which had mercifully cut me off from
+anything but the mere road and from the contemplation of hackneyed
+sights.
+
+A hint or memory of gracious things ran in the slight breeze, the
+wreaths of fog would lift a little for a few yards, and in their
+clearings I thought to approach a softer and more desirable world. I
+was soothed as though with caresses and when I began to see somewhat
+farther and felt a vigour and fulness in the outline of the Trees, I
+said to myself suddenly--
+
+'I know what it is! It is the South, and a great part of my blood.
+They may call it Switzerland still, but I know now that I am in Italy,
+and this is the gate of Italy lying in groves.'
+
+Then and on till evening I reconciled myself with misfortune, and when
+I heard again at Airolo the speech of civilized men, and saw the
+strong Latin eyes and straight forms of the Race after all those days
+of fog and frost and German speech and the north, my eyes filled with
+tears and I was as glad as a man come home again, and I could have
+kissed the ground.
+
+The wine of Airolo and its songs, how greatly they refreshed me! To
+see men with answering eyes and to find a salute returned; the noise
+of careless mouths talking all together; the group at cards, and the
+laughter that is proper to mankind; the straight carriage of the
+women, and in all the people something erect and noble as though
+indeed they possessed the earth.  I made a meal there, talking to all
+my companions left and right in a new speech of my own, which was made
+up, as it were, of the essence of all the Latin tongues, saying--
+
+_'Ha! Si jo a traversa li montagna no erat facile! Nenni! II san
+Gottardo?  Nil est! pooh! poco! Ma hesterna jo ha voulu traversar in
+Val Bavona, e credi non ritornar, namfredo, fredo erat in alto! La
+tourmente ma prise...'_
+
+And so forth, explaining all fully with gestures, exaggerating,
+emphasizing, and acting the whole matter, so that they understood me
+without much error. But I found it more difficult to understand them,
+because they had a regular formed language with terminations and
+special words.
+
+It went to my heart to offer them no wine, but a thought was in me of
+which you shall soon hear more. My money was running low, and the
+chief anxiety of a civilized man was spreading over my mind like the
+shadow of a cloud over a field of corn in summer. They gave me a
+number of 'good-nights', and at parting I could not forbear from
+boasting that I was a pilgrim on my way to Rome. This they repeated
+one to another, and one man told me that the next good halting-place
+was a town called Faido, three hours down the road.  He held up three
+fingers to explain, and that was the last intercourse I had with the
+Airolans, for at once I took the road.
+
+I glanced up the dark ravine which I should have descended had I
+crossed the Nufenen. I thought of the Val Bavona, only just over the
+great wall that held the west; and in one place where a rift (you have
+just seen its picture) led up to the summits of the hills I was half
+tempted to go back to Airolo and sleep and next morning to attempt a
+crossing. But I had accepted my fate on the Gries and the falling road
+also held me, and so I continued my way.
+
+Everything was pleasing in this new valley under the sunlight that
+still came strongly from behind the enormous mountains; everything
+also was new, and I was evidently now in a country of a special kind.
+The slopes were populous, I had come to the great mother of fruits and
+men, and I was soon to see her cities and her old walls, and the
+rivers that glide by them. Church towers also repeated the same shapes
+up and up the wooded hills until the villages stopped at the line of
+the higher slopes and at the patches of snow. The houses were square
+and coloured; they were graced with arbours, and there seemed to be
+all around nothing but what was reasonable and secure, and especially
+no rich or poor.
+
+I noticed all these things on the one side and the other till, not two
+hours from Airolo, I came to a step in the valley. For the valley of
+the Ticino is made up of distinct levels, each of which might have
+held a lake once for the way it is enclosed: and each level ends in
+high rocks with a gorge between them. Down this gorge the river
+tumbles in falls and rapids and the road picks its way down steeply,
+all banked and cut, and sometimes has to cross from side to side by a
+bridge, while the railway above one overcomes the sharp descent by
+running round into the heart of the hills through circular tunnels and
+coming out again far below the cavern where it plunged in. Then when
+all three--the river, the road, and the railway--- have got over the
+great step, a new level of the valley opens. This is the way the road
+comes into the south, and as I passed down to the lower valley, though
+it was darkening into evening, something melted out of the mountain
+air, there was content and warmth in the growing things, and I found
+it was a place for vineyards. So, before it was yet dark, I came into
+Faido, and there I slept, having at last, after so many adventures,
+crossed the threshold and occupied Italy.
+
+Next day before sunrise I went out, and all the valley was adorned and
+tremulous with the films of morning.
+
+Now all of you who have hitherto followed the story of this great
+journey, put out of your minds the Alps and the passes and the
+snows--postpone even for a moment the influence of the happy dawn and
+of that South into which I had entered, and consider only this truth,
+that I found myself just out of Faido on this blessed date of God with
+eight francs and forty centimes for my viaticum and temporal provision
+wherewith to accomplish the good work of my pilgrimage.
+
+Now when you consider that coffee and bread was twopence and a penny
+for the maid, you may say without lying that I had left behind me the
+escarpment of the Alps and stood upon the downward slopes of the first
+Italian stream and at the summit of the entry road with _eight francs
+ten centimes_ in my pocket--my body hearty and my spirit light, for
+the arriving sun shot glory into the sky. The air was keen, and a
+fresh day came radiant over the high eastern walls of the valley.
+
+And what of that? Why, one might make many things of it. For instance,
+eight francs and ten centimes is a very good day's wages; it is a lot
+to spend in cab fares but little for a _coupé._ It is a heavy price
+for Burgundy but a song for Tokay. It is eighty miles third-class and
+more; it is thirty or less first-class; it is a flash in a train _de
+luxe,_ and a mere fleabite as a bribe to a journalist. It would be
+enormous to give it to an apostle begging at a church door, but
+nothing to spend on luncheon.
+
+Properly spent I can imagine it saving five or six souls, but I cannot
+believe that so paltry a sum would damn half an one.
+
+Then, again, it would be a nice thing to sing about. Thus, if one were
+a modern fool one might write a dirge with 'Huit francs et dix
+centimes' all chanted on one low sad note, and coming in between
+brackets for a 'motif, and with a lot about autumn and Death--which
+last, Death that is, people nowadays seem to regard as something odd,
+whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world. Or
+one might make the words the Backbone of a triolet, only one would
+have to split them up to fit it into the metre; or one might make it
+the decisive line in a sonnet; or one might make a pretty little lyric
+of it, to the tune of 'Madame la Marquise'--
+
+_'Huit francs et dix centimes, Tra la la, la la la.'_
+
+Or one might put it rhetorically, fiercely, stoically, finely,
+republicanly into the Heroics of the Great School. Thus--
+
+HERNANI _(with indignation}... dans ces efforts sublimes_ _'Qu'avez
+vous à offrir?'
+
+RUY BLAS _(simply) Huit francs et dix centimes!_
+
+Or finally (for this kind of thing cannot go on for ever), one might
+curl one's hair and dye it black, and cock a dirty slouch hat over one
+ear and take a guitar and sit on a flat stone by the roadside and
+cross one's legs, and, after a few pings and pongs on the strings,
+strike up a Ballad with the refrain--
+
+_Car j'ai toujours huit francs et dix centimes!_ a jocular,
+sub-sardonic, a triumphant refrain!
+
+But all this is by the way; the point is, why was the eight francs and
+ten centimes of such importance just there and then?
+
+For this reason, that I could get no more money before Milan; and I
+think a little reflection will show you what a meaning lies in that
+phrase. Milan was nearer ninety miles than eighty miles off. By the
+strict road it was over ninety. And so I was forced to consider and to
+be anxious, for how would this money hold out?
+
+There was nothing for it but forced marches, and little prospect of
+luxuries. But could it be done?
+
+I thought it could, and I reasoned this way.
+
+'It is true I need a good deal of food, and that if a man is to cover
+great distances he must keep fit. It is also true that many men have
+done more on less. On the other hand, they were men who were not
+pressed for time--I am; and I do not know the habits of the country.
+Ninety miles is three good days; two very heavy days. Indeed, whether
+it can be done at all in two is doubtful. But it can be done in two
+days, two nights, and half the third day. So if I plan it thus I shall
+achieve it; namely, to march say forty-five miles or more to-day, and
+to sleep rough at the end of it. My food may cost me altogether three
+francs. I march the next day twenty-five to thirty, my food costing me
+another three francs. Then with the remaining two francs and ten
+centimes I will take a bed at the end of the day, and coffee and bread
+next morning, and will march the remaining twenty miles or less (as
+they may be) into Milan with a copper or two in my pocket. Then in
+Milan, having obtained my money, I will eat.'
+
+So I planned with very careful and exact precision, but many accidents
+and unexpected things, diverting my plans, lay in wait for me among
+the hills.
+
+And to cut a long story short, as the old sailor said to the young
+fool--
+
+LECTOR. What did the old sailor say to the young fool?
+
+AUCTOR. Why, the old sailor was teaching the young fool his compass,
+and he said---
+
+'Here we go from north, making round by west, and then by south round
+by east again to north. There are thirty-two points of the compass,
+namely, first these four, N., W., S., and E., and these are halved,
+making four more, viz., NW., S W., SE., and NE. I trust I make myself
+clear,' said the old sailor.
+
+'That makes eight divisions, as we call them. So look smart and
+follow.  Each of these eight is divided into two symbolically and
+symmetrically divided parts, as is most evident in the nomenclature of
+the same,' said the old sailor. 'Thus between N. and NE. is NNE.,
+between NE. and E. is ENE., between E. and SE. is...'
+
+'I see,' said the young fool.
+
+The old sailor, frowning at him, continued--
+
+'Smart you there. Heels together, and note you well. Each of these
+sixteen divisions is separated quite reasonably and precisely into
+two. Thus between N. and NNE. we get N. by E.,' said the old sailor;
+'and between NNE. and NE. we get NE. by E., and between NE. and ENE.
+we get NE. by E.,' said the old sailor; 'and between ENE. and E. we
+get E. by N., and then between E. and ESE. we get...'
+
+But here he noticed something dangerous in the young fool's eyes, and
+having read all his life Admiral Griles' 'Notes on Discipline', and
+knowing that discipline is a subtle bond depending 'not on force but
+on an attitude of the mind,' he continued--
+
+'And so TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT we come round to the north again.'
+Then he added, 'It is customary also to divide each of these points
+into quarters. Thus NNE. 3/4 E. signifies...'
+
+But at this point the young fool, whose hands were clasped behind him
+and concealed a marlin-spike, up and killed the old sailor, and so
+rounded off this fascinating tale.
+
+Well then, to cut a long story short, I had to make forced marches.
+With eight francs and ten centimes, and nearer ninety than eighty-five
+miles before the next relief, it was necessary to plan and then to
+urge on heroically.  Said I to myself, 'The thing can be done quite
+easily. What is ninety miles? Two long days! Who cannot live on four
+francs a day? Why, lots of men do it on two francs a day.'
+
+But my guardian angel said to me, 'You are an ass! Ninety miles is a
+great deal more than twice forty-five. Besides which' (said he) 'a
+great effort needs largeness and ease. Men who live on two francs a
+day or less are not men who attempt to march forty-five miles a day.
+Indeed, my friend, you are pushing it very close.'
+
+'Well,' thought I, 'at least in such a glorious air, with such Hills
+all about one, and such a race, one can come to no great harm.'
+
+But I knew within me that Latins are hard where money is concerned,
+and I feared for my strength. I was determined to push forward and to
+live on little. I filled my lungs and put on the spirit of an attempt
+and swung down the valley.
+
+Alas! I may not linger on that charge, for if I did I should not give
+you any measure of its determination and rapidity. Many little places
+passed me off the road on the flanks of that valley, and mostly to the
+left. While the morning was yet young, I came to the packed little
+town of Bodio, and passed the eight franc limit by taking coffee,
+brandy, and bread. There also were a gentleman and a lady in a
+carriage who wondered where I was going, and I told them (in French)
+'to Rome'. It was nine in the morning when I came to Biasca. The sun
+was glorious, and not yet warm: it was too early for a meal. They gave
+me a little cold meat and bread and wine, and seven francs stood out
+dry above the falling tide of my money.
+
+Here at Biasca the valley took on a different aspect. It became wider
+and more of a countryside; the vast hills, receding, took on an
+appearance of less familiar majesty, and because the trend of the
+Ticino turned southerly some miles ahead the whole place seemed
+enclosed from the world. One would have said that a high mountain
+before me closed it in and rendered it unique and unknown, had not a
+wide cleft in the east argued another pass over the hills, and
+reminded me that there were various routes over the crest of the Alps.
+
+Indeed, this hackneyed approach to Italy which I had dreaded and
+despised and accepted only after a defeat was very marvellous, and
+this valley of the Ticino ought to stand apart and be a commonwealth
+of its own like Andorra or the Gresivaudan: the noble garden of the
+Isere within the first gates of the Dauphine.
+
+I was fatigued, and my senses lost acuteness. Still I noticed with
+delight the new character of the miles I pursued. A low hill just
+before me, jutting out apparently from the high western mountains,
+forbade me to see beyond it. The plain was alluvial, while copses and
+wood and many cultivated fields now found room where, higher up, had
+been nothing but the bed of a torrent with bare banks and strips of
+grass immediately above them; it was a place worthy of a special name
+and of being one lordship and a countryside. Still I went on towards
+that near boundary of the mountain spur and towards the point where
+the river rounded it, the great barrier hill before me still seeming
+to shut in the valley.
+
+It was noon, or thereabouts, the heat was increasing (I did not feel
+it greatly, for I had eaten and drunk next to nothing), when, coming
+round the point, there opened out before me the great fan of the lower
+valley and the widening and fruitful plain through which the Ticino
+rolls in a full river to reach Lake Major, which is its sea.
+
+Weary as I was, the vision of this sudden expansion roused me and made
+me forget everything except the sight before me. The valley turned
+well southward as it broadened. The Alps spread out on either side
+like great arms welcoming the southern day; the wholesome and familiar
+haze that should accompany summer dimmed the more distant mountains of
+the lakes and turned them amethystine, and something of repose and of
+distance was added to the landscape; something I had not seen for many
+days. There was room in that air and space for dreams and for many
+living men, for towns perhaps on the slopes, for the boats of happy
+men upon the waters, and everywhere for crowded and contented living.
+History might be in all this, and I remembered it was the entry and
+introduction of many armies. Singing therefore a song of Charlemagne,
+I swung on in a good effort to where, right under the sun, what seemed
+a wall and two towers on a sharp little hillock set in the bosom of
+the valley showed me Bellinzona. Within the central street of that
+city, and on its shaded side, I sank down upon a bench before the
+curtained door of a drinking booth and boasted that I had covered in
+that morning my twenty-five miles.
+
+The woman of the place came out to greet me, and asked me a question.
+I did not catch it (for it was in a foreign language), but guessing
+her to mean that I should take something, I asked for vermouth, and
+seeing before me a strange door built of red stone, I drew it as I
+sipped my glass and the woman talked to me all the while in a language
+I could not understand. And as I drew I became so interested that I
+forgot my poverty and offered her husband a glass, and then gave
+another to a lounging man that had watched me at work, and so from
+less than seven francs my money fell to six exactly, and my pencil
+fell from my hand, and I became afraid.
+
+'I have done a foolish thing,' said I to myself, 'and have endangered
+the success of my endeavour. Nevertheless, that cannot now be
+remedied, and I must eat; and as eating is best where one has friends
+I will ask a meal of this woman.'
+
+Now had they understood French I could have bargained and chosen; as
+it was I had to take what they were taking, and so I sat with them as
+they all came out and ate together at the little table. They had soup
+and flesh, wine and bread, and as we ate we talked, not understanding
+each other, and laughing heartily at our mutual ignorance. And they
+charged me a franc, which brought my six francs down to five. But I,
+knowing my subtle duty to the world, put down twopence more, as I
+would have done anywhere else, for a _pour boire;_ and so with four
+francs and eighty centimes left, and with much less than a third of my
+task accomplished I rose, now drowsy with the food and wine, and
+saluting them, took the road once more.
+
+But as I left Bellinzona there was a task before me which was to bring
+my poverty to the test; for you must know that my map was a bad one,
+and on a very small scale, and the road from Bellinzona to Lugano has
+a crook in it, and it was essential to find a short cut. So I thought
+to myself, 'I will try to see a good map as cheaply as possible,' and
+I slunk off to the right into a kind of main square, and there I found
+a proud stationer's shop, such as would deal with rich men only, or
+tourists of the coarser and less humble kind. I entered with some
+assurance, and said in French--
+
+'Sir, I wish to know the hills between here and Lugano, but I am too
+poor to buy a map. If you will let me look at one for a few moments, I
+will pay you what you think fit.'
+
+The wicked stationer became like a devil for pride, and glaring at me,
+said--
+
+'Look! Look for yourself. I do not take pence. I sell maps; I do not
+hire them!'
+
+Then I thought, 'Shall I take a favour from such a man?' But I
+yielded, and did. I went up to the wall and studied a large map for
+some moments. Then as I left, I said to him--
+
+'Sir, I shall always hold in remembrance the day on which you did me
+this signal kindness; nor shall I forget your courtesy and goodwill.'
+
+And what do you think he did at that?
+
+Why, he burst into twenty smiles, and bowed and seemed beatified, and
+said: 'Whatever I can do for my customers and for visitors to this
+town, I shall always be delighted to do. Pray, sir, will you not look
+at other maps for a moment?'
+
+Now, why did he say this and grin happily like a gargoyle appeased?
+Did something in my accent suggest wealth? or was he naturally kindly?
+I do not know; but of this I am sure, one should never hate human
+beings merely on a first, nor on a tenth, impression. Who knows? This
+map-seller of Bellinzona may have been a good man; anyhow, I left him
+as rich as I had found him, and remembering that the true key to a
+forced march is to break the twenty-four hours into three pieces, and
+now feeling the extreme heat, I went out along the burning straight
+road until I found a border of grass and a hedge, and there, in spite
+of the dust and the continually passing carts, I lay at full length in
+the shade and fell into the sleep of men against whom there is no
+reckoning. Just as I forgot the world I heard a clock strike two.
+
+I slept for hours beneath that hedge, and when I woke the air was no
+longer a trembling furnace, but everything about me was wrapped round
+as in a cloak of southern afternoon, and was still. The sun had fallen
+midway, and shone in steady glory through a haze that overhung Lake
+Major, and the wide luxuriant estuary of the vale. There lay before me
+a long straight road for miles at the base of high hills; then, far
+off, this road seemed to end at the foot of a mountain called, I
+believe, Ash Mount or Cinder Hill. But my imperfect map told me that
+here it went sharp round to the left, choosing a pass, and then at an
+angle went down its way to Lugano.
+
+Now Lugano was not fifteen miles as the crow flies from where I stood,
+and I determined to cut off that angle by climbing the high hills just
+above me. They were wooded only on their slopes; their crest and much
+of their sides were a down-land of parched grass, with rocks appearing
+here and there. At the first divergent lane I made off eastward from
+the road and began to climb.
+
+In under the chestnut trees the lane became a number of vague beaten
+paths; I followed straight upwards. Here and there were little houses
+standing hidden in leaves, and soon I crossed the railway, and at last
+above the trees I saw the sight of all the Bellinzona valley to the
+north; and turning my eyes I saw it broaden out between its walls to
+where the lake lay very bright, in spite of the slight mist, and this
+mist gave the lake distances, and the mountains round about it were
+transfigured and seemed part of the mere light.
+
+The Italian lakes have that in them and their air which removes them
+from common living. Their beauty is not the beauty which each of us
+sees for himself in the world; it is rather the beauty of a special
+creation; the expression of some mind. To eyes innocent, and first
+freshly noting our great temporal inheritance--1 mean to the eyes of a
+boy and girl just entered upon the estate of this glorious earth, and
+thinking themselves immortal, this shrine of Europe might remain for
+ever in the memory; an enchanted experience, in which the single sense
+of sight had almost touched the boundary of music. They would remember
+these lakes as the central emotion of their youth. To mean men also
+who, in spite of years and of a full foreknowledge of death, yet
+attempt nothing but the satisfaction of sense, and pride themselves
+upon the taste and fineness with which they achieve this satisfaction,
+the Italian lakes would seem a place for habitation, and there such a
+man might build his house contentedly. But to ordinary Christians I am
+sure there is something unnatural in this beauty of theirs, and they
+find in it either a paradise only to be won by a much longer road to a
+bait and veil of sorcery, behind which lies great peril.  Now, for all
+we know, beauty beyond the world may not really bear this double
+aspect; but to us on earth--if we are ordinary men--beauty of this
+kind has something evil. Have you not read in books how men when they
+see even divine visions are terrified? So as I looked at Lake Major in
+its halo I also was afraid, and I was glad to cross the ridge and
+crest of the hill and to shut out that picture framed all round with
+glory.
+
+But on the other side of the hill I found, to my great disgust, not as
+I had hoped, a fine slope down leading to Lugano, but a second
+interior valley and another range just opposite me. I had not the
+patience to climb this so I followed down the marshy land at the foot
+of it, passed round the end of the hill and came upon the railway,
+which had tunnelled under the range I had crossed. I followed the
+railway for a little while and at last crossed it, penetrated through
+a thick brushwood, forded a nasty little stream, and found myself
+again on the main road, wishing heartily I had never left it.
+
+It was still at least seven miles to Lugano, and though all the way
+was downhill, yet fatigue threatened me. These short cuts over marshy
+land and through difficult thickets are not short cuts at all, and I
+was just wondering whether, although it was already evening, I dared
+not rest a while, when there appeared at a turn in the road a little
+pink house with a yard all shaded over by a vast tree; there was also
+a trellis making a roof over a plain bench and table, and on the
+trellis grew vines.
+
+'Into such houses,' I thought, 'the gods walk when they come down and
+talk with men, and such houses are the scenes of adventures. I will go
+in and rest.'
+
+So I walked straight into the courtyard and found there a shrivelled
+brown-faced man with kindly eyes, who was singing a song to himself.
+He could talk a little French, a little English, and his own Italian
+language.  He had been to America and to Paris; he was full of
+memories; and when I had listened to these and asked for food and
+drink, and said I was extremely poor and would have to bargain, he
+made a kind of litany of 'I will not cheat you; I am an honest man; I
+also am poor,' and so forth.  Nevertheless I argued about every
+item--the bread, the sausage, and the beer. Seeing that I was in
+necessity, he charged me about three times their value, but I beat him
+down to double, and lower than that he would not go.  Then we sat down
+together at the table and ate and drank and talked of far countries;
+and he would interject remarks on his honesty compared with the
+wickedness of his neighbours, and I parried with illustrations of my
+poverty and need, pulling out the four francs odd that remained to me,
+and jingling them sorrowfully in my hand. 'With these,' I said, 'I
+must reach Milan.'
+
+Then I left him, and as I went down the road a slight breeze came on,
+and brought with it the coolness of evening.
+
+At last the falling plateau reached an edge, many little lights
+glittered below me, and I sat on a stone and looked down at the town
+of Lugano. It was nearly dark. The mountains all around had lost their
+mouldings, and were marked in flat silhouettes against the sky. The
+new lake which had just appeared below me was bright as water is at
+dusk, and far away in the north and east the high Alps still stood up
+and received the large glow of evening. Everything else was full of
+the coming night, and a few stars shone. Up from She town came the
+distant noise of music; otherwise there was no sound. I could have
+rested there a long time, letting my tired body lapse into the
+advancing darkness, and catching in my spirit the inspiration of the
+silence--had it not been for hunger. I knew by experience that when it
+is very late one cannot be served in the eating-houses of poor men,
+and I had not the money or any other. So I rose and shambled down the
+steep road into the town, and there I found a square with arcades, and
+in the south-eastern corner of this square just such a little tavern
+as I required. Entering, therefore, and taking off my hat very low, I
+said in French to a man who was sitting there with friends, and who
+was the master, 'Sir, what is the least price at which you can give me
+a meal?'
+
+He said, 'What do you want?'
+
+I answered, 'Soup, meat, vegetables, bread, and a little wine.'
+
+He counted on his fingers, while all his friends stared respectfully
+at him and me. He then gave orders, and a very young and beautiful
+girl set before me as excellent a meal as I had eaten for days on
+days, and he charged me but a franc and a half. He gave me also coffee
+and a little cheese, and I, feeling hearty, gave threepence over for
+the service, and they all very genially wished me a good-night; but
+their wishes were of no value to me, for the night was terrible.
+
+I had gone over forty miles; how much over I did not know. I should
+have slept at Lugano, but my lightening purse forbade me. I thought,
+'I will push on and on; after all, I have already slept, and so broken
+the back of the day. I will push on till I am at the end of my tether,
+then I will find a wood and sleep.' Within four miles my strength
+abandoned me. I was not even so far down the lake as to have lost the
+sound of the band at Lugano floating up the still water, when I was
+under an imperative necessity for repose. It was perhaps ten o'clock,
+and the sky was open and glorious with stars. I climbed up a bank on
+my right, and searching for a place to lie found one under a tree near
+a great telegraph pole. Here was a little parched grass, and one could
+lie there and see the lake and wait for sleep. It was a benediction to
+stretch out all supported by the dry earth, with my little side-bag
+for pillow, and to look at the clear night above the hills, and to
+listen to the very distant music, and to wonder whether or not, in
+this strange southern country, there might not be snakes gliding about
+in the undergrowth. Caught in such a skein of influence I was soothed
+and fell asleep.
+
+For a little while I slept dreamlessly.
+
+Just so much of my living self remained as can know, without
+understanding, the air around. It is the life of trees. That
+under-part, the barely conscious base of nature which trees and
+sleeping men are sunk in, is not only dominated by an immeasurable
+calm, but is also beyond all expression contented. And in its very
+stuff there is a complete and changeless joy.  This is surely what the
+great mind meant when it said to the Athenian judges that death must
+not be dreaded since no experience in life was so pleasurable as a
+deep sleep; for being wise and seeing the intercommunion of things, he
+could not mean extinction, which is nonsense, but a lapse into that
+under-part of which I speak. For there are gods also below the earth.
+
+But a dream came into my sleep and disturbed me, increasing life, and
+therefore bringing pain. I dreamt that I was arguing, at first easily,
+then violently, with another man. More and more he pressed me, and at
+last in my dream there were clearly spoken words, and he said to me,
+'You must be wrong, because you are so cold; if you were right you
+would not be so cold.' And this argument seemed quite reasonable to me
+in my foolish dream, and I muttered to him, 'You are right, I must be
+in the wrong. It is very cold ...' Then I half opened my eyes and saw
+the telegraph pole, the trees, and the lake. Far up the lake, where
+the Italian Frontier cuts it, the torpedo-boats, looking for
+smugglers, were casting their search-lights. One of the roving beams
+fell full on me and I became broad awake. I stood up.  It was indeed
+cold, with a kind of clinging and grasping chill that was not to be
+expressed in degrees of heat, but in dampness perhaps, or perhaps in
+some subtler influence of the air.
+
+I sat on the bank and gazed at the lake in some despair. Certainly I
+could not sleep again without a covering cloth, and it was now past
+midnight, nor did I know of any house, whether if I took the road I
+should find one in a mile, or in two, or in five. And, note you, I was
+utterly exhausted. That enormous march from Faido, though it had been
+wisely broken by the siesta at Bellinzona, needed more than a few cold
+hours under trees, and I thought of the three poor francs in my
+pocket, and of the thirty-eight miles remaining to Milan.
+
+The stars were beyond the middle of their slow turning, and I watched
+them, splendid and in order, for sympathy, as I also regularly, but
+slowly and painfully, dragged myself along my appointed road. But in a
+very short time a great, tall, square, white house stood right on the
+roadway, and to my intense joy I saw a light in one of its higher
+windows. Standing therefore beneath, I cried at the top of my voice,
+'Hola!' five or six times. A woman put her head out of the window into
+the fresh night, and said, 'You cannot sleep here; we have no rooms,'
+then she remained looking out of her window and ready to analyse the
+difficulties of the moment; a good-natured woman and fat.
+
+In a moment another window at the same level, but farther from me,
+opened, and a man leaned out, just as those alternate figures come in
+and out of the toys that tell the weather. 'It is impossible,' said
+the man; 'we have no rooms.'
+
+Then they talked a great deal together, while I shouted, _'Quid vis?
+Non e possibile dormire in la foresta! e troppo fredo! Vis ne me
+assassinare?  Veni de Lugano--e piu--non e possibile ritornare!'_ and
+so forth.
+
+They answered in strophe and antistrophe, sometimes together in full
+chorus, and again in semichorus, and with variations, that it was
+impossible. Then a light showed in the chinks of their great door; the
+lock grated, and it opened. A third person, a tall youth, stood in the
+hall. I went forward into the breach and occupied the hall. He blinked
+at me above a candle, and murmured, as a man apologizing 'It is not
+possible.'
+
+Whatever I have in common with these southerners made me understand
+that I had won, so I smiled at him and nodded; he also smiled, and at
+once beckoned to me. He led me upstairs, and showed me a charming bed
+in a clean room, where there was a portrait of the Pope, looking
+cunning; the charge for that delightful and human place was sixpence,
+and as I said good-night to the youth, the man and woman from above
+said good-night also. And this was my first introduction to the most
+permanent feature in the Italian character. The good people!
+
+When I woke and rose I was the first to be up and out. It was high
+morning.  The sun was not yet quite over the eastern mountains, but I
+had slept, though so shortly yet at great ease, and the world seemed
+new and full of a merry mind. The sky was coloured like that high
+metal work which you may see in the studios of Paris; there was gold
+in it fading into bronze, and above, the bronze softened to silver. A
+little morning breeze, courageous and steady, blew down the lake and
+provoked the water to glad ripples, and there was nothing that did not
+move and take pleasure in the day.
+
+The Lake of Lugano is of a complicated shape, and has many arms. It is
+at this point very narrow indeed, and shallow too; a mole, pierced at
+either end with low arches, has here been thrown across it, and by
+this mole the railway and the road pass over to the eastern shore. I
+turned in this long causeway and noticed the northern view. On the
+farther shore was an old village and some pleasure-houses of rich men
+on the shore; the boats also were beginning to go about the water.
+These boats were strange, unlike other boats; they were covered with
+hoods, and looked like floating waggons. This was to shield the rowers
+from the sun. Far off a man was sailing with a little brown
+sprit-sail. It was morning, and all the world was alive.
+
+Coffee in the village left me two francs and two pennies. I still
+thought the thing could be done, so invigorating and deceiving are the
+early hours, and coming farther down the road to an old and beautiful
+courtyard on the left, I drew it, and hearing a bell at hand I saw a
+tumble-down church with trees before it, and went in to Mass; and
+though it was a little low village Mass, yet the priest had three
+acolytes to serve it, and (true and gracious mark of a Catholic
+country!) these boys were restless and distracted at their office.
+
+You may think it trivial, but it was certainly a portent. One of the
+acolytes had half his head clean shaved! A most extraordinary sight! I
+could not take my eyes from it, and I heartily wished I had an
+Omen-book with me to tell me what it might mean.
+
+When there were oracles on earth, before Pan died, this sight would
+have been of the utmost use. For I should have consulted the oracle
+woman for a Lira--at Biasca for instance, or in the lonely woods of
+the Cinder Mountain; and, after a lot of incense and hesitation, and
+wrestling with the god, the oracle would have accepted Apollo and,
+staring like one entranced, she would have chanted verses which,
+though ambiguous, would at least have been a guide. Thus:
+
+  _Matutinus adest ubi Vesper, et accipiens te
+  Saepe recusatum voces intelligit hospes
+  Rusticus ignotas notas, ac flumina tellus
+  Occupat--In sancto tum, tum, stans
+  Aede caveto Tonsuram Hirsuti
+  Capitis, via namque pedestrem
+  Ferrea praeveniens cursum, peregrine, laborem_
+  Pro pietate tuâ inceptum frustratur, amore
+  Antiqui Ritus alto sub Numine Romae._
+
+LECTOR. What Hoggish great Participles!
+
+AUCTOR. Well, well, you see it was but a rustic oracle at 9 3/4 d. the
+revelation, and even that is supposing silver at par. Let us translate
+it for the vulgar:
+
+When early morning seems but eve And they that still refuse receive:
+When speech unknown men understand; And floods are crossed upon dry
+land. Within the Sacred Walls beware The Shaven Head that boasts of
+Hair, For when the road attains the rail The Pilgrim's great attempt
+shall fail.
+
+Of course such an oracle might very easily have made me fear too much.
+The 'shaven head' I should have taken for a priest, especially if it
+was to be met with 'in a temple'--it might have prevented me entering
+a church, which would have been deplorable. Then I might have taken it
+to mean that I should never have reached Rome, which would have been a
+monstrous weight upon my mind. Still, as things unfolded themselves,
+the oracle would have become plainer and plainer, and I felt the lack
+of it greatly. For, I repeat, I had certainly received an omen.
+
+The road now neared the end of the lake, and the town called Capo di
+Lago, or 'Lake-head', lay off to my right. I saw also that in a very
+little while I should abruptly find the plains. A low hill some five
+miles ahead of me was the last roll of the mountains, and just above
+me stood the last high crest, a precipitous peak of bare rock, up
+which there ran a cog-railway to some hotel or other. I passed through
+an old town under the now rising heat; I passed a cemetery in the
+Italian manner, with marble figures like common living men. The road
+turned to the left, and I was fairly on the shoulder of the last
+glacis. I stood on the Alps at their southern bank, and before me was
+Lombardy.
+
+Also in this ending of the Swiss canton one was more evidently in
+Italy than ever. A village perched upon a rock, deep woods and a
+ravine below it, its houses and its church, all betrayed the full
+Italian spirit.
+
+The frontier town was Chiasso. I hesitated with reverence before
+touching the sacred soil which I had taken so long to reach, and I
+longed to be able to drink its health; but though I had gone, I
+suppose, ten miles, and though the heat was increasing, I would not
+stop; for I remembered the two francs, and my former certitude of
+reaching Milan was shaking and crumbling. The great heat of midday
+would soon be on me, I had yet nearly thirty miles to go, and my bad
+night began to oppress me.
+
+I crossed the frontier, which is here an imaginary line. Two slovenly
+customs-house men asked me if I had anything dutiable on me. I said
+No, and it was evident enough, for in my little sack or pocket was
+nothing but a piece of bread. If they had applied the American test,
+and searched me for money, then indeed they could have turned me back,
+and I should have been forced to go into the fields a quarter of a
+mile or so and come into their country by a path instead of a
+highroad.
+
+This necessity was spared me. I climbed slowly up the long slope that
+hides Como, then I came down upon that lovely city and saw its frame
+of hills and its lake below me.
+
+These things are not like things seen by the eyes. I say it again,
+they are like what one feels when music is played.
+
+I entered Como between ten and eleven faint for food, and then a new
+interest came to fill my mind with memories of this great adventure.
+The lake was in flood, and all the town was water.
+
+Como dry must be interesting enough; Como flooded is a marvel. What
+else is Venice? And here is a Venice at the foot of high mountains,
+and _all_ in the water, no streets or squares; a fine even depth of
+three feet and a half or so for navigators, much what you have in the
+Spitway in London River at low spring tides.
+
+There were a few boats about, but the traffic and pleasure of Como was
+passing along planks laid on trestles over the water here and there
+like bridges; and for those who were in haste, and could afford it
+(such as take cabs in London), there were wheelbarrows, coster carts,
+and what not, pulled about by men for hire; and it was a sight to
+remember all one's life to see the rich men of Como squatting on these
+carts and barrows, and being pulled about over the water by the poor
+men of Como, being, indeed, an epitome of all modern sociology and
+economics and religion and organized charity and strenuousness and
+liberalism and sophistry generally.
+
+For my part I was determined to explore this curious town in the
+water, and I especially desired to see it on the lake side, because
+there one would get the best impression of its being really an aquatic
+town; so I went northward, as I was directed, and came quite
+unexpectedly upon the astonishing cathedral. It seemed built of
+polished marble, and it was in every way so exquisite in proportion,
+so delicate in sculpture, and so triumphant in attitude, that I
+thought to myself--
+
+'No wonder men praise Italy if this first Italian town has such a
+building as this.'
+
+But, as you will learn later, many of the things praised are ugly, and
+are praised only by certain followers of charlatans.
+
+So I went on till I got to the lake, and there I found a little port
+about as big as a dining-room (for the Italian lakes play at being
+little seas.  They have little ports, little lighthouses, little
+fleets for war, and little custom-houses, and little storms and little
+lines of steamers.  Indeed, if one wanted to give a rich child a
+perfect model or toy, one could not give him anything better than an
+Italian lake), and when I had long gazed at the town, standing, as it
+seemed, right in the lake, I felt giddy, and said to myself, 'This is
+the lack of food,' for I had eaten nothing but my coffee and bread
+eleven miles before, at dawn.
+
+So I pulled out my two francs, and going into a little shop, I bought
+bread, sausage, and a very little wine for fourpence, and with one
+franc eighty left I stood in the street eating and wondering what my
+next step should be.
+
+It seemed on the map perhaps twenty-five, perhaps twenty-six miles to
+Milan. It was now nearly noon, and as hot as could be. I might, if I
+held out, cover the distance in eight or nine hours, but I did not see
+myself walking in the middle heat on the plain of Lombardy, and even
+if I had been able I should only have got into Milan at dark or later,
+when the post office (with my money in it) would be shut; and where
+could I sleep, for my one franc eighty would be gone? A man covering
+these distances must have one good meal a day or he falls ill. I could
+beg, but there was the risk of being arrested, and that means an
+indefinite waste of time, perhaps several days; and time, that had
+defeated me at the Gries, threatened me here again. I had nothing to
+sell or to pawn, and I had no friends. The Consul I would not attempt;
+I knew too much of such things as Consuls when poor and dirty men try
+them. Besides which, there was no Consul I pondered.
+
+I went into the cool of the cathedral to sit in its fine darkness and
+think better. I sat before a shrine where candles were burning, put up
+for their private intentions by the faithful. Of many, two had nearly
+burnt out. I watched them in their slow race for extinction when a
+thought took me.
+
+'I will,' said I to myself, 'use these candles for an ordeal or
+heavenly judgement. The left hand one shall be for attempting the road
+at the risk of illness or very dangerous failure; the right hand one
+shall stand for my going by rail till I come to that point on the
+railway where one franc eighty will take me, and thence walking into
+Milan:--and heaven defend the right.'
+
+They were a long time going out, and they fell evenly. At last the
+right hand one shot up the long flame that precedes the death of
+candles; the contest took on interest, and even excitement, when, just
+as I thought the left hand certain of winning, it went out without
+guess or warning, like a second-rate person leaving this world for
+another. The right hand candle waved its flame still higher, as though
+in triumph, outlived its colleague just the moment to enjoy glory, and
+then in its turn went fluttering down the dark way from which they say
+there is no return.
+
+None may protest against the voice of the Gods. I went straight to the
+nearest railway station (for there are two), and putting down one
+franc eighty, asked in French for a ticket to whatever station that
+sum would reach down the line. The ticket came out marked Milan, and I
+admitted the miracle and confessed the finger of Providence. There was
+no change, and as I got into the train I had become that rarest and
+ultimate kind of traveller, the man without any money whatsoever--
+without passport, without letters, without food or wine; it would be
+interesting to see what would follow if the train broke down.
+
+I had marched 378 miles and some three furlongs, or thereabouts.
+
+Thus did I break--but by a direct command--the last and dearest of my
+vows, and as the train rumbled off, I took luxury in the rolling
+wheels.
+
+I thought of that other medieval and papistical pilgrim hobbling along
+rather than 'take advantage of any wheeled thing', and I laughed at
+him.  Now if Moroso-Malodoroso or any other Non-Aryan, Antichristian,
+over-inductive, statistical, brittle-minded man and scientist, sees
+anything remarkable in one self laughing at another self, let me tell
+him and all such for their wide-eyed edification and astonishment that
+I knew a man once that had fifty-six selves (there would have been
+fifty-seven, but for the poet in him that died young)--he could evolve
+them at will, and they were very useful to lend to the parish priest
+when he wished to make up a respectable Procession on Holy-days. And I
+knew another man that could make himself so tall as to look over the
+heads of the scientists as a pine-tree looks over grasses, and again
+so small as to discern very clearly the thick coating or dust of
+wicked pride that covers them up in a fine impenetrable coat. So much
+for the moderns.
+
+The train rolled on. I noticed Lombardy out of the windows. It is
+flat. I listened to the talk of the crowded peasants in the train. I
+did not understand it. I twice leaned out to see if Milan were not
+standing up before me out of the plain, but I saw nothing. Then I fell
+asleep, and when I woke suddenly it was because we were in the
+terminus of that noble great town, which I then set out to traverse in
+search of my necessary money and sustenance. It was yet but early in
+the afternoon.
+
+What a magnificent city is Milan! The great houses are all of stone,
+and stand regular and in order, along wide straight streets. There are
+swift cars, drawn by electricity, for such as can afford them. Men are
+brisk and alert even in the summer heats, and there are shops of a
+very good kind, though a trifle showy. There are many newspapers to
+help the Milanese to be better men and to cultivate charity and
+humility; there are banks full of paper money; there are soldiers,
+good pavements, and all that man requires to fulfil him, soul and
+body; cafés, arcades, mutoscopes, and every sign of the perfect state.
+And the whole centres in a splendid open square, in the midst of which
+is the cathedral, which is justly the most renowned in the world.
+
+My pilgrimage is to Rome, my business is with lonely places, hills,
+and the recollection of the spirit. It would be waste to describe at
+length this mighty capital. The mists and the woods, the snows and the
+interminable way, had left me ill-suited for the place, and I was
+ashamed. I sat outside a café, opposite the cathedral, watching its
+pinnacles of light; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the master a hurt
+by sitting there in his fine great café, unkempt, in such clothes,
+like a tramp; but he was courteous in spite of his riches, and I
+ordered a very expensive drink for him also, in order to make amends.
+I showed him my sketches, and told him of my adventures in French, and
+he was kind enough to sit opposite me, and to take that drink with me.
+He talked French quite easily, as it seems do all such men in the
+principal towns of north Italy. Still, the broad day shamed me, and
+only when darkness came did I feel at ease.
+
+I wandered in the streets till I saw a small eating shop, and there I
+took a good meal. But when one is living the life of the poor, one
+sees how hard are the great cities. Everything was dearer, and worse,
+than in the simple countrysides. The innkeeper and his wife were
+kindly, but their eyes showed that they had often to suspect men. They
+gave me a bed, but it was a franc and more, and I had to pay before
+going upstairs to it. The walls were mildewed, the place ramshackle
+and evil, the rickety bed not clean, the door broken and warped, and
+that night I was oppressed with the vision of poverty. Dirt and
+clamour and inhuman conditions surrounded me. Yet the people meant
+well.
+
+With the first light I got up quietly, glad to find the street again
+and the air. I stood in the crypt of the cathedral to hear the
+Ambrosian Mass, and it was (as I had expected) like any other, save
+for a kind of second _lavabo_ before the Elevation. To read the
+distorted stupidity of the north one might have imagined that in the
+Ambrosian ritual the priest put a _non_ before the _credo,_ and
+_nec's_ at each clause of it, and renounced his baptismal vows at the
+_kyrie;_ but the Milanese are Catholics like any others, and the
+northern historians are either liars or ignorant men. And I know three
+that are both together.
+
+Then I set out down the long street that leads south out of Milan, and
+was soon in the dull and sordid suburb of the Piacenzan way. The sky
+was grey, the air chilly, and in a little while--alas!--it rained.
+
+Lombardy is an alluvial plain.
+
+That is the pretty way of putting it. The truth is more vivid if you
+say that Lombardy is as flat as a marsh, and that it is made up of
+mud. Of course this mud dries when the sun shines on it, but mud it is
+and mud it will remain; and that day, as the rain began falling, mud
+it rapidly revealed itself to be; and the more did it seem to be mud
+when one saw how the moistening soil showed cracks from the last day's
+heat.
+
+Lombardy has no forests, but any amount of groups of trees; moreover
+(what is very remarkable), it is all cultivated in fields more or less
+square.  These fields have ditches round them, full of mud and water
+running slowly, and some of them are themselves under water in order
+to cultivate rice. All these fields have a few trees bordering them,
+apart from the standing clumps; but these trees are not very high.
+There are no open views in Lombardy, and Lombardy is all the same.
+Irregular large farmsteads stand at random all up and down the
+country; no square mile of Lombardy is empty.  There are many, many
+little villages; many straggling small towns about seven to eight
+miles apart, and a great number of large towns from thirty to fifty
+miles apart. Indeed, this very road to Piacenza, which the rain now
+covered with a veil of despair, was among the longest stretches
+between any two large towns, although it was less than fifty miles.
+
+On the map, before coming to this desolate place, there seemed a
+straighter and a better way to Rome than this great road. There is a
+river called the Lambro, which comes east of Milan and cuts the
+Piacenzan road at a place called Melegnano. It seemed to lead straight
+down to a point on the Po, a little above Piacenza. This stream one
+could follow (so it seemed), and when it joined the Po get a boat or
+ferry, and see on the other side the famous Trebbia, where Hannibal
+conquered and Joubert fell, and so make straight on for the Apennine.
+
+Since it is always said in books that Lombardy is a furnace in summer,
+and that whole great armies have died of the heat there, this river
+bank would make a fine refuge. Clear and delicious water, more limpid
+than glass, would reflect and echo the restless poplars, and would
+make tolerable or even pleasing the excessive summer. Not so. It was a
+northern mind judging by northern things that came to this conclusion.
+There is not in all Lombardy a clear stream, but every river and brook
+is rolling mud. In the rain, not heat, but a damp and penetrating
+chill was the danger. There is no walking on the banks of the rivers;
+they are cliffs of crumbling soil, jumbled anyhow.
+
+Man may, as Pinkerton (Sir Jonas Pinkerton) writes, be master of his
+fate, but he has a precious poor servant. It is easier to command a
+lapdog or a mule for a whole day than one's own fate for half-an-hour.
+
+Nevertheless, though it was apparent that I should have to follow the
+main road for a while, I determined to make at last to the right of
+it, and to pass through a place called 'Old Lodi', for I reasoned
+thus: 'Lodi is the famous town. How much more interesting must Old
+Lodi be which is the mothertown of Lodi?' Also, Old Lodi brought me
+back again on the straight line to Rome, and I foolishly thought it
+might be possible to hear there of some straight path down the Lambro
+(for that river still possessed me somewhat).
+
+Therefore, after hours and hours of trudging miserably along the wide
+highway in the wretched and searching rain, after splashing through
+tortuous Melegnano, and not even stopping to wonder if it was the
+place of the battle, after noting in despair the impossible Lambro, I
+came, caring for nothing, to the place where a secondary road branches
+off to the right over a level crossing and makes for Lodi Vecchio.
+
+It was not nearly midday, but I had walked perhaps fifteen miles, and
+had only rested once in a miserable Trattoria. In less than three
+miles I came to that unkempt and lengthy village, founded upon dirt
+and living in misery, and through the quiet, cold, persistent rain I
+splashed up the main street. I passed wretched, shivering dogs and
+mournful fowls that took a poor refuge against walls; passed a sad
+horse that hung its head in the wet and stood waiting for a master,
+till at last I reached the open square where the church stood, then I
+knew that I had seen all Old Lodi had to offer me. So, going into an
+eating-house, or inn, opposite the church, I found a girl and her
+mother serving, and I saluted them, but there was no fire, and my
+heart sank to the level of that room, which was, I am sure, no more
+than fifty-four degrees.
+
+Why should the less gracious part of a pilgrimage be specially
+remembered?  In life were remember joy best--that is what makes us sad
+by contrast; pain somewhat, especially if it is acute; but dulness
+never. And a book--which has it in its own power to choose and to
+emphasize--has no business to record dulness. What did I at Lodi
+Vecchio? I ate; I dried my clothes before a tepid stove in a kitchen.
+I tried to make myself understood by the girl and her mother. I sat at
+a window and drew the ugly church on principle. Oh, the vile sketch!
+
+Worthy of that Lombard plain, which they had told me was so full of
+wonderful things. I gave up all hope of by-roads, and I determined to
+push back obliquely to the highway again--obliquely in order to save
+time!  Nepios!
+
+These 'by-roads' of the map turned out in real life to be all manner
+of abominable tracks. Some few were metalled, some were cart-ruts
+merely, some were open lanes of rank grass; and along most there went
+a horrible ditch, and in many fields the standing water proclaimed
+desolation. IN so far as I can be said to have had a way at all, I
+lost it. I could not ask my way because my only ultimate goal was
+Piacenza, and that was far off. I did not know the name of any place
+between. Two or three groups of houses I passed, and sometimes church
+towers glimmered through the rain. I passed a larger and wider road
+than the rest, but obviously not my road; I pressed on and passed
+another; and by this time, having ploughed up Lombardy for some four
+hours, I was utterly lost. I no longer felt the north, and, for all I
+knew, I might be going backwards. The only certain thing was that I
+was somewhere in the belt between the highroad and the Lambro, and
+that was little enough to know at the close of such a day. Grown
+desperate, I clamoured within my mind for a miracle; and it was not
+long before I saw a little bent man sitting on a crazy cart and going
+ahead of me at a pace much slower than a walk--the pace of a horse
+crawling. I caught him up, and, doubting much whether he would
+understand a word, I said to him repeatedly--
+
+_'La granda via? La via a Piacenza?'_
+
+He shook his head as though to indicate that this filthy lane was not
+the road. Just as I had despaired of learning anything, he pointed
+with his arm away to the right, perpendicularly to the road we were
+on, and nodded. He moved his hand up and down. I had been going north!
+
+On getting this sign I did not wait for a cross road, but jumped the
+little ditch and pushed through long grass, across further ditches,
+along the side of patches of growing corn, heedless of the huge weight
+on my boots and of the oozing ground, till I saw against the rainy sky
+a line of telegraph poles. For the first time since they were made the
+sight of them gave a man joy. There was a long stagnant pond full of
+reeds between me and the railroad; but, as I outflanked it, I came
+upon a road that crossed the railway at a level and led me into the
+great Piacenzan way. Almost immediately appeared a village. It was a
+hole called Secugnano, and there I entered a house where a bush
+hanging above the door promised entertainment, and an old hobbling
+woman gave me food and drink and a bed. The night had fallen, and upon
+the roof above me I could hear the steady rain.
+
+The next morning--Heaven preserve the world from evil!--it was still
+raining.
+
+LECTOR. It does not seem to me that this part of your book is very
+entertaining.
+
+AUCTOR. I know that; but what am I to do?
+
+LECTOR. Why, what was the next point in the pilgrimage that was even
+tolerably noteworthy?
+
+AUCTOR. I suppose the Bridge of Boats.
+
+LECTOR. And how far on was that?
+
+AUCTOR. About fourteen miles, more or less ... I passed through a town
+with a name as long as my arm, and I suppose the Bridge of Boats must
+have been nine miles on after that.
+
+LECTOR. And it rained all the time, and there was mud?
+
+AUCTOR. Precisely.
+
+LECTOR. Well, then, let us skip it and tell stories.
+
+AUCTOR. With all my heart. And since you are such a good judge of
+literary poignancy, do you begin.
+
+LECTOR. I will, and I draw my inspiration from your style.
+
+Once upon a time there was a man who was born in Croydon, and whose
+name was Charles Amieson Blake. He went to Rugby at twelve and left it
+at seventeen. He fell in love twice and then went to Cambridge till he
+was twenty-three. Having left Cambridge he fell in love more mildly,
+and was put by his father into a government office, where he began at
+_180_ pounds a year. At thirty-five he was earning 500 pounds a year,
+and perquisites made 750 pounds a year. He met a pleasant lady and
+fell in love quite a little compared with the other times. She had 250
+pounds a year. That made _1000_ pounds a year. They married and had
+three children--Richard, Amy, and Cornelia. He rose to a high
+government position, was knighted, retired at sixty-three, and died at
+sixty-seven. He is buried at Kensal Green...
+
+AUCTOR. Thank you, Lector, that is a very good story. It is simple and
+full of plain human touches. You know how to deal with the facts of
+everyday life ... It requires a master-hand. Tell me, Lector, had this
+man any adventures?
+
+LECTOR. None that I know of.
+
+AUCTOR. Had he opinions?
+
+LECTOR. Yes. I forgot to tell you he was a Unionist. He spoke two
+foreign languages badly. He often went abroad to Assisi, Florence, and
+Boulogne...  He left 7,623 pounds 6s. 8d., and a house and garden at
+Sutton. His wife lives there still.
+
+AUCTOR. Oh!
+
+LECTOR. It is the human story ... the daily task!
+
+AUCTOR. Very true, my dear Lector ... the common lot... Now let me
+tell my story. It is about the Hole that could not be Filled Up.
+
+LECTOR. Oh no! Auctor, no! That is the oldest story in the--
+
+AUCTOR. Patience, dear Lector, patience! I will tell it well. Besides
+which I promise you it shall never be told again. I will copyright it.
+
+Well, once there was a Learned Man who had a bargain with the Devil
+that he should warn the Devil's emissaries of all the good deeds done
+around him so that they could be upset, and he in turn was to have all
+those pleasant things of this life which the Devil's allies usually
+get, to wit a Comfortable Home, Self-Respect, good health, 'enough
+money for one's rank', and generally what is called 'a happy useful
+life'--_till_ midnight of All-Hallowe'en in the last year of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+So this Learned Man did all he was required, and daily would inform
+the messenger imps of the good being done or prepared in the
+neighbourhood, and they would upset it; so that the place he lived in
+from a nice country town became a great Centre of Industry, full of
+wealth and desirable family mansions and street property, and was
+called in hell 'Depot B' (Depot A you may guess at). But at last
+toward the 15th of October 1900, the Learned Man began to shake in his
+shoes and to dread the judgement; for, you see, he had not the
+comfortable ignorance of his kind, and was compelled to believe in the
+Devil willy-nilly, and, as I say, he shook in his shoes.
+
+So he bethought him of a plan to cheat the Devil, and the day before
+All-Hallowe'en he cut a very small round hole in the floor of his
+study, just near the fireplace, right through down to the cellar. Then
+he got a number of things that do great harm (newspapers, legal
+documents, unpaid bills, and so forth) and made ready for action.
+
+Next morning when the little imps came for orders as usual, after
+prayers, he took them down into the cellar, and pointing out the hole
+in the ceiling, he said to them:
+
+'My friends, this little hole is a mystery. It communicates, I
+believe, with the chapel; but I cannot find the exit. All I know is,
+that some pious person or angel, or what not, desirous to do good,
+slips into it every day whatever he thinks may be a cause of evil in
+the neighbourhood, hoping thus to destroy it' (in proof of which
+statement he showed them a scattered heap of newspapers on the floor
+of the cellar beneath the hole). 'And the best thing you can do,' he
+added, 'is to stay here and take them away as far as they come down
+and put them back into circulation again. Tut! tut!' he added, picking
+up a moneylender's threatening letter to a widow, 'it is astonishing
+how these people interfere with the most sacred rights! Here is a
+letter actually stolen from the post! Pray see that it is delivered.'
+
+So he left the little imps at work, and fed them from above with all
+manner of evil-doing things, which they as promptly drew into the
+cellar, and at intervals flew away with, to put them into circulation
+again.
+
+That evening, at about half-past eleven, the Devil came to fetch the
+Learned Man, and found him seated at his fine great desk, writing. The
+Learned Man got up very affably to receive the Devil, and offered him
+a chair by the fire, just near the little round hole.
+
+'Pray don't move,' said the Devil; 'I came early on purpose not to
+disturb you.'
+
+'You are very good,' replied the Learned Man. 'The fact is, I have to
+finish my report on Lady Grope's Settlement among our Poor in the Bull
+Ring--it is making some progress. But their condition is
+heart-breaking, my dear sir; heart-breaking!'
+
+'I can well believe it,' said the Devil sadly and solemnly, leaning
+back in his chair, and pressing his hands together like a roof. 'The
+poor in our great towns, Sir Charles' (for the Learned Man had been
+made a Baronet), 'the condition, I say, of the--Don't I feel a
+draught?' he added abruptly. For the Devil can't bear draughts.
+
+'Why,' said the Learned Man, as though ashamed, 'just near your chair
+there _is_ a little hole that I have done my best to fill up, but
+somehow it seemed impossible to fill it... I don't know...'
+
+The Devil hates excuses, and is above all practical, so he just
+whipped the soul of a lawyer out of his side-pocket, tied a knot in it
+to stiffen it, and shoved it into the hole.
+
+'There!' said the Devil contentedly; 'if you had taken a piece of rag,
+or what not, you might yourself... Hulloa!...' He looked down and saw
+the hole still gaping, and he felt a furious draught coming up again.
+He wondered a little, and then muttered: 'It's a pity I have on my
+best things. I never dare crease them, and I have nothing in my
+pockets to speak of, otherwise I might have brought something bigger.'
+He felt in his left-hand trouser pocket, and fished out a pedant,
+crumpled him carefully into a ball, and stuffed him hard into the
+hole, so that he suffered agonies. Then the Devil watched carefully.
+The soul of the pedant was at first tugged as if from below, then
+drawn slowly down, and finally shot off out of sight.
+
+'This is a most extraordinary thing!' said the Devil.
+
+'It is the draught. It is very strong between the joists,' ventured
+the Learned Man.
+
+'Fiddle-sticks ends!' shouted the Devil. 'It is a trick! But I've
+never been caught yet, and I never will be.'
+
+He clapped his hands, and a whole host of his followers poured in
+through the windows with mortgages, Acts of Parliament, legal
+decisions, declarations of war, charters to universities, patents for
+medicines, naturalization orders, shares in gold mines,
+specifications, prospectuses, water companies' reports, publishers'
+agreements, letters patent, freedoms of cities, and, in a word, all
+that the Devil controls in the way of hole-stopping rubbish; and the
+Devil, kneeling on the floor, stuffed them into the hole like a
+madman. But as fast as he stuffed, the little imps below (who had
+summoned a number of their kind to their aid also) pulled it through
+and carted it away. And the Devil, like one possessed, lashed the
+floor with his tail, and his eyes glared like coals of fire, and the
+sweat ran down his face, and he breathed hard, and pushed every
+imaginable thing he had into the hole so swiftly that at last his
+documents and parchments looked like streaks and flashes. But the
+loyal little imps, not to be beaten, drew them through into the cellar
+as fast as machinery, and whirled them to their assistants; and all
+the poor lost souls who had been pressed into the service were
+groaning that their one holiday in the year was being filched from
+them, when, just as the process was going on so fast that it roared
+like a printing-machine in full blast, the clock in the hall struck
+twelve.
+
+The Devil suddenly stopped and stood up.
+
+'Out of my house,' said the Learned Man; 'out of my house! I've had
+enough of you, and I've no time for fiddle-faddle! It's past twelve,
+and I've won!'
+
+The Devil, though still panting, smiled a diabolical smile, and
+pulling out his repeater (which he had taken as a perquisite from the
+body of a member of Parliament), said, 'I suppose you keep Greenwich
+time?'
+
+'Certainly!' said Sir Charles.
+
+'Well,' said the Devil, 'so much the worse for you to live in Suffolk.
+You're four minutes fast, so I'll trouble you to come along with me;
+and I warn you that any words you now say may be used against...'
+
+At this point the Learned Man's patron saint, who thought things had
+gone far enough, materialized himself and coughed gently. They both
+looked round, and there was St Charles sitting in the easy chair.
+
+'So far,' murmured the Saint to the Devil suavely, 'so far from being
+four minutes too early, you are exactly a year too late.' On saying
+this, the Saint smiled a genial, priestly smile, folded his hands,
+twiddled his thumbs slowly round and round, and gazed in a fatherly
+way at the Devil.
+
+'What do you mean?' shouted the Devil.
+
+'What I say,' said St Charles calmly; '1900 is not the last year of
+the nineteenth century; it is the first year of the twentieth.'
+
+'Oh!' sneered the Devil, 'are you an anti-vaccinationist as well? Now,
+look here' (and he began counting on his fingers); 'supposing in the
+year 1 B.C.  ...'
+
+'I never argue,' said St Charles.
+
+'Well, all I know is,' answered the Devil with some heat, 'that in
+this matter as in most others, thank the Lord, I have on my side all
+the historians and all the scientists, all the universities, all
+the...'
+
+'And I,' interrupted St Charles, waving his hand like a gentleman (he
+is a Borromeo), 'I have the Pope!'
+
+At this the Devil gave a great howl, and disappeared in a clap of
+thunder, and was never seen again till his recent appearance at
+Brighton.
+
+So the Learned Man was saved; but hardly; for he had to spend five
+hundred years in Purgatory catechizing such heretics and pagans as got
+there, and instructing them in the true faith. And with the more
+muscular he passed a knotty time.
+
+You do not see the river Po till you are close to it. Then, a little
+crook in the road being passed, you come between high trees, and
+straight out before you, level with you, runs the road into and over a
+very wide mass of tumbling water. It does not look like a bridge, it
+looks like a quay. It does not rise; it has all the appearance of
+being a strip of road shaved off and floated on the water.
+
+All this is because it passes over boats, as do some bridges over the
+Rhine. (At Cologne, I believe, and certainly at Kiel--for I once sat
+at the end of that and saw a lot of sad German soldiers drilling, a
+memory which later made me understand (1) why they can be out-marched
+by Latins; (2) why they impress travellers and civilians; (3) why the
+governing class in Germany take care to avoid common service; (4) why
+there is no promotion from the ranks; and (5) why their artillery is
+too rigid and not quick enough. It also showed me something intimate
+and fundamental about the Germans which Tacitus never understood and
+which all our historians miss--they are _of necessity_ histrionic.
+Note I do not say it is a vice of theirs. It is a necessity of theirs,
+an appetite. They must see themselves on a stage. Whether they do
+things well or ill, whether it is their excellent army with its
+ridiculous parade, or their eighteenth-century _sans-soucis_ with
+avenues and surprises, or their national legends with gods in wigs and
+strong men in tights, they _must_ be play-actors to be happy and
+therefore to be efficient; and if I were Lord of Germany, and desired
+to lead my nation and to be loved by them, I should put great golden
+feathers on my helmet, I should use rhetorical expressions, spout
+monologues in public, organize wide cavalry charges at reviews, and
+move through life generally to the crashing of an orchestra. For by
+doing this even a vulgar, short, and diseased man, who dabbled in
+stocks and shares and was led by financiers, could become a hero, and
+do his nation good.)
+
+LECTOR. What is all this?
+
+AUCTOR. It is a parenthesis.
+
+LECTOR. It is good to know the names of the strange things one meets
+with on one's travels.
+
+AUCTOR. So I return to where I branched off, and tell you that the
+river Po is here crossed by a bridge of boats.
+
+It is a very large stream. Half-way across, it is even a trifle
+uncomfortable to be so near the rush of the water on the trembling
+pontoons. And on that day its speed and turbulence were emphasized by
+the falling rain. For the marks of the rain on the water showed the
+rapidity of the current, and the silence of its fall framed and
+enhanced the swirl of the great river.
+
+Once across, it is a step up into Piacenza--a step through mud and
+rain. On my right was that plain where Barbarossa received, and was
+glorified by, the rising life of the twelfth century; there the
+renaissance of our Europe saw the future glorious for the first time
+since the twilight of Rome, and being full of morning they imagined a
+new earth and gave it a Lord. It was at Roncaglia, I think in spring,
+and I wish I had been there. For in spring even the Lombard plain they
+say is beautiful and generous, but in summer I know by experience that
+it is cold, brutish, and wet.
+
+And so in Piacenza it rained and there was mud, till I came to a hotel
+called the Moor's Head, in a very narrow street, and entering it I
+discovered a curious thing: the Italians live in palaces: I might have
+known it.
+
+They are the impoverished heirs of a great time; its garments cling to
+them, but their rooms are too large for the modern penury. I found
+these men eating in a great corridor, in a hall, as they might do in a
+palace. I found high, painted ceilings and many things of marble, a
+vast kitchen, and all the apparatus of the great houses--at the
+service of a handful of contented, unknown men. So in England, when we
+have worked out our full fate, happier but poorer men will sit in the
+faded country-houses (a community, or an inn, or impoverished
+squires), and rough food will be eaten under mouldering great
+pictures, and there will be offices or granaries in the galleries of
+our castles; and where Lord Saxonthorpe (whose real name is
+Hauptstein) now plans our policy, common Englishmen will return to the
+simpler life, and there will be dogs, and beer, and catches upon
+winter evenings. For Italy also once gathered by artifice the wealth
+that was not of her making.
+
+He was a good man, the innkeeper of this palace. He warmed me at his
+fire in his enormous kitchen, and I drank Malaga to the health of the
+cooks. I ate of their food, I bought a bottle of a new kind of sweet
+wine called 'Vino Dolce', and--I took the road.
+
+LECTOR. And did you see nothing of Piacenza?
+
+AUCTOR. Nothing, Lector; it was raining, and there was mud. I stood in
+front of the cathedral on my way out, and watched it rain. It rained
+all along the broad and splendid Emilian Way. I had promised myself
+great visions of the Roman soldiery passing up that eternal road; it
+still was stamped with the imperial mark, but the rain washed out its
+interest, and left me cold. The Apennines also, rising abruptly from
+the plain, were to have given me revelations at sunset; they gave me
+none. Their foothills appeared continually on my right, they
+themselves were veiled. And all these miles of road fade into the
+confused memory of that intolerable plain. The night at Firenzuola,
+the morning (the second morning of this visitation) still cold, still
+heartless, and sodden with the abominable weather, shall form no part
+of this book.
+
+Things grand and simple of their nature are possessed, as you know, of
+a very subtle flavour. The larger music, the more majestic lengths of
+verse called epics, the exact in sculpture, the classic drama, the
+most absolute kinds of wine, require a perfect harmony of circumstance
+for their appreciation. Whatever is strong, poignant, and immediate in
+its effect is not so difficult to suit; farce, horror, rage, or what
+not, these a man can find in the arts, even when his mood may be heavy
+or disturbed; just as (to take their parallel in wines) strong Beaune
+will always rouse a man. But that which is cousin to the immortal
+spirit, and which has, so to speak, no colour but mere light, _that_
+needs for its recognition so serene an air of abstraction and of
+content as makes its pleasure seem rare in this troubled life, and
+causes us to recall it like a descent of the gods.
+
+For who, having noise around him, can strike the table with pleasure
+at reading the Misanthrope, or in mere thirst or in fatigue praise
+Chinon wine? Who does not need for either of these perfect things
+Recollection, a variety of according conditions, and a certain easy
+Plenitude of the Mind?
+
+So it is with the majesty of Plains, and with the haunting power of
+their imperial roads.
+
+All you that have had your souls touched at the innermost, and have
+attempted to release yourselves in verse and have written trash--(and
+who know it)--be comforted. You shall have satisfaction at last, and
+you shall attain fame in some other fashion--perhaps in private
+theatricals or perhaps in journalism. You will be granted a prevision
+of complete success, and your hearts shall be filled--but you must not
+expect to find this mood on the Emilian Way when it is raining.
+
+All you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the
+approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front
+and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good
+endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of
+revelation when you shall bless the effect of time. But this divine
+moment--- it is not on the Emilian Way in the rain that you should
+seek it.
+
+All you that have loved passionately and have torn your hearts asunder
+in disillusions, do not imagine that things broken cannot be mended by
+the good angels. There is a kind of splice called 'the long splice'
+which makes a cut rope seem what it was before; it is even stronger
+than before, and can pass through a block. There will descend upon you
+a blessed hour when you will be convinced as by a miracle, and you
+will suddenly understand the _redintegratio amoris (amoris
+redintegratio,_ a Latin phrase). But this hour you will not receive in
+the rain on the Emilian Way.
+
+Here then, next day, just outside a town called Borgo, past the middle
+of morning, the rain ceased.
+
+Its effect was still upon the slippery and shining road, the sky was
+still fast and leaden, when, in a distaste for their towns, I skirted
+the place by a lane that runs westward of the houses, and sitting upon
+a low wall, I looked up at the Apennines, which were now plain above
+me, and thought over my approaching passage through those hills.
+
+But here I must make clear by a map the mass of mountains which I was
+about to attempt, and in which I forded so many rivers, met so many
+strange men and beasts, saw such unaccountable sights, was imprisoned,
+starved, frozen, haunted, delighted, burnt up, and finally refreshed
+in Tuscany--in a word, where I had the most extraordinary and
+unheard-of adventures that ever diversified the life of man.
+
+The straight line to Rome runs from Milan not quite through Piacenza,
+but within a mile or two of that city. Then it runs across the first
+folds of the Apennines, and gradually diverges from the Emilian Way.
+It was not possible to follow this part of the line exactly, for there
+was no kind of track. But by following the Emilian Way for several
+miles (as I had done), and by leaving it at the right moment, it was
+possible to strike the straight line again near a village called
+Medesano.
+
+Now on the far side of the Apennines, beyond their main crest, there
+happens, most providentially, to be a river called the Serchio, whose
+valley is fairly straight and points down directly to Rome. To follow
+this valley would be practically to follow the line to Rome, and it
+struck the Tuscan plain not far from Lucca.
+
+But to get from the Emilian Way over the eastern slope of the
+Apennines' main ridge and crest, to where the Serchio rises on the
+western side, is a very difficult matter. The few roads across the
+Apennines cut my track at right angles, and were therefore useless. In
+order to strike the watershed at the sources of the Serchio it was
+necessary to go obliquely across a torrent and four rivers (the Taro,
+the Parma, the Enza, and the Secchia), and to climb the four spurs
+that divided them; crossing each nearer to the principal chain as I
+advanced until, after the Secchia, the next climb would be that of the
+central crest itself, on the far side of which I should find the
+Serchio valley.
+
+Perhaps in places roads might correspond to this track. Certainly the
+bulk of it would be mule-paths or rough gullies--how much I could not
+tell. The only way I could work it with my wretched map was to note
+the names of towns' or hamlets more or less on the line, and to pick
+my way from one to another. I wrote them down as follows: Fornovo,
+Calestano, Tizzano, Colagna--the last at the foot of the final pass.
+The distance to that pass as the crow flies was only a little more
+than thirty miles. So exceedingly difficult was the task that it took
+me over two days. Till I reached Fornovo beyond the Taro, I was not
+really in the hills.
+
+By country roads, picking my way, I made that afternoon for Medesano.
+The lanes were tortuous; they crossed continual streams that ran from
+the hills above, full and foaming after the rain, and frothing with
+the waste of the mountains. I had not gone two miles when the sky
+broke; not four when a new warmth began to steal over the air and a
+sense of summer to appear in the earth about me. With the greatest
+rapidity the unusual weather that had accompanied me from Milan was
+changing into the normal brilliancy of the south; but it was too late
+for the sun to tell, though he shone from time to time through clouds
+that were now moving eastwards more perceptibly and shredding as they
+moved.
+
+Quite tired and desiring food, keen also for rest after those
+dispiriting days, I stopped, before reaching Medesano, at an inn where
+three ways met; and there I purposed to eat and spend the night, for
+the next day, it was easy to see, would be tropical, and I should rise
+before dawn if I was to save the heat. I entered.
+
+The room within was of red wood. It had two tables, a little counter
+with a vast array of bottles, a woman behind the counter, and a small,
+nervous man in a strange hat serving. And all the little place was
+filled and crammed with a crowd of perhaps twenty men, gesticulating,
+shouting, laughing, quarrelling, and one very big man was explaining
+to another the virtues of his knife; and all were already amply
+satisfied with wine. For in this part men do not own, but are paid
+wages, so that they waste the little they have.
+
+I saluted the company, and walking up to the counter was about to call
+for wine. They had all become silent, when one man asked me a question
+in Italian. I did not understand it, and attempted to say so, when
+another asked the same question; then six or seven--and there was a
+hubbub. And out of the hubbub I heard a similar sentence rising all
+the time. To this day I do not know what it meant, but I thought (and
+think) it meant 'He is a Venetian,' or 'He is the Venetian.' Something
+in my broken language had made them think this, and evidently the
+Venetians (or a Venetian) were (or was) gravely unpopular here. Why, I
+cannot tell. Perhaps the Venetians were blacklegs. But evidently a
+Venetian, or the whole Venetian nation, had recently done them a
+wrong.
+
+At any rate one very dark-haired man put his face close up to mine,
+unlipped his teeth, and began a great noise of cursing and
+threatening, and this so angered me that it overmastered my fear,
+which had till then been considerable. I remembered also a rule which
+a wise man once told me for guidance, and it is this: 'God disposes of
+victory, but, as the world is made, when men smile, smile; when men
+laugh, laugh; when men hit, hit; when men shout, shout; and when men
+curse, curse you also, my son, and in doubt let them always take the
+first move.'
+
+I say my fear had been considerable, especially of the man with the
+knife, but I got too angry to remember it, and advancing my face also
+to this insulter's I shouted, _'Dio Ladro! Dios di mi alma!
+Sanguinamento! Nombre di Dios! Che? Che vole? Non sono da Venezia io!
+Sono de Francia! Je m'en fiche da vestra Venezia! Non se vede che non
+parlar vestra lingua? Che sono forestiere?'_ and so forth. At this
+they evidently divided into two parties, and all began raging amongst
+themselves, and some at me, while the others argued louder and louder
+that there was an error.
+
+The little innkeeper caught my arm over the counter, and I turned
+round sharply, thinking he was doing me a wrong, but I saw him nodding
+and winking at me, and he was on my side. This was probably because he
+was responsible if anything happened, and he alone could not fly from
+the police.
+
+He made them a speech which, for all I know, may have been to the
+effect that he had known and loved me from childhood, or may have been
+that he knew me for one Jacques of Turin, or may have been any other
+lie. Whatever lie it was, it appeased them. Their anger went down to a
+murmur, just like soda-water settling down into a glass.
+
+I stood wine; we drank. I showed them my book, and as my pencil needed
+sharpening the large man lent me his knife for courtesy. When I got it
+in my hand I saw plainly that it was no knife for stabbing with; it
+was a pruning-knife, and would have bit the hand that cherished it (as
+they say of serpents). On the other hand, it would have been a good
+knife for ripping, and passable at a slash. You must not expect too
+much of one article.
+
+I took food, but I saw that in this parish it was safer to sleep out
+of doors than in; so in the falling evening, but not yet sunset, I
+wandered on, not at a pace but looking for shelter, and I found at
+last just what I wanted: a little shed, with dried ferns (as it
+seemed) strewed in a corner, a few old sacks, and a broken piece of
+machinery--though this last was of no use to me.
+
+I thought: 'It will be safe here, for I shall rise before day, and the
+owner, if there is one, will not disturb me.'
+
+The air was fairly warm. The place quite dry. The open side looked
+westward and a little south.
+
+The sun had now set behind the Apennines, and there was a deep
+effulgence in the sky. I drank a little wine, lit a pipe, and watched
+the west in silence.
+
+Whatever was left of the great pall from which all that rain had
+fallen, now was banked up on the further side of heaven in toppling
+great clouds that caught the full glow of evening.
+
+The great clouds stood up in heaven, separate, like persons; and no
+wind blew; but everything was full of evening. I worshipped them so
+far as it is permitted to worship inanimate things.
+
+They domed into the pure light of the higher air, inviolable. They
+seemed halted in the presence of a commanding majesty who ranked them
+all in order.
+
+This vision filled me with a large calm which a travelled man may find
+on coming to his home, or a learner in the communion of wise men.
+Repose, certitude, and, as it were, a premonition of glory occupied my
+spirit.  Before it was yet quite dark I had made a bed out of the dry
+bracken, covered myself with the sacks and cloths, and very soon I
+fell asleep, still thinking of the shapes of clouds and of the power
+of God.
+
+Next morning it was as I had thought. Going out before it was fully
+light, a dense mist all around and a clear sky showed what the day was
+to be. As I reached Medesano the sun rose, and in half-an-hour the air
+was instinct with heat; within an hour it was blinding. An early Mass
+in the church below the village prepared my day, but as I took coffee
+afterwards in a little inn, and asked about crossing the Taro to
+Fornovo--my first point--to my astonishment they shook their heads.
+The Taro was impassable.
+
+Why could it not be crossed? My very broken language made it difficult
+for me to understand. They talked _oframi,_ which I thought meant
+oars; but _rami,_ had I known it, meant the separate branches or
+streams whereby these torrential rivers of Italy flow through their
+arid beds.
+
+I drew a boat and asked if one could not cross in that (for I was a
+northerner, and my idea of a river was a river with banks and water in
+between), but they laughed and said 'No.' Then I made the motion of
+swimming. They said it was impossible, and one man hung his head to
+indicate drowning. It was serious. They said to-morrow, or rather next
+day, one might do it.
+
+Finally, a boy that stood by said he remembered a man who knew the
+river better than any one, and he, if any one could, would get me
+across. So I took the boy with me up the road, and as we went I saw,
+parallel to the road, a wide plain of dazzling rocks and sand, and
+beyond it, shining and silhouetted like an Arab village, the group of
+houses that was Fornovo.  This plain was their sort of river in these
+hills. The boy said that sometimes it was full and a mile wide,
+sometimes it dwindled into dirty pools. Now, as I looked, a few thin
+streams seemed to wind through it, and I could not understand the
+danger.
+
+After a mile or two we came to a spot in the road where a patch of
+brushwood only separated us from the river-bed. Here the boy bade me
+wait, and asked a group of peasants whether the guide was in; they
+said they thought so, and some went up into the hillside with the boy
+to fetch him, others remained with me, looking at the river-bed and at
+Fornovo beyond, shaking their heads, and saying it had not been done
+for days. But I did not understand whether the rain-freshet had passed
+and was draining away, or whether it had not yet come down from
+beyond, and I waited for the guide.
+
+They brought him at last down from his hut among the hills. He came
+with great strides, a kindly-looking man, extremely tall and thin, and
+with very pale eyes. He smiled. They pointed me out to him, and we
+struck the bargain by holding up three fingers each for three lira,
+and nodding. Then he grasped his long staff and I mine, we bade
+farewell to the party, and together we went in silence through thick
+brushwood down towards the broad river-bed. The stones of it glared
+like the sands of Africa; Fornovo baked under the sun all white and
+black; between us was this broad plain of parched shingle and rocks
+that could, in a night, become one enormous river, or dwindle to a
+chain of stagnant ponds. To-day some seven narrow streams wandered in
+the expanse, and again they seemed so easy to cross that again I
+wondered at the need of a guide.
+
+We came to the edge of the first, and I climbed on the guide's back.
+He went bare-legged into the stream deeper and deeper till my feet,
+though held up high, just touched the water; then laboriously he
+climbed the further shore, and I got down upon dry land. It had been
+but twenty yards or so, and he knew the place well. I had seen, as we
+crossed, what a torrent this first little stream was, and I now knew
+the difficulty and understood the warnings of the inn.
+
+The second branch was impassable. We followed it up for nearly a mile
+to where 'an island' (that is, a mass of high land that must have been
+an island in flood-time, and that had on it an old brown village)
+stood above the white bed of the river. Just at this 'island' my guide
+found a ford.  And the way he found it is worth telling. He taught me
+the trick, and it is most useful to men who wander alone in mountains.
+
+You take a heavy stone, how heavy you must learn to judge, for a more
+rapid current needs a heavier stone; but say about ten pounds. This
+you lob gently into mid-stream. _How,_ it is impossible to describe,
+but when you do it it is quite easy to see that in about four feet of
+water, or less, the stone splashes quite differently from the way it
+does in five feet or more. It is a sure test, and one much easier to
+acquire by practice than to write about. To teach myself this trick I
+practised it throughout my journey in these wilds.
+
+Having found a ford then, he again took me on his shoulders, but, in
+mid-stream, the water being up to his breast, his foot slipped on a
+stone (all the bed beneath was rolling and churning in the torrent),
+and in a moment we had both fallen. He pulled me up straight by his
+side, and then indeed, overwhelmed in the rush of water, it was easy
+to understand how the Taro could drown men, and why the peasants
+dreaded these little ribbons of water.
+
+The current rushed and foamed past me, coming nearly to my neck; and
+it was icy cold. One had to lean against it, and the water so took
+away one's weight that at any moment one might have slipped and been
+carried away. The guide, a much taller man (indeed he was six foot
+three or so), supported me, holding my arm: and again in a moment we
+reached dry land.
+
+After that adventure there was no need for carrying. The third,
+fourth, fifth, and sixth branches were easily fordable. The seventh
+was broad and deep, and I found it a heavy matter; nor should I have
+waded it but for my guide, for the water bore against me like a man
+wrestling, and it was as cold as Acheron, the river of the dead. Then
+on the further shore, and warning him (in Lingua Franca) of his peril,
+I gave him his wage, and he smiled and thanked me, and went back,
+choosing his plans at leisure.
+
+Thus did I cross the river Taro; a danger for men.
+
+Where I landed was a poor man sunning himself. He rose and walked with
+me to Fornovo. He knew the guide.
+
+'He is a good man,' he said to me of this friend. 'He is as good as a
+little piece of bread.'
+
+'E vero,' I answered; 'e San Cristophero.'
+
+This pleased the peasant; and indeed it was true. For the guide's
+business was exactly that of St Christopher, except that the Saint
+took no money, and lived, I suppose, on air.
+
+And so to Fornovo; and the heat blinded and confused, and the air was
+alive with flies. But the sun dried me at once, and I pressed up the
+road because I needed food. After I had eaten in this old town I was
+preparing to make for Calestano and to cross the first high spur of
+the Apennines that separated me from it, when I saw, as I left the
+place, a very old church; and I stayed a moment and looked at carvings
+which were in no order, but put in pell-mell, evidently chosen from
+some older building. They were barbaric, but one could see that they
+stood for the last judgement of man, and there were the good looking
+foolish, and there were the wicked being boiled by devils in a pot,
+and what was most pleasing was one devil who with great joy was
+carrying off a rich man's gold in a bag. But now we are too wise to
+believe in such follies, and when we die we take our wealth with us;
+in the ninth century they had no way of doing this, for no system of
+credit yet obtained.
+
+Then leaving the main road which runs to Pontremoli and at last to
+Spezzia, my lane climbed up into the hills and ceased, little by
+little, to be even a lane. It became from time to time the bed of a
+stream, then nothing, then a lane again, and at last, at the head of
+the glen, I confessed to having lost it; but I noted a great rock or
+peak above me for a landmark, and I said to myself-
+
+'No matter. The wall of this glen before me is obviously the ridge of
+the spur; the rock must be left to the north, and I have but to cross
+the ridge by its guidance.' By this time, however, the heat overcame
+me, and, as it was already afternoon, and as I had used so much of the
+preceding night for my journey, I remembered the wise custom of hot
+countries and lay down to sleep.
+
+I slept but a little while, yet when I woke the air was cooler. I
+climbed the side of the glen at random, and on the summit I found, to
+my disgust, a road. What road could it be? To this day I do not know.
+Perhaps I had missed my way and struck the main highway again. Perhaps
+(it is often so in the Apennines) it was a road leading nowhere. At
+any rate I hesitated, and looked back to judge my direction.
+
+It was a happy accident. I was now some 2000 feet above the Taro.
+There, before me, stood the high strange rock that I had watched from
+below; all around it and below me was the glen or cup of bare hills,
+slabs, and slopes of sand and stone calcined in the sun, and, beyond
+these near things, all the plain of Lombardy was at my feet.
+
+It was this which made it worth while to have toiled up that steep
+wall, and even to have lost my way--to see a hundred miles of the
+great flat stretched out before me: all the kingdoms of the world.
+
+Nor was this all. There were sharp white clouds on the far northern
+horizon, low down above the uncertain edge of the world. I looked
+again and found they did not move. Then I knew they were the Alps.
+
+Believe it or not, I was looking back to a place of days before: over
+how many, many miles of road! The rare, white peaks and edges could
+not deceive me; they still stood to the sunlight, and sent me from
+that vast distance the memory of my passage, when their snows had
+seemed interminable and their height so monstrous; their cold such a
+cloak of death. Now they were as far off as childhood, and I saw them
+for the last time.
+
+All this I drew. Then finding a post directing me to a side road for
+Calestano, I followed it down and down into the valley beyond; and up
+the walls of this second valley as the evening fell I heard the noise
+of the water running, as the Taro had run, a net of torrents from the
+melting snows far off. These streams I soon saw below me, winding (as
+those of the Taro had wound) through a floor of dry shingle and rock;
+but when my road ceased suddenly some hundreds of feet above the bed
+of the river, and when, full of evening, I had scrambled down through
+trees to the brink of the water, I found I should have to repeat what
+I had done that morning and to ford these streams. For there was no
+track of any kind and no bridge, and Calestano stood opposite me, a
+purple cluster of houses in the dusk against the farther mountain
+side.
+
+Very warily, lobbing stones as I had been taught, and following up and
+down each branch to find a place, I forded one by one the six little
+cold and violent rivers, and reaching the farther shore, I reached
+also, as I thought, supper, companionship, and a bed.
+
+But it is not in this simple way that human life is arranged. What
+awaited me in Calestano was ill favour, a prison, release, base
+flattery, and a very tardy meal.
+
+It is our duty to pity all men. It is our duty to pity those who are
+in prison. It is our duty to pity those who are not in prison. How
+much more is it the duty of a Christian man to pity the rich who
+cannot ever get into prison? These indeed I do now specially pity, and
+extend to them my commiseration.
+
+What! Never even to have felt the grip of the policeman; to have
+watched his bold suspicious eye; to have tried to make a good show
+under examination ... never to have heard the bolt grinding in the
+lock, and never to have looked round at the cleanly simplicity of a
+cell? Then what emotions have you had, unimprisonable rich; or what do
+you know of active living and of adventure?
+
+It was after drinking some wine and eating macaroni and bread at a
+poor inn, the only one in the place, and after having to shout at the
+ill-natured hostess (and to try twenty guesses before I made her
+understand that I wanted cheese), it was when I had thus eaten and
+shouted, and had gone over the way to drink coffee and to smoke in a
+little cafe, that my adventure befell me.
+
+In the inn there had been a fat jolly-looking man and two
+official-looking people with white caps dining at another table. I had
+taken no notice of them at the time. But as I sat smoking and thinking
+in the little cafe, which was bright and full of people, I noticed a
+first danger-signal when I was told sullenly that 'they had no bed;
+they thought I could get none in the town': then, suddenly, these two
+men in white caps came in, and they arrested me with as much ease as
+you or I would hold a horse.
+
+A moment later there came in two magnificent fellows, gendarmes, with
+swords and cocked hats, and moustaches _a l'Abd el Kader,_ as we used
+to say in the old days; these four, the two gendarmes and two
+policemen, sat down opposite me on chairs and began cross-questioning
+me in Italian, a language in which I was not proficient. I so far
+understood them as to know that they were asking for my papers.
+
+'Niente!' said I, and poured out on the table a card-case, a
+sketch-book, two pencils, a bottle of wine, a cup, a piece of bread, a
+scrap of French newspaper, an old _Secolo,_ a needle, some thread, and
+a flute--but no passport.
+
+They looked in the card-case and found 73 lira; that is, not quite
+three pounds. They examined the sketch-book critically, as behoved
+southerners who are mostly of an artistic bent: but they found no
+passport. They questioned me again, and as I picked about for words to
+reply, the smaller (the policeman, a man with a face like a fox)
+shouted that he had heard me speaking Italian _currently_ in the inn,
+and that my hesitation was a blind.
+
+This lie so annoyed me that I said angrily in French (which I made as
+southern as possible to suit them):
+
+'You lie: and you can be punished for such lies, since you are an
+official.' For though the police are the same in all countries, and
+will swear black is white, and destroy men for a song, yet where there
+is a _droit administratif-_ that is, where the Revolution has made
+things tolerable--you are much surer of punishing your policeman, and
+he is much less able to do you a damage than in England or America;
+for he counts as an official and is under a more public discipline and
+responsibility if he exceeds his powers.
+
+Then I added, speaking distinctly, 'I can speak French and Latin. Have
+you a priest in Calestano, and does he know Latin?'
+
+This was a fine touch. They winced, and parried it by saying that the
+Sindaco knew French. Then they led me away to their barracks while
+they fetched the Sindaco, and so I was imprisoned.
+
+But not for long. Very soon I was again following up the street, and
+we came to the house of the Sindaco or Mayor. There he was, an old man
+with white hair, God bless him, playing cards with his son and
+daughter. To him therefore, as understanding French, I was bidden
+address myself. I told him in clear and exact idiom that his policemen
+were fools, that his town was a rabbit-warren, and his prison the only
+cleanly thing in it; that half-a-dozen telegrams to places I could
+indicate would show where I had passed; that I was a common tourist,
+not even an artist (as my sketch-book showed), and that my cards gave
+my exact address and description.
+
+But the Sindaco, the French-speaking Sindaco, understood me not in the
+least, and it seemed a wicked thing in me to expose him in his old
+age, so I waited till he spoke. He spoke a word common to all
+languages, and one he had just caught from my lips.
+
+'Tourist-e?' he said.
+
+I nodded. Then he told them to let me go. It was as simple as that;
+and to this day, I suppose, he passes for a very bilingual Mayor. He
+did me a service, and I am willing to believe that in his youth he
+smacked his lips over the subtle flavour of Voltaire, but I fear
+to-day he would have a poor time with Anatole France.
+
+What a contrast was there between the hour when I had gone out of the
+cafe a prisoner and that when I returned rejoicing with a crowd about
+me, proclaiming my innocence, and shouting one to another that I was a
+tourist and had seventy-three lira on my person! The landlady smiled
+and bowed: she had before refused me a bed! The men at the tables made
+me a god! Nor did I think them worse for this. Why should I? A man
+unknown, unkempt, unshaven, in tatters, covered with weeks of travel
+and mud, and in a suit that originally cost not ten shillings; having
+slept in leaves and ferns, and forest places, crosses a river at dusk
+and enters a town furtively, not by the road. He is a foreigner; he
+carries a great club. Is it not much wiser to arrest such a man? Why
+yes, evidently. And when you have arrested him, can you do more than
+let him go without proof, on his own word? Hardly!
+
+Thus I loved the people of Calestano, especially for this strange
+adventure they had given me; and next day, having slept in a human
+room, I went at sunrise up the mountain sides beyond and above their
+town, and so climbed by a long cleft the _second_ spur of the
+Apennines: the spur that separated me from the _third_ river, the
+Parma. And my goal above the Parma (when I should have crossed it) was
+a place marked in the map 'Tizzano'. To climb this second spur, to
+reach and cross the Parma in the vale below, to find Tizzano, I left
+Calestano on that fragrant morning; and having passed and drawn a
+little hamlet called Frangi, standing on a crag, I went on up the
+steep vale and soon reached the top of the ridge, which here dips a
+little and allows a path to cross over to the southern side.
+
+It is the custom of many, when they get over a ridge, to begin
+singing. Nor did I fail, early as was the hour, to sing in passing
+this the second of my Apennine summits. I sang easily with an open
+throat everything that I could remember in praise of joy; and I did
+not spare the choruses of my songs, being even at pains to imitate
+(when they were double) the various voices of either part.
+
+Now, so much of the Englishman was in me that, coming round a corner
+of rock from which one first sees Beduzzo hanging on its ledge (as you
+know), and finding round this corner a peasant sitting at his ease, I
+was ashamed.  For I did not like to be overheard singing fantastic
+songs. But he, used to singing as a solitary pastime, greeted me, and
+we walked along together, pointing out to each other the glories of
+the world before us and exulting in the morning. It was his business
+to show me things and their names: the great Mountain of the
+Pilgrimage to the South, the strange rock of Castel-Nuovo; in the far
+haze the plain of Parma; and Tizzano on its high hill, the ridge
+straight before me. He also would tell me the name in Italian of the
+things to hand--my boots, my staff, my hat; and I told him their names
+in French, all of which he was eager to learn.
+
+We talked of the way people here tilled and owned ground, of the
+dangers in the hills, and of the happiness of lonely men. But if you
+ask how we understood each other, I will explain the matter to you.
+
+In Italy, in the Apennines of the north, there seem to be three strata
+of language. In the valleys the Italian was pure, resonant, and
+foreign to me.  There dwell the townsmen, and they deal down river
+with the plains.  Half-way up (as at Frangi, at Beduzzo, at Tizzano) I
+began to understand them. They have the nasal 'n'; they clip their
+words. On the summits, at last, they speak like northerners, and I was
+easily understood, for they said not _'vino' _but _'vin';_ not _'duo'_
+but _'du'_, and so forth. They are the Gauls of the hills. I told them
+so, and they were very pleased.
+
+Then I and my peasant parted, but as one should never leave a man
+without giving him something to show by way of token on the Day of
+Judgement, I gave this man a little picture of Milan, and bade him
+keep it for my sake.
+
+So he went his way, and I mine, and the last thing he said to me was
+about a _'molinar'_, but I did not know what that meant.
+
+When I had taken a cut down the mountain, and discovered a highroad at
+the bottom, I saw that the river before me needed fording, like all
+the rest; and as my map showed me there was no bridge for many miles
+down, I cast about to cross directly, if possible on some man's
+shoulders.
+
+I met an old woman with a heap of grass on her back; I pointed to the
+river, and said (in Lingua Franca) that I wished to cross. She again
+used that word _'molinar',_ and I had an inkling that it meant
+'miller'. I said to myself--
+
+'Where there is a miller there is a mill. For _Ubi Petrus ibi
+Ecclesia._ Where there is a mill there is water; a mill must have
+motive power: .'.  (a) I must get near the stream; (b) I must look out
+for the noise and aspect of a mill.
+
+I therefore (thanking the grass-bearing woman) went right over the
+fields till I saw a great, slow mill-wheel against a house, and a sad
+man standing looking at it as though it were the Procession of God's
+Providence. He was thinking of many things. I tapped him on the
+shoulder (whereat he started) and spoke the great word of that valley,
+_'molinar'_. It opened all the gates of his soul. He smiled at me like
+a man grown young again, and, beckoning me to follow, led radiantly up
+the sluice to where it drew from the river.
+
+Here three men were at work digging a better entry for the water. One
+was an old, happy man in spectacles, the second a young man with
+stilts in his hands, the third was very tall and narrow; his face was
+sad, and he was of the kind that endure all things and conquer. I said
+'_Molinar_?'' I had found him.
+
+To the man who had brought me I gave 50 c., and so innocent and good
+are these people that he said _'Pourquoi?'_ or words like it, and I
+said it was necessary. Then I said to the molinar, _'Quanta?'_ and he,
+holding up a tall finger, said '_Una Lira'._ The young man leapt on to
+his stilts, the molinar stooped down and I got upon his shoulders, and
+we all attempted the many streams of the river Parma, in which I think
+I should by myself have drowned.
+
+I say advisedly--'I should have been drowned.' These upper rivers of
+the hills run high and low according to storms and to the melting of
+the snows.  The river of Parma (for this torrent at last fed Parma)
+was higher than the rest.
+
+Even the molinar, the god of that valley, had to pick his way
+carefully, and the young man on stilts had to go before, much higher
+than mortal men, and up above the water. I could see him as he went,
+and I could see that, to tell the truth, there was a ford--a rare
+thing in upper waters, because in the torrent-sources of rivers either
+the upper waters run over changeless rocks or else over gravel and
+sand. Now if they run over rocks they have their isolated shallow
+places, which any man may find, and their deep--evident by the still
+and mysterious surface, where fish go round and round in the hollows;
+but no true ford continuous from side to side. So it is in Scotland.
+And if they run over gravel and sand, then with every storm or 'spate'
+they shift and change. But here by some accident there ran--perhaps a
+shelf or rock, perhaps a ruin of a Roman bridge--something at least
+that was deep enough and solid enough to be a true ford--and that we
+followed.
+
+The molinar--even the molinar--was careful of his way. Twice he
+waited, waist high, while the man on stilts before us suddenly lost
+ground and plunged to his feet. Once, crossing a small branch (for the
+river here, like all these rivers, runs in many arms over the dry
+gravel), it seemed there was no foothold and we had to cast up and
+down. Whenever we found dry land, I came off the molinar's back to
+rest him, and when he took the water again I mounted again. So we
+passed the many streams, and stood at last on the Tizzanian side. Then
+I gave a lira to the molinar, and to his companion on stilts 50 c.,
+who said, 'What is this for?' and I said, 'You also helped.'
+
+The molinar then, with gesticulations and expression of the eyes, gave
+me to understand that for this 50 c. the stilt-man would take me up to
+Tizzano on the high ridge and show me the path up the ridge; so the
+stilt-man turned to me and said, _'Andiamo' _which means _'Allons'.
+_But when the Italians say _'Andiamo' _they are less harsh than the
+northern French who say _'Allans'; _for the northern French have three
+troubles in the blood.  They are fighters; they will for ever be
+seeking the perfect state, and they love furiously. Hence they ferment
+twice over, like wine subjected to movement and breeding acidity.
+Therefore is it that when they say _'Allons'_ it is harsher than
+_'Andiamo'._ My Italian said to me genially, _'Andiamo_'.
+
+The Catholic Church makes men. By which I do not mean boasters and
+swaggerers, nor bullies nor ignorant fools, who, finding themselves
+comfortable, think that their comfort will be a boon to others, and
+attempt (with singular unsuccess) to force it on the world; but men,
+human beings, different from the beasts, capable of firmness and
+discipline and recognition; accepting death; tenacious. Of her effects
+the most gracious is the character of the Irish and of these Italians.
+Of such also some day she may make soldiers.
+
+Have you ever noticed that all the Catholic Church does is thought
+beautiful and lovable until she comes out into the open, and then
+suddenly she is found by her enemies (which are the seven capital
+sins, and the four sins calling to heaven for vengeance) to be hateful
+and grinding? So it is; and it is the fine irony of her present
+renovation that those who were for ever belauding her pictures, and
+her saints, and her architecture, as we praise things dead, they are
+the most angered by her appearance on this modern field all armed,
+just as she was, with works and art and songs, sometimes superlative,
+often vulgar. Note you, she is still careless of art or songs, as she
+has always been. She lays her foundations in something other, which
+something other our moderns hate. Yet out of that something other came
+the art and song of the Middle Ages. And what art or songs have you?
+She is Europe and all our past. She is returning. _Andiamo._
+
+LECTOR. But Mr _(deleted by the Censor)_ does not think so?
+
+AUCTOR. I last saw him supping at the Savoy. _Andiamo._
+
+We went up the hill together over a burnt land, but shaded with trees.
+It was very hot. I could scarcely continue, so fast did my companion
+go, and so much did the heat oppress me.
+
+We passed a fountain at which oxen drank, and there I supped up cool
+water from the spout, but he wagged his finger before his face to tell
+me that this was an error under a hot sun.
+
+We went on and met two men driving cattle up the path between the
+trees.  These I soon found to be talking of prices and markets with my
+guide. For it was market-day. As we came up at last on to the little
+town--a little, little town like a nest, and all surrounded with
+walls, and a castle in it and a church--we found a thousand beasts all
+lowing and answering each other along the highroad, and on into the
+market square through the gate.  There my guide led me into a large
+room, where a great many peasants were eating soup with macaroni in
+it, and some few, meat. But I was too exhausted to eat meat, so I
+supped up my broth and then began diapephradizing on my fingers to
+show the great innkeeper what I wanted.
+
+I first pulled up the macaroni out of the dish, and said, _Fromagio,
+Pommodoro,_ by which I meant cheese--tomato. He then said he knew what
+I meant, and brought me that spaghetti so treated, which is a dish for
+a king, a cosmopolitan traitor, an oppressor of the poor, a usurer, or
+any other rich man, but there is no spaghetti in the place to which
+such men go, whereas these peasants will continue to enjoy it in
+heaven.
+
+I then pulled out my bottle of wine, drank what was left out of the
+neck (by way of sign), and putting it down said, _'Tale, tantum, vino
+rosso.'_ My guide also said many things which probably meant that I
+was a rich man, who threw his money about by the sixpence. So the
+innkeeper went through a door and brought back a bottle all corked and
+sealed, and said on his fingers, and with his mouth and eyes, 'THIS
+KIND OF WINE IS SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL.'
+
+Only in the foolish cities do men think it a fine thing to appear
+careless of money. So I, very narrowly watching him out of half-closed
+eyes, held up my five fingers interrogatively, and said,
+_'Cinquante?'_ meaning 'Dare you ask fivepence?'
+
+At which he and all the peasants around, even including my guide,
+laughed aloud as at an excellent joke, and said, _'Cinquante, Ho!
+ho!'_ and dug each other in the ribs. But the innkeeper of Tizzano Val
+Parmense said in Italian a number of things which meant that I could
+but be joking, and added (in passing) that a lira made it a kind of
+gift to me. A lira was, as it were, but a token to prove that it had
+changed hands: a registration fee: a matter of record; at a lira it
+was pure charity. Then I said, _'Soixante Dix?'_ which meant nothing
+to him, so I held up seven fingers; he waved his hand about genially,
+and said that as I was evidently a good fellow, a traveller, and as
+anyhow he was practically giving me the wine, he would make it
+ninepence; it was hardly worth his while to stretch out his hand for
+so little money. So then I pulled out 80 c. in coppers, and said,
+_'Tutto',_ which means 'all'. Then he put the bottle before me, took
+the money, and an immense clamour rose from all those who had been
+watching the scene, and they applauded it as a ratified bargain. And
+this is the way in which bargains were struck of old time in these
+hills when your fathers and mine lived and shivered in a cave, hunted
+wolves, and bargained with clubs only.
+
+So this being settled, and I eager for the wine, wished it to be
+opened, especially to stand drink to my guide. The innkeeper was in
+another room.  The guide was too courteous to ask for a corkscrew, and
+I did not know the Italian for a corkscrew.
+
+I pointed to the cork, but all I got out of my guide was a remark that
+the wine was very good. Then I made the emblem and sign of a corkscrew
+in my sketch-book with a pencil, but he pretended not to
+understand--such was his breeding. Then I imitated the mode, sound,
+and gesture of a corkscrew entering a cork, and an old man next to me
+said '_Tira-buchon'--_a common French word as familiar as the woods of
+Marly! It was brought. The bottle was opened and we all drank
+together.
+
+As I rose to go out of Tizzano Val Parmense my guide said to me, _'Se
+chiama Tira-Buchon perche E' lira il buchon'_ And I said to him,
+_'Dominus Vobiscum'_ and left him to his hills.
+
+I took the road downwards from the ridge into the next dip and valley,
+but after a mile or so in the great heat (it was now one o'clock) I
+was exhausted. So I went up to a little wooded bank, and lay there in
+the shade sketching Tizzano Val Parmense, where it stood not much
+above me, and then I lay down and slept for an hour and smoked a pipe
+and thought of many things.
+
+From the ridge on which Tizzano stands, which is the third of these
+Apennine spurs, to the next, the fourth, is but a little way; one
+looks across from one to the other. Nevertheless it is a difficult
+piece of walking, because in the middle of the valley another ridge,
+almost as high as the principal spurs, runs down, and this has to be
+climbed at its lowest part before one can get down to the torrent of
+the Enza, where it runs with a hollow noise in the depths of the
+mountains. So the whole valley looks confused, and it appears, and is,
+laborious.
+
+Very high up above in a mass of trees stood the first of those many
+ruined towers and castles in which the Apennines abound, and of which
+Canossa, far off and indistinguishable in the haze, was the chief
+example. It was called 'The Tower of Rugino'. Beyond the deep trench
+of the Enza, poised as it seemed on its southern bank (but really much
+further off, in the Secchia valley), stood that strange high rock of
+Castel-Nuovo, which the peasant had shown me that morning and which
+was the landmark of this attempt. It seemed made rather by man than by
+nature, so square and exact was it and so cut off from the other
+hills.
+
+It was not till the later afternoon, when the air was already full of
+the golden dust that comes before the fall of the evening, that I
+stood above the Enza and saw it running thousands of feet below. Here
+I halted for a moment irresolute, and looked at the confusion of the
+hills. It had been my intention to make a straight line for Collagna,
+but I could not tell where Collagna lay save that it was somewhere
+behind the high mountain that was now darkening against the sky.
+Moreover, the Enza (as I could see down, down from where I stood) was
+not fordable. It did not run in streams but in one full current, and
+was a true river. All the scene was wild. I had come close to the
+central ridge of the Apennines. It stood above me but five or six
+clear miles away, and on its slopes there were patches and fields of
+snow which were beginning to glimmer in the diminishing light.
+
+Four peasants sat on the edge of the road. They were preparing to go
+to their quiet homesteads, and they were gathering their scythes
+together, for they had been mowing in a field. Coming up to these, I
+asked them how I might reach Collagna. They told me that I could not
+go straight, as I had wished, on account of the impassable river, but
+that if I went down the steep directly below me I should find a
+bridge; that thence a path went up the opposite ridge to where a
+hamlet, called Ceregio (which they showed me beyond the valley), stood
+in trees on the crest, and once there (they said) I could be further
+directed. I understood all their speech except one fatal word. I
+thought they told me that Ceregio was _half_ the way to Collagna; and
+what that error cost me you shall hear.
+
+They drank my wine, I ate their bread, and we parted: they to go to
+their accustomed place, and I to cross this unknown valley. But when I
+had left these grave and kindly men, the echo of their voices remained
+with me; the deep valley of the Enza seemed lonely, and as I went
+lower and lower down towards the noise of the river I lost the sun.
+
+The Enza was flooded. A rough bridge, made of stout logs resting on
+trunks of trees that were lashed together like tripods and supported a
+long plank, was afforded to cross it. But in the high water it did not
+quite reach to the hither bank. I rolled great stones into the water
+and made a short causeway, and so, somewhat perilously, I attained the
+farther shore, and went up, up by a little precipitous path till I
+reached the hamlet of Ceregio standing on its hill, blessed and
+secluded; for no road leads in or out of it, but only mule-paths.
+
+The houses were all grouped together round a church; it was dim
+between them; but several men driving oxen took me to a house that was
+perhaps the inn, though there was no sign; and there in a twilight
+room we all sat down together like Christians in perfect harmony, and
+the woman of the house served us.
+
+Now when, after this communion, I asked the way to Collagna, they must
+have thought me foolish, and have wondered why I did not pass the
+night with them, for they knew how far off Collagna was. But I (by the
+error in language of which I have told you) believed it to be but a
+short way off.  It was in reality ten miles. The oldest of my
+companions said he would put me on the way.
+
+We went together in the half light by a lane that followed the crest
+of the hill, and we passed a charming thing, a little white sculpture
+in relief, set up for a shrine and representing the Annunciation; and
+as we passed it we both smiled. Then in a few hundred yards we passed
+another that was the Visitation, and they were gracious and beautiful
+to a degree, and I saw that they stood for the five joyful mysteries.
+Then he had to leave me, and he said, pointing to the little shrine:
+
+'When you come to the fifth of these the path divides. Take that to
+the left, and follow it round the hollow of the mountain: it will
+become a lane. This lane crosses a stream and passes near a tower.
+When you have reached the tower it joins a great highroad, and that is
+the road to Collagna.'
+
+And when he indicated the shrines he smiled, as though in apology for
+them, and I saw that we were of the same religion. Then (since people
+who will not meet again should give each other presents mutually) I
+gave him the best of my two pipes, a new pipe with letters carved on
+it, which he took to be the initials of my name, and he on his part
+gave me a hedge-rose which he had plucked and had been holding in his
+fingers. And I continued the path alone.
+
+Certainly these people have a benediction upon them, granted them for
+their simple lives and their justice. Their eyes are fearless and
+kindly. They are courteous, straight, and all have in them laughter
+and sadness. They are full of songs, of memories, of the stories of
+their native place; and their worship is conformable to the world that
+God made. May they possess their own land, and may their influence
+come again from Italy to save from jar, and boasting, and ineptitude
+the foolish, valourless cities, and the garish crowds of shouting
+men.... And let us especially pray that the revival of the faith may
+do something for our poor old universities.
+
+Already, when I heard all these directions, they seemed to argue a
+longer road than I had expected. It proved interminable.
+
+It was now fully dark; the night was very cold from the height of the
+hills; a dense dew began to fall upon the ground, and the sky was full
+of stars. For hours I went on slowly down the lane that ran round the
+hollow of the wooded mountain, wondering why I did not reach the
+stream he spoke of. It was midnight when I came to the level, and yet
+I heard no water, and did not yet see the tower against the sky.
+Extreme fatigue made it impossible, as I thought, to proceed farther,
+when I saw a light in a window, and went to it quickly and stood
+beneath it. A woman from the window called me _Caro mio,_ which was
+gracious, but she would not let me sleep even in the straw of the
+barn.
+
+I hobbled on in despair of the night, for the necessity of sleep was
+weighing me down after four high hills climbed that day, and after the
+rough ways and the heat and the continual marching.
+
+I found a bridge which crossed the deep ravine they had told me of.
+This high bridge was new, and had been built of fine stone, yet it was
+broken and ruined, and a gap suddenly showed in the dark. I stepped
+back from it in fear. The clambering down to the stream and up again
+through the briars to regain the road broke me yet more, and when, on
+the hill beyond, I saw the tower faintly darker against the dark sky,
+I went up doggedly to it, fearing faintness, and reaching it where it
+stood (it was on the highest ground overlooking the Secchia valley), I
+sat down on a stone beside it and waited for the morning.
+
+The long slope of the hills fell away for miles to where, by daylight,
+would have lain the misty plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the
+landscape. The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the
+place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy
+roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a
+cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of
+Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous--bare, rugged, a desert
+place--added something of doom.
+
+The hours were creeping on with the less certain stars; a very faint
+and unliving grey touched the edges of the clouds. The cold possessed
+me, and I rose to walk, if I could walk, a little farther.
+
+What is that in the mind which, after (it may be) a slight
+disappointment or a petty accident, causes it to suffer on the scale
+of grave things?
+
+I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, attended by that mournful,
+colourless spirit which haunts the last hours of darkness; and
+influenced especially by the great timeless apathy that hangs round
+the first uncertain promise of increasing light. For there is an hour
+before daylight when men die, and when there is nothing above the soul
+or around it, when even the stars fail.
+
+And this long and dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst when
+one was alone at sea in a small boat without wind; drifting beyond
+one's harbour in the ebb of the outer channel tide, and sogging back
+at the first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea without any
+waves. In such lonely mornings I have watched the Owers light turning,
+and I have counted up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments could
+be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I have prayed for the
+morning or for a little draught of wind, and this I have thought, I
+say, the extreme of absorption into emptiness and longing.
+
+But now, on this ridge, dragging myself on to the main road, I found a
+deeper abyss of isolation and despairing fatigue than I had ever
+known, and I came near to turning eastward and imploring the hastening
+of light, as men pray continually without reason for things that can
+but come in a due order. I still went forward a little, because when I
+sat down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune; and because my
+feet, going painfully and slowly, yet gave a little balance and rhythm
+to the movement of my mind.
+
+I heard no sound of animals or birds. I passed several fields,
+deserted in the half-darkness; and in some I felt the hay, but always
+found it wringing wet with dew, nor could I discover a good shelter
+from the wind that blew off the upper snow of the summits. For a
+little space of time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road,
+that shadow of sleep which numbs the mind, but it could not compel me
+to lie down, and I accepted it only as a partial and beneficent
+oblivion which covered my desolation and suffering as a thin,
+transparent cloud may cover an evil moon.
+
+Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every side. That cheating
+gloom (which I think the clouds in purgatory must reflect) lifted from
+the valley as though to a slow order given by some calm and good
+influence that was marshalling in the day. Their colours came back to
+things; the trees recovered their shape, life, and trembling; here and
+there, on the face of the mountain opposite, the mists by their
+movement took part in the new life, and I thought I heard for the
+first time the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. That subtle
+barrier was drawn which marks to-day from yesterday; all the night and
+its despondency became the past and entered memory. The road before
+me, the pass on my left (my last ridge, and the entry into Tuscany),
+the mass of the great hills, had become mixed into the increasing
+light, that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present which I
+have always found capable of opening the doors of the future with a
+gesture of victory.
+
+My pain either left me, or I ceased to notice it, and seeing a little
+way before me a bank above the road, and a fine grove of sparse and
+dominant chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing to the
+east.
+
+There, without any warning of colours, or of the heraldry that we have
+in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without
+doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with
+security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun.
+
+The air became warmer almost suddenly. The splendour and health of the
+new day left me all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to
+immediate sleep.
+
+I found therefore in the short grass, and on the scented earth beneath
+one of my trees, a place for lying down; I stretched myself out upon
+it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, which nothing but a vague and
+tenuous delight separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last
+confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was a kind of
+prayer--and certainly I was in the mood of gratitude and of
+adoration--this prayer was of course to God, from whom every good
+proceeds, but partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the
+things He has made, seems, of what we at least can discover, the most
+complete and glorious.
+
+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 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 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 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, 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 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!
+
+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, Brueckengebildung 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 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.
+
+The next morning with daylight I continued the road to Lucca, and of
+that also I will say nothing.
+
+LECTOR. Why on earth did you write this book?
+
+AUCTOR. For my amusement.
+
+LECTOR. And why do you suppose I got it?
+
+AUCTOR. I cannot conceive ... however, I will give up this much, to
+tell you that at Decimo the mystery of cypress trees first came into
+my adventure and pilgrimage: of cypress trees which henceforward were
+to mark my Tuscan road. And I will tell you that there also I came
+across a thing peculiar (I suppose) to the region of Lucca, for I saw
+it there as at Decimo, and also some miles beyond. I mean fine
+mournful towers built thus: In the first storey one arch, in the
+second two, in the third three, and so on: a very noble way of
+building.
+
+And I will tell you something more. I will tell you something no one
+has yet heard. To wit, why this place is called Decimo, and why just
+below it is another little spot called Sexta.
+
+LECTOR.. ..
+
+AUCTOR. I know what you are going to say! Do not say it. You are going
+to say: 'It is because they were at the sixth and tenth milestones
+from Lucca on the Roman road.' Heaven help these scientists! Did you
+suppose that I thought it was called Decimo because the people had ten
+toes? Tell me, why is not every place ten miles out of a Roman town
+called by such a name? Eh?  You are dumb. You cannot answer. Like most
+moderns you have entirely missed the point. We all know that there was
+a Roman town at Lucca, because it was called Luca, and if there had
+been no Roman town the modern town would not be spelt with two _c's._
+All Roman towns had milestones beyond them. But why did _this_ tenth
+milestone from _this_ Roman town keep its name?
+
+LECTOR. I am indifferent.
+
+AUCTOR. I will tell you. Up in the tangle of the Carrara mountains,
+overhanging the Garfagnana, was a wild tribe, whose name I forget
+(unless it were the Bruttii), but which troubled the Romans not a
+little, defeating them horribly, and keeping the legionaries in some
+anxiety for years. So when the soldiers marched out north from Luca
+about six miles, they could halt and smile at each other, and say 'At
+_Sextant..._ that's all right.  All safe so far!' and therefore only a
+little village grew up at this little rest and emotion. But as they
+got nearer the gates of the hills they began to be visibly perturbed,
+and they would say: 'The eighth mile! cheer up!' Then 'The ninth mile!
+Sanctissima Madonna! Have you seen anything moving on the heights?'
+But when they got to the _tenth_ milestone, which stands before the
+very jaws of the defile, then indeed they said with terrible emphasis,
+_'Ad Decimam!'_ And there was no restraining them: they would camp and
+entrench, or die in the venture: for they were Romans and stern
+fellows, and loved a good square camp and a ditch, and sentries and a
+clear moon, and plenty of sharp stakes, and all the panoply of war.
+That is the origin of Decimo.
+
+For all my early start, the intolerable heat had again taken the
+ascendant before I had fairly entered the plain. Then, it being yet
+but morning, I entered from the north the town of Lucca, which is the
+neatest, the regularest, the exactest, the most fly-in-amber little
+town in the world, with its uncrowded streets, its absurd
+fortifications, and its contented silent houses--all like a family at
+ease and at rest under its high sun. It is as sharp and trim as its
+own map, and that map is as clear as a geometrical problem. Everything
+in Lucca is good.
+
+I went with a short shadow, creeping when I could on the eastern side
+of the street to save the sunlight; then I came to the main square,
+and immediately on my left was the Albergo di Something-or-other, a
+fine great hotel, but most unfortunately right facing the blazing sky.
+I had to stop outside it to count my money. I counted it wrong and
+entered. There I saw the master, who talked French.
+
+'Can you in an hour,' said I, 'give me a meal to my order, then a bed,
+though it is early day?' This absurd question I made less absurd by
+explaining to him my purpose. How I was walking to Rome and how, being
+northern, I was unaccustomed to such heat; how, therefore, I had
+missed sleep, and would find it necessary in future to walk mainly by
+night. For I had now determined to fill the last few marches up in
+darkness, and to sleep out the strong hours of the sun.
+
+All this he understood; I ordered such a meal as men give to beloved
+friends returned from wars. I ordered a wine I had known long ago in
+the valley of the Saône in the old time of peace before ever the Greek
+came to the land. While they cooked it I went to their cool and
+splendid cathedral to follow a late Mass. Then I came home and ate
+their admirable food and drank the wine which the Burgundians had
+trodden upon the hills of gold so many years before. They showed me a
+regal kind of a room where a bed with great hangings invited repose.
+
+All my days of marching, the dirty inns, the forests, the nights
+abroad, the cold, the mists, the sleeplessness, the faintness, the
+dust, the dazzling sun, the Apennines--all my days came over me, and
+there fell on me a peaceful weight, as his two hundred years fell upon
+Charlemagne in the tower of Saragossa when the battle was done; after
+he had curbed the valley of Ebro and christened Bramimonde.
+
+So I slept deeply all day long; and, outside, the glare made a silence
+upon the closed shutters, save that little insects darted in the outer
+air.
+
+When I woke it was evening. So well had they used me that I paid what
+they asked, and, not knowing what money remained over, I left their
+town by the southern gate, crossed the railway and took the road.
+
+My way lay under the flank of that mountain whereby the Luccans cannot
+see Pisa, or the Pisans cannot see Lucca--it is all one to me, I shall
+not live in either town, God willing; and if they are so eager to
+squint at one another, in Heaven's name, cannot they be at the pains
+to walk round the end of the hill? It is this laziness which is the
+ruin of many; but not of pilgrims, for here was I off to cross the
+plain of Arno in one night, and reach by morning the mouth and gate of
+that valley of the Elsa, which same is a very manifest proof of how
+Rome was intended to be the end and centre of all roads, the chief
+city of the world, and the Popes' residence--as, indeed, it plainly is
+to this day, for all the world to deny at their peril, spiritual,
+geographical, historical, sociological, economic, and philosophical.
+
+For if some such primeval and predestinarian quality were not inherent
+in the City, how, think you, would the valley of the Serchio--the hot,
+droughty, and baking Garfagnana--lead down pointing straight to Rome;
+and how would that same line, prolonged across the plain, find fitting
+it exactly beyond that plain this vale of the Elsa, itself leading up
+directly towards Rome? I say, nowhere in the world is such a
+coincidence observable, and they that will not take it for a portent
+may go back to their rationalism and consort with microbes and make
+their meals off logarithms, washed down with an exact distillation of
+the root of minus one; and the peace of fools, that is the deepest and
+most balmy of all, be theirs for ever and ever.
+
+Here again you fall into errors as you read, ever expecting something
+new; for of that night's march there is nothing to tell, save that it
+was cool, full of mist, and an easy matter after the royal
+entertainment and sleep of the princely Albergo that dignifies Lucca.
+The villages were silent, the moon soon left the sky, and the stars
+could not show through the fog, which deepened in the hours after
+midnight.
+
+A map I had bought in Lucca made the difficulties of the first part of
+the road (though there were many cross-ways) easy enough; and the
+second part, in midnight and the early hours, was very plain sailing,
+till--having crossed the main line and having, at last, very weary,
+come up to the branch railway at a slant from the west and north, I
+crossed that also under the full light--I stood fairly in the Elsa
+valley and on the highroad which follows the railway straight to
+Siena. That long march, I say, had been easy enough in the coolness
+and in the dark; but I saw nothing; my interior thoughts alone would
+have afforded matter for this part; but of these if you have not had
+enough in near six hundred miles of travel, you are a stouter fellow
+than I took you for.
+
+Though it was midsummer, the light had come quickly. Long after
+sunrise the mist dispersed, and the nature of the valley appeared.
+
+It was in no way mountainous, but easy, pleasant, and comfortable,
+bounded by low, rounded hills, having upon them here and there a row
+of cypresses against the sky; and it was populous with pleasant farms.
+Though the soil was baked and dry, as indeed it is everywhere in this
+south, yet little regular streams (or canals) irrigated it and
+nourished many trees--- but the deep grass of the north was wanting.
+
+For an hour or more after sunrise I continued my way very briskly;
+then what had been the warmth of the early sun turned into the violent
+heat of day, and remembering Merlin where he says that those who will
+walk by night must sleep by day, and having in my mind the severe
+verses of James Bayle, sometime Fellow of St Anne's, that 'in Tuscan
+summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but the nights are
+cool' (he was no flamboyant poet; he loved the quiet diction of the
+right wing of English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit of
+sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay down under a tree of
+a kind I had never seen; and lulled under the pleasant fancy that this
+was a picture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that I was
+reclining in some background landscape of the fifteenth century (for
+the scene was of that kind), I fell asleep.
+
+When I woke it was as though I had slept long; but I doubted the
+feeling.  The young sun still low in the sky, and the shadows not yet
+shortened, puzzled me. I looked at my watch, but the dislocation of
+habit which night marches produce had left it unwound. It marked a
+quarter to three, which was absurd. I took the road somewhat stiffly
+and wondering. I passed several small white cottages; there was no
+clock in them, and their people were away. At last in a Trattoria, as
+they served me with food, a woman told me it was just after seven; I
+had slept but an hour.
+
+Outside, the day was intense; already flies had begun to annoy the
+darkened room within. Through the half-curtained door the road was
+white in the sun, and the railway ran just beyond.
+
+I paid my reckoning, and then, partly for an amusement, I ranged my
+remaining pence upon the table, first in the shape of a Maltese cross,
+then in a circle (interesting details!). The road lay white in the
+sunlight outside, and the railway ran just beyond.
+
+I counted the pence and the silver--there was three francs and a
+little over; I remembered the imperial largesse at Lucca, the lordly
+spending of great sums, where, now in the pocket of an obsequious man,
+the pounds were taking care of themselves. I remembered how at Como I
+had been compelled by poverty to enter the train for Milan. How little
+was three francs for the remaining twenty-five miles to Siena! The
+road lay white in the sunlight, and the railway ran just beyond.
+
+I remembered the pleasing cheque in the post-office of Siena; the
+banks of Siena, and the money changers at their counters changing
+money at the rate of change.
+
+'If one man,' thought I, 'may take five per cent discount on a sum of
+money in the exchange, may not another man take discount off a walk of
+over seven hundred miles? May he not cut off it, as his due,
+twenty-five miserable little miles in the train?' Sleep coming over me
+after my meal increased the temptation. Alas! how true is the great
+phrase of Averroes (or it may be Boa-ed-din: anyhow, the Arabic
+escapes me, but the meaning is plain enough), that when one has once
+fallen, it is easy to fall again (saving always heavy falls from
+cliffs and high towers, for after these there is no more falling)....
+Examine the horse's knees before you buy him; take no ticket-of-leave
+man into your house for charity; touch no prospectus that has
+founders' shares, and do not play with firearms or knives and never go
+near the water till you know how to swim. Oh! blessed wisdom of the
+ages!  sole patrimony of the poor! The road lay white in the sun, and
+the railway ran just beyond.
+
+If the people of Milo did well to put up a statue in gold to the man
+that invented wheels, so should we also put one up in Portland stone
+or plaster to the man that invented rails, whose property it is not
+only to increase the speed and ease of travel, but also to bring on
+slumber as can no drug: not even poppies gathered under a waning moon.
+The rails have a rhythm of slight falls and rises ... they make a loud
+roar like a perpetual torrent; they cover up the mind with a veil.
+
+Once only, when a number of men were shouting 'POGGI-BON-SI,' like a
+war-cry to the clank of bronze, did I open my eyes sleepily to see a
+hill, a castle wall, many cypresses, and a strange tower bulging out
+at the top (such towers I learned were the feature of Tuscany). Then
+in a moment, as it seemed, I awoke in the station of Siena, where the
+railway ends and goes no farther.
+
+It was still only morning; but the glare was beyond bearing as I
+passed through the enormous gate of the town, a gate pierced in high
+and stupendous walls that are here guarded by lions. In the narrow
+main street there was full shade, and it was made cooler by the
+contrast of the blaze on the higher storeys of the northern side. The
+wonders of Siena kept sleep a moment from my mind. I saw their great
+square where a tower of vast height marks the guildhall. I heard Mass
+in a chapel of their cathedral: a chapel all frescoed, and built, as
+it were, out of doors, and right below the altar-end or choir. I noted
+how the city stood like a queen of hills dominating all Tuscany: above
+the Elsa northward, southward above the province round Mount Amiato.
+And this great mountain I saw also hazily far off on the horizon. I
+suffered the vulgarities of the main street all in English and
+American, like a show. I took my money and changed it; then, having so
+passed not a full hour, and oppressed by weariness, I said to myself:
+
+'After all, my business is not with cities, and already I have seen
+far off the great hill whence one can see far off the hills that
+overhang Rome.'
+
+With this in my mind I wandered out for a quiet place, and found it in
+a desolate green to the north of the city, near a huge, old red-brick
+church like a barn. A deep shadow beneath it invited me in spite of
+the scant and dusty grass, and in this country no one disturbs the
+wanderer. There, lying down, I slept without dreams till evening.
+
+AUCTOR. Turn to page 94.
+
+LECTOR. I have it. It is not easy to watch the book in two places at
+once; but pray continue.
+
+AUCTOR. Note the words from the eighth to the tenth lines.
+
+LECTOR. Why?
+
+AUCTOR. They will make what follows seem less abrupt.
+
+Once there was a man dining by himself at the Cafe Anglais, in the
+days when people went there. It was a full night, and he sat alone at
+a small table, when there entered a very big man in a large fur coat.
+The big man looked round annoyed, because there was no room, and the
+first man very courteously offered him a seat at his little table.
+They sat down and ate and talked of several things; among others, of
+Bureaucracy. The first maintained that Bureaucracy was the curse of
+France.
+
+'Men are governed by it like sheep. The administrator, however humble,
+is a despot; most people will even run forward to meet him halfway,
+like the servile dogs they are,' said he.
+
+'No,' answered the Man in the Big Fur Coat, 'I should say men were
+governed just by the ordinary human sense of authority. I have no
+theories. I say they recognize authority and obey it. Whether it is
+bureaucratic or not is merely a question of form.'
+
+At this moment there came in a tall, rather stiff Englishman. He also
+was put out at finding no room. The two men saw the manager approach
+him; a few words were passed, and a card; then the manager suddenly
+smiled, bowed, smirked, and finally went up to the table and begged
+that the Duke of Sussex might be allowed to share it. The Duke hoped
+he did not incommode these gentlemen. They assured him that, on the
+contrary, they esteemed his presence a favour.
+
+'It is our prerogative,' said the Man in the Big Fur Coat, 'to be the
+host Paris entertaining her Guest.'
+
+They would take no denial; they insisted on the Duke's dining with
+them, and they told him what they had just been discussing. The Duke
+listened to their theories with some _morgue,_ much _spleen,_ and no
+little _phlegm,_ but with _perfect courtesy,_ and then, towards the
+coffee, told them in fluent French with a strong accent, his own
+opinion. (He had had eight excellent courses; Yquem with his fish, the
+best Chambertin during the dinner, and a glass of wonderful champagne
+with his dessert.) He spoke as follows, with a slight and rather hard
+smile:
+
+'My opinion may seem to you impertinent, but I believe nothing more
+subtly and powerfully affects men than the aristocratic feeling. Do
+not misunderstand me,' he added, seeing that they would protest; 'it
+is not my own experience alone that guides me. All history bears
+witness to the same truth.'
+
+The simple-minded Frenchmen put down this infatuation to the Duke's
+early training, little knowing that our English men of rank are the
+simplest fellows in the world, and are quite indifferent to their
+titles save in business matters.
+
+The Frenchmen paid the bill, and they all three went on to the
+Boulevard.
+
+'Now,' said the first man to his two companions, 'I will give you a
+practical example of what I meant when I said that Bureaucracy
+governed mankind.'
+
+He went up to the wall of the Credit Lyonnais, put the forefinger of
+either hand against it, about twenty-five centimetres apart, and at a
+level of about a foot above his eyes. Holding his fingers thus he
+gazed at them, shifting them slightly from time to time and moving his
+glance from one to the other rapidly. A crowd gathered. In a few
+moments a pleasant elderly, short, and rather fat gentleman in the
+crowd came forward, and, taking off his hat, asked if he could do
+anything for him.
+
+'Why,' said our friend, 'the fact is I am an engineer (section D of
+the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important
+measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs
+to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the
+concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be
+drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor
+in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have
+marked; yet I can get no further without my Double Refractor.'
+
+'Do not let that trouble you,' said the short, stout stranger; 'I will
+be delighted to keep the place exactly marked while you run for your
+instrument.'
+
+The crowd was now swelled to a considerable size; it blocked up the
+pavement, and was swelled every moment by the arrival of the curious.
+The little fat elderly man put his fingers exactly where the other's
+had been, effecting the exchange with a sharp gesture; and each
+watched intently to see that it was right to within a millimetre. The
+attitude was constrained.  The elderly man smiled, and begged the
+engineer not to be alarmed. So they left him with his two forefingers
+well above his head, precisely twenty-five centimetres apart, and
+pressing their tips against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais. Then the
+three friends slipped out of the crowd and pursued their way.
+
+'Let us go to the theatre,' said the experimenter, 'and when we come
+back I warrant you will agree with my remarks on Bureaucracy.'
+
+They went to hear the admirable marble lines of Corneille. For three
+hours they were absorbed by the classics, and, when they returned, a
+crowd, now enormous, was surging all over the Boulevard, stopping the
+traffic and filled with a noise like the sea. Policemen were attacking
+it with the utmost energy, but still it grew and eddied; and in the
+centre--a little respectful space kept empty around him--still
+stretched the poor little fat elderly man, a pitiable sight. His knees
+were bent, his head wagged and drooped with extreme fatigue, he was
+the colour of old blotting-paper; but still he kept the tips of his
+two forefingers exactly twenty-five centimetres apart, well above his
+head, and pressed against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais.
+
+'You will not match that with your aristocratic sentiment!' said the
+author of the scene in pardonable triumph.
+
+'I am not so sure,' answered the Duke of Sussex. He pulled out his
+watch.  'It is midnight,' he said, 'and I must be off; but let me tell
+you before we part that you have paid for a most expensive dinner, and
+have behaved all night with an extravagant deference under the
+impression that I was the Duke of Sussex. As a fact my name is Jerks,
+and I am a commercial traveller in the linseed oil line; and I wish
+you the best of good evenings.'
+
+'Wait a moment,' said the Man in the Big Fur Coat; 'my theory of the
+Simple Human Sense of Authority still holds. I am a detective officer,
+and you will both be good enough to follow me to the police station.'
+
+And so they did, and the Engineer was fined fifty francs in
+correctional, and the Duke of Sussex was imprisoned for ten days, with
+interdiction of domicile for six months; the first indeed under the
+Prefectorial Decree of the 18th of November 1843, but the second under
+the law of the 12th germinal of the year VIII.
+
+In this way I have got over between twenty and thirty miles of road
+which were tramped in the dark, and the description of which would
+have plagued you worse than a swarm of hornets.
+
+Oh, blessed interlude! no struggling moon, no mist, no long-winded
+passages upon the genial earth, no the sense of the night, no marvels
+of the dawn, no rhodomontade, no religion, no rhetoric, no sleeping
+villages, no silent towns (there was one), no rustle of trees--just a
+short story, and there you have a whole march covered as though a
+brigade had swung down it. A new day has come, and the sun has risen
+over the detestable parched hillocks of this downward way.
+
+No, no, Lector! Do not blame me that Tuscany should have passed
+beneath me unnoticed, as the monotonous sea passes beneath a boat in
+full sail. Blame all those days of marching; hundreds upon hundreds of
+miles that exhausted the powers of the mind. Blame the fiery and angry
+sky of Etruria, that compelled most of my way to be taken at night.
+Blame St Augustine, who misled me in his Confessions by talking like
+an African of 'the icy shores of Italy'; or blame Rome, that now more
+and more drew me to Herself as She approached from six to five, from
+five to four, from four to three--now She was but _three_ days off.
+The third sun after that I now saw rising would shine upon the City.
+
+I did indeed go forward a little in the heat, but it was useless.
+After an hour I abandoned it. It was not so much the sun, though that
+was intemperate and deadly; it was rather the inhuman aspect of the
+earth which made me despair. It was as though the soil had been left
+imperfect and rough after some cataclysm; it reminded me of those bad
+lands in the west of America, where the desert has no form, and where
+the crumbling and ashy look of things is more abhorrent than their
+mere desolation. As soon march through evil dreams!
+
+The north is the place for men. Eden was there; and the four rivers of
+Paradise are the Seine, the Oise, the Thames, and the Arun; there are
+grasses there, and the trees are generous, and the air is an unnoticed
+pleasure. The waters brim up to the edges of the fields. But for this
+bare Tuscany I was never made.
+
+How far I had gone I could not tell, nor precisely how much farther
+San Quirico, the neighbouring town, might be. The imperfect map I had
+bought at Siena was too minute to give me clear indications. I was
+content to wait for evening, and then to go on till I found it. An
+hour or so in the shade of a row of parched and dusty bushes I lay and
+ate and drank my wine, and smoked, and then all day I slept, and woke
+a while, and slept again more deeply. But how people sleep and wake,
+if you do not yet know it after so much of this book you never will.
+
+It was perhaps five o'clock, or rather more, when I rose unhappily and
+took up the ceaseless road.
+
+Even the goodness of the Italian nature seemed parched up in those dry
+hollows. At an inn where I ate they shouted at me, thinking in that
+way to make me understand; and their voices were as harsh as the
+grating of metal against stone. A mile farther I crossed a lonely line
+of railway; then my map told me where I was, and I went wearily up an
+indefinite slope under the declining sun, and thought it outrageous
+that only when the light had gone was there any tolerable air in this
+country.
+
+Soon the walls of San Quirico, partly ruinous, stood above the fields
+(for the smallest places here have walls); as I entered its gate the
+sun set, and as though the cool, coming suddenly, had a magic in it,
+everything turned kinder. A church that could wake interest stood at
+the entry of the town; it had stone lions on its steps, and the
+pillars were so carved as to resemble knotted ropes. There for the
+first time I saw in procession one of those confraternities which in
+Italy bury the dead; they had long and dreadful hoods over their
+heads, with slits for the eyes. I spoke to the people of San Quirico,
+and they to me. They were upstanding, and very fine and noble in the
+lines of the face. On their walls is set a marble tablet, on which it
+is registered that the people of Tuscany, being asked whether they
+would have their hereditary Duke or the House of Savoy, voted for the
+latter by such and such a great majority; and this kind of tablet I
+afterwards found was common to all these small towns. Then passing
+down their long street I came, at the farther gate, to a great sight,
+which the twilight still permitted me to receive in its entirety.
+
+For San Quirico is built on the edge of a kind of swell in the land,
+and here where I stood one looked over the next great wave; for the
+shape of the view was, on a vast scale, just what one sees from a
+lonely boat looking forward over a following sea.
+
+The trough of the wave was a shallow purple valley, its arid quality
+hidden by the kindly glimmer of evening; few trees stood in it to
+break its sweep, and its irregularities and mouldings were just those
+of a sweep of water after a gale. The crest of the wave beyond was
+seventeen miles away. It had, as have also such crests at sea, one
+highest, toppling peak in its long line, and this, against the clear
+sky, one could see to be marked by buildings. These buildings were the
+ruined castle and walls of Radicofani, and it lay straight on my way
+to Rome.
+
+It is a strange thing, arresting northern eyes, to see towns thus
+built on summits up into the sky, and this height seemed the more
+fantastic because it was framed. A row of cypress trees stood on
+either side of the road where it fell from San Quirico, and, exactly
+between these, this high crest, a long way off, was set as though by
+design.
+
+With more heart in me, and tempted by such an outline as one might be
+by the prospect of adventure, I set out to cross the great bare run of
+the valley. As I went, the mountain of Amiato came more and more
+nearly abreast of me in the west; in its foothills near me were
+ravines and unexpected rocks; upon one of them hung a village. I
+watched its church and one tall cypress next it, as they stood black
+against the last of daylight. Then for miles I went on the dusty way,
+and crossed by old bridges watercourses in which stood nothing but
+green pools; and the night deepened.
+
+It was when I had crossed the greater part of the obscure plain, at
+its lowest dip and not far from the climb up to Radicofani, that I saw
+lights shining in a large farmhouse, and though it was my business to
+walk by night, yet I needed companionship, so I went in.
+
+There in a very large room, floored with brick and lit by one candle,
+were two fine old peasants, with faces like apostles, playing a game
+of cards.  There also was a woman playing with a strong boy child,
+that could not yet talk: and the child ran up to me. Nothing could
+persuade the master of the house but that I was a very poor man who
+needed sleep, and so good and generous was this old man that my
+protests seemed to him nothing but the excuses and shame of poverty.
+He asked me where I was going. I said, 'To Rome.' He came out with a
+lantern to the stable, and showed me there a manger full of hay,
+indicating that I might sleep in it... His candle flashed upon the
+great silent oxen standing in rows; their enormous horns, three times
+the length of what we know in England, filled me with wonder ... Well!
+(may it count to me as gain!), rather than seem to offend him I lay
+down in that manger, though I had no more desire to sleep than has the
+flittermouse in our Sussex gloamings; also I was careful to offer no
+money, for that is brutality. When he had left me I took the
+opportunity for a little rest, and lay on my back in the hay
+wide-awake and staring at darkness.
+
+The great oxen champed and champed their food with a regular sound; I
+remembered the steerage in a liner, the noise of the sea and the
+regular screw, for this it exactly resembled. I considered in the
+darkness the noble aspect of these beasts as I had seen them in the
+lantern light, and I determined when I got to Rome to buy two such
+horns, and to bring them to England and have them mounted for drinking
+horns--great drinking horns, a yard deep--and to get an engraver to
+engrave a motto for each. On the first I would have--
+
+  King Alfred was in Wantage born
+  He drank out of a ram's horn.
+  Here is a better man than he,
+  Who drinks deeper, as you see.
+
+Thus my friends drinking out of it should lift up their hearts and no
+longer be oppressed with humility. But on the second I determined for
+a rousing Latin thing, such as men shouted round camp fires in the
+year 888 or thereabouts; so, the imagination fairly set going and
+taking wood-cock's flight, snipe-fashion, zigzag and devil-may-care-
+for-the-rules, this seemed to suit me--
+
+  _Salve, cornu cornuum!
+  Cornutorum vis Boûm.
+  Munus excellent Deûm!
+  Gregis o praesidium!
+  Sitis desiderium!
+  Dignum cornuum cornu
+  Romae memor salve tu!
+  Tibi cornuum cornuto--_
+
+LECTOR. That means nothing.
+
+AUCTOR. Shut up!
+
+  _Tibi cornuum cornuto
+  Tibi clamo, te saluto
+  Salve cornu cornuum!
+  Fortunatam da Domunt!_
+
+And after this cogitation and musing I got up quietly, so as not to
+offend the peasant: and I crept out, and so upwards on to the crest of
+the hill.
+
+But when, after several miles of climbing, I neared the summit, it was
+already beginning to be light. The bareness and desert grey of the
+distance I had crossed stood revealed in a colourless dawn, only the
+Mont' Amiata, now somewhat to the northward, was more gentle, and
+softened the scene with distant woods. Between it and this height ran
+a vague river-bed as dry as the stones of a salt beach.
+
+The sun rose as I passed under the ruined walls of the castle. In the
+little town itself, early as was the hour, many people were stirring.
+One gave me good-morning--a man of singular character, for here, in
+the very peep of day, he was sitting on a doorstep, idle, lazy and
+contented, as though it was full noon. Another was yoking oxen; a
+third going out singing to work in the fields.
+
+I did not linger in this crow's nest, but going out by the low and
+aged southern gate, another deeper valley, even drier and more dead
+than the last, appeared under the rising sun. It was enough to make
+one despair! And when I thought of the day's sleep in that wilderness,
+of the next night's toil through it--
+
+LECTOR. What about the Brigand of Radicofani of whom you spoke in
+Lorraine, and of whom I am waiting to hear?
+
+AUCTOR. What about him? Why, he was captured long ago, and has since
+died of old age. I am surprised at your interrupting me with such
+questions.  Pray ask for no more tales till we get to the really
+absorbing story of the Hungry Student.
+
+Well, as I was saying, I was in some despair at the sight of that
+valley, which had to be crossed before I could reach the town of
+Acquapendente, or Hanging-water, which I knew to lie somewhere on the
+hills beyond. The sun was conquering me, and I was looking hopelessly
+for a place to sleep, when a cart drawn by two oxen at about one mile
+an hour came creaking by. The driver was asleep, his head on the shady
+side. The devil tempted me, and without one struggle against
+temptation, nay with cynical and congratulatory feelings, I jumped up
+behind, and putting my head also on the shady side (there were soft
+sacks for a bed) I very soon was pleasantly asleep.
+
+We lay side by side for hour after hour, and the day rose on to noon;
+the sun beat upon our feet, but our heads were in the shade and we
+slept heavily a good and honest sleep: he thinking that he was alone,
+but I knowing that I was in company (a far preferable thing), and I
+was right and he was wrong. And the heat grew, and sleep came out of
+that hot sun more surely than it does out of the night air in the
+north. But no dreams wander under the noon.
+
+From time to time one or the other of us would open our eyes drowsily
+and wonder, but sleep was heavy on us both, and our minds were sunk in
+calm like old hulls in the dark depths of the sea where there are no
+storms.
+
+We neither of us really woke until, at the bottom of the hill which
+rises into Acquapendente, the oxen stopped. This halt woke us up;
+first me and then my companion. He looked at me a moment and laughed.
+He seemed to have thought all this while that I was some country
+friend of his who had taken a lift; and I, for my part, had made more
+or less certain that he was a good fellow who would do me no harm. I
+was right, and he was wrong. I knew not what offering to make him to
+compensate him for this trouble which his heavy oxen had taken. After
+some thought I brought a cigar out of my pocket, which he smoked with
+extreme pleasure. The oxen meanwhile had been urged up the slow hill,
+and it was in this way that we reached the famous town of
+Acquapendente. But why it should be called famous is more than I can
+understand. It may be that in one of those narrow streets there is a
+picture or a church, or one of those things which so attract
+unbelieving men. To the pilgrim it is simply a group of houses. Into
+one of these I went, and, upon my soul, I have nothing to say of it
+except that they furnished me with food.
+
+I do not pretend to have counted the flies, though they were numerous;
+and, even had I done so, what interest would the number have, save to
+the statisticians? Now as these are patient men and foolish, I
+heartily recommend them to go and count the flies for themselves.
+
+Leaving this meal then, this town and this people (which were all of a
+humdrum sort), and going out by the gate, the left side of which is
+made up of a church, I went a little way on the short road to San
+Lorenzo, but I had no intention of going far, for (as you know by this
+time) the night had become my day and the day my night.
+
+I found a stream running very sluggish between tall trees, and this
+sight sufficiently reminded me of my own country to permit repose.
+Lying down there I slept till the end of the day, or rather to that
+same time of evening which had now become my usual waking hour ... And
+now tell me, Lector, shall I leave out altogether, or shall I give you
+some description of, the next few miles to San Lorenzo?
+
+LECTOR. Why, if I were you I would put the matter shortly and simply,
+for it is the business of one describing a pilgrimage or any other
+matter not to puff himself up with vain conceit, nor to be always
+picking about for picturesque situations, but to set down plainly and
+shortly what he has seen and heard, describing the whole matter.
+
+AUCTOR. But remember, Lector, that the artist is known not only by
+what he puts in but by what he leaves out.
+
+LECTOR. That is all very well for the artist, but you have no business
+to meddle with such people.
+
+AUCTOR. How then would you write such a book if you had the writing of
+it?
+
+LECTOR. I would not introduce myself at all; I would not tell stories
+at random, nor go in for long descriptions of emotions, which I am
+sure other men have felt as well as I. I would be careful to visit
+those things my readers had already heard of (AUCTOR. The pictures!
+the remarkable pictures! All that is meant by culture! The brown
+photographs! Oh! Lector, indeed I have done you a wrong!), and I would
+certainly not have the bad taste to say anything upon religion. Above
+all, I would be terse.
+
+AUCTOR. I see. You would not pile words one on the other, qualifying,
+exaggerating, conditioning, superlativing, diminishing, connecting,
+amplifying, condensing, mouthing, and glorifying the mere sound: you
+would be terse. You should be known for your self-restraint. There
+should be no verbosity in your style (God forbid!), still less
+pomposity, animosity, curiosity, or ferocity; you would have it neat,
+exact, and scholarly, and, above all, chiselled to the nail. A fig
+(say you), the pip of a fig, for the rambling style. You would be led
+into no hilarity, charity, vulgarity, or barbarity. Eh! my jolly
+Lector? You would simply say what you had to say?
+
+LECTOR. Precisely; I would say a plain thing in a plain way.
+
+AUCTOR. So you think one can say a plain thing in a plain way? You
+think that words mean nothing more than themselves, and that you can
+talk without ellipsis, and that customary phrases have not their
+connotations? You think that, do you? Listen then to the tale of Mr
+Benjamin Franklin Hard, a kindly merchant of Cincinnati, O., who had
+no particular religion, but who had accumulated a fortune of six
+hundred thousand dollars, and who had a horror of breaking the
+Sabbath. He was not 'a kind husband and a good father,' for he was
+unmarried; nor had he any children. But he was all that those words
+connote.
+
+This man Hard at the age of fifty-four retired from business, and
+determined to treat himself to a visit to Europe. He had not been in
+Europe five weeks before he ran bang up against the Catholic Church.
+He was never more surprised in his life. I do not mean that I have
+exactly weighed all his surprises all his life through. I mean that he
+was very much surprised indeed--and that is all that these words
+connote.
+
+He studied the Catholic Church with extreme interest. He watched High
+Mass at several places (hoping it might be different). He thought it
+was what it was not, and then, contrariwise, he thought it was not
+what it was. He talked to poor Catholics, rich Catholics, middle-class
+Catholics, and elusive, wellborn, penniless, neatly dressed,
+successful Catholics; also to pompous, vain Catholics; humble,
+uncertain Catholics; sneaking, pad-footed Catholics; healthy, howling,
+combative Catholics; doubtful, shoulder-shrugging, but devout
+Catholics; fixed, crabbed, and dangerous Catholics; easy, jovial, and
+shone-upon-by-the-heavenly-light Catholics; subtle Catholics; strange
+Catholics, and _(quod tibi manifeste absurdum videtur)_ intellectual,
+_pince-nez,_ jejune, twisted, analytical, yellow, cranky, and
+introspective Catholics: in fine, he talked to all Catholics.  And
+when I say 'all Catholics' I do not mean that he talked to every
+individual Catholic, but that he got a good, integrative grip of the
+Church militant, which is all that the words connote.
+
+Well, this man Hard got to know, among others, a certain good priest
+that loved a good bottle of wine, a fine deep dish of_ poulet à la
+casserole, _and a kind of egg done with cream in a little platter; and
+eating such things, this priest said to him one day: 'Mr Hard, what
+you want is to read some books on Catholicism.' And Hard, who was on
+the point of being received into the Church as the final solution of
+human difficulties, thought it would be a very good thing to instruct
+his mind before baptism.  So he gave the priest a note to a bookseller
+whom an American friend had told him of; and this American friend had
+said:
+
+'You will find Mr Fingle (for such was the bookseller's name) a
+hard-headed, honest, business man. He can say a _plain thing in a
+plain way.'_
+
+'Here,' said Mr Hard to the priest, 'is ten pounds. Send it to this
+bookseller Fingle and he shall choose books on Catholicism to that
+amount, and you shall receive them, and I will come and read them here
+with you.'
+
+So the priest sent the money, and in four days the books came, and Mr
+Hard and the priest opened the package, and these were the books
+inside:
+
+_Auricular Confession:_ a History. By a Brand Saved from the Burning.
+
+_Isabella; or, The Little Female Jesuit._ By 'Hephzibah'.
+
+_Elisha MacNab:_ a Tale of the French Huguenots.
+
+_England and Rome._ By the Rev. Ebenezer Catchpole of Emmanuel,
+Birmingham.
+
+_Nuns and Nunneries._ By 'Ruth', with a Preface by Miss Carran, lately
+rescued from a Canadian Convent.
+
+_History of the Inquisition._ By Llorente.
+
+_The Beast with Seven Heads; or, the Apocalyptical Warning._
+
+_No Truce with the Vatican._
+
+_The True Cause of Irish Disaffection._
+
+_Decline of the Latin Nations._
+
+_Anglo-Saxons the Chosen Race,_ and their connexion with the Ten Lost
+Tribes: with a map.
+
+Finally, a very large book at the bottom of the case called _Giant
+Pope._
+
+And it was no use asking for the money back or protesting. Mr Fingle
+was an honest, straightforward man, who said a plain thing in a plain
+way. They had left him to choose a suitable collection of books on
+Catholicism, and he had chosen the best he knew. And thus did Mr Hard
+(who has recently given a hideous font to the new Catholic church at
+Bismarckville) learn the importance of estimating what words connote.
+
+LECTOR. But all that does not excuse an intolerable prolixity?
+
+AUCTOR. Neither did I say it did, dear Lector. My object was merely to
+get you to San Lorenzo where I bought that wine, and where, going out
+of the gate on the south, I saw suddenly the wide lake of Bolsena all
+below.
+
+It is a great sheet like a sea; but as one knows one is on a high
+plateau, and as there is but a short dip down to it; as it is round
+and has all about it a rim of low even hills, therefore one knows it
+for an old and gigantic crater now full of pure water; and there are
+islands in it and palaces on the islands. Indeed it was an impression
+of silence and recollection, for the water lay all upturned to heaven,
+and, in the sky above me, the moon at her quarter hung still pale in
+the daylight, waiting for glory.
+
+I sat on the coping of a wall, drank a little of my wine, ate a little
+bread and sausage; but still song demanded some outlet in the cool
+evening, and companionship was more of an appetite in me than
+landscape. Please God, I had become southern and took beauty for
+granted.
+
+Anyhow, seeing a little two-wheeled cart come through the gate,
+harnessed to a ramshackle little pony, bony and hard, and driven by a
+little, brown, smiling, and contented old fellow with black hair, I
+made a sign to him and he stopped.
+
+This time there was no temptation of the devil; if anything the
+advance was from my side. I was determined to ride, and I sprang up
+beside the driver.  We raced down the hill, clattering and banging and
+rattling like a piece of ordnance, and he, my brother, unasked began
+to sing. I sang in turn. He sang of Italy, I of four countries:
+America, France, England, and Ireland. I could not understand his
+songs nor he mine, but there was wine in common between us, and
+_salami_ and a merry heart, bread which is the bond of all mankind,
+and that prime solution of ill-ease--I mean the forgetfulness of
+money.
+
+That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a
+drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy
+of remembrance for ever. The moon has shone on but few like it though
+she is old; the lake of Bolsena has glittered beneath none like it
+since the Etruscans here unbended after the solemnities of a triumph.
+It broke my vow to pieces; there was not a shadow of excuse for this
+use of wheels: it was done openly and wantonly in the face of the wide
+sky for pleasure. And what is there else but pleasure, and to what
+else does beauty move on? Not I hope to contemplation! A hideous
+oriental trick! No, but to loud notes and comradeship and the riot of
+galloping, and laughter ringing through old trees. Who would change
+(says Aristippus of Pslinthon) the moon and all the stars for so much
+wine as can be held in the cup of a bottle upturned? The honest man!
+And in his time (note you) they did not make the devilish deep and
+fraudulent bottoms they do now that cheat you of half your liquor.
+
+Moreover if I broke my vows (which is a serious matter), and if I
+neglected to contemplate the heavens (for which neglect I will confess
+to no one, not even to a postulate sub-deacon; it is no sin; it is a
+healthy omission), if (I say) I did this, I did what peasants do. And
+what is more, by drinking wine and eating pig we proved ourselves no
+Mohammedans; and on such as he is sure of, St Peter looks with a
+kindly eye.
+
+Now, just at the very entry to Bolsena, when we had followed the
+lovely lake some time, my driver halted and began to turn up a lane to
+a farm or villa; so I, bidding him good-night, crossed a field and
+stood silent by the lake and watched for a long time the water
+breaking on a tiny shore, and the pretty miniatures of waves. I stood
+there till the stars came out and the moon shone fully; then I went
+towards Bolsena under its high gate which showed in the darkness, and
+under its castle on the rock. There, in a large room which was not
+quite an inn, a woman of great age and dignity served me with fried
+fish from the lake, and the men gathered round me and attempted to
+tell me of the road to Rome, while I in exchange made out to them as
+much by gestures as by broken words the crossing of the Alps and the
+Apennines.
+
+Then, after my meal, one of the men told me I needed sleep; that there
+were no rooms in that house (as I said, it was not an inn), but that
+across the way he would show me one he had for hire. I tried to say
+that my plan was to walk by night. They all assured me he would charge
+me a reasonable sum.  I insisted that the day was too hot for walking.
+They told me, did these Etruscans, that I need fear no extortion from
+so honest a man.
+
+Certainly it is not easy to make everybody understand everything, and
+I had had experience already up in the mountains, days before, of how
+important it is not to be misunderstood when one is wandering in a
+foreign country, poor and ill-clad. I therefore accepted the offer,
+and, what was really very much to my regret, I paid the money he
+demanded. I even so far fell in with the spirit of the thing as to
+sleep a certain number of hours (for after all, my sleep that day in
+the cart had been very broken, and instead of resting throughout the
+whole of the heat I had taken a meal at Acquapendente). But I woke up
+not long after midnight--perhaps between one and two o'clock--and went
+out along the borders of the lake.
+
+The moon had set; I wish I could have seen her hanging at the quarter
+in the clear sky of that high crater, dipping into the rim of its
+inland sea.  It was perceptibly cold. I went on the road quite slowly,
+till it began to climb, and when the day broke I found myself in a
+sunken lane leading up to the town of Montefiascone.
+
+The town lay on its hill in the pale but growing light. A great dome
+gave it dignity, and a castle overlooked the lake. It was built upon
+the very edge and lip of the volcano-cup commanding either side.
+
+I climbed up this sunken lane towards it, not knowing what might be
+beyond, when, at the crest, there shone before me in the sunrise one
+of those unexpected and united landscapes which are among the glories
+of Italy. They have changed the very mind in a hundred northern
+painters, when men travelled hither to Rome to learn their art, and
+coming in by her mountain roads saw, time and again, the set views of
+plains like gardens, surrounded by sharp mountain-land and framed.
+
+The road did not pass through the town; the grand though crumbling
+gate of entry lay up a short straight way to the right, and below,
+where the road continued down the slope, was a level of some eight
+miles full of trees diminishing in distance. At its further side an
+ample mountain, wooded, of gentle flattened outline, but high and
+majestic, barred the way to Rome. It was yet another of those
+volcanoes, fruitful after death, which are the mark of Latium: and it
+held hidden, as did that larger and more confused one on the rim of
+which I stood, a lake in its silent crater. But that lake, as I was to
+find, was far smaller than the glittering sea of Bolsena, whose shores
+now lay behind me.
+
+The distance and the hill that bounded it should in that climate have
+stood clear in the pure air, but it was yet so early that a thin haze
+hung over the earth, and the sun had not yet controlled it: it was
+even chilly. I could not catch the towers of Viterbo, though I knew
+them to stand at the foot of the far mountain. I went down the road,
+and in half-an-hour or so was engaged upon the straight line crossing
+the plain.
+
+I wondered a little how the road would lie with regard to the town,
+and looked at my map for guidance, but it told me little. It was too
+general, taking in all central Italy, and even large places were
+marked only by small circles.
+
+When I approached Viterbo I first saw an astonishing wall,
+perpendicular to my road, untouched, the bones of the Middle Ages. It
+stood up straight before one like a range of cliffs, seeming much
+higher than it should; its hundred feet or so were exaggerated by the
+severity of its stones and by their sheer fall. For they had no
+ornament whatever, and few marks of decay, though many of age. Tall
+towers, exactly square and equally bare of carving or machicolation,
+stood at intervals along this forbidding defence and flanked its
+curtain. Then nearer by, one saw that it was not a huge castle, but
+the wall of a city, for at a corner it went sharp round to contain the
+town, and through one uneven place I saw houses. Many men were walking
+in the roads alongside these walls, and there were gates pierced in
+them whereby the citizens went in and out of the city as bees go in
+and out of the little opening in a hive.
+
+But my main road to Rome did not go through Viterbo, it ran alongside
+of the eastern wall, and I debated a little with myself whether I
+would go in or no. It was out of my way, and I had not entered
+Montefiascone for that reason. On the other hand, Viterbo was a famous
+place. It is all very well to neglect Florence and Pisa because they
+are some miles off the straight way, but Viterbo right under one's
+hand it is a pity to miss. Then I needed wine and food for the later
+day in the mountain. Yet, again, it was getting hot. It was past
+eight, the mist had long ago receded, and I feared delay.  So I mused
+on the white road under the tall towers and dead walls of Viterbo, and
+ruminated on an unimportant thing. Then curiosity did what reason
+could not do, and I entered by a gate.
+
+The streets were narrow, tortuous, and alive, all shaded by the great
+houses, and still full of the cold of the night. The noise of
+fountains echoed in them, and the high voices of women and the cries
+of sellers.  Every house had in it something fantastic and peculiar;
+humanity had twined into this place like a natural growth, and the
+separate thoughts of men, both those that were alive there and those
+dead before them, had decorated it all. There were courtyards with
+blinding whites of sunlit walls above, themselves in shadow; and there
+were many carvings and paintings over doors. I had come into a great
+living place after the loneliness of the road.
+
+There, in the first wide street I could find, I bought sausage and
+bread and a great bottle of wine, and then quitting Viterbo, I left it
+by the same gate and took the road.
+
+For a long while yet I continued under the walls, noting in one place
+a thing peculiar to the Middle Ages, I mean the apse of a church built
+right into the wall as the old Cathedral of St Stephen's was in Paris.
+These, I suppose, enemies respected if they could; for I have noticed
+also that in castles the chapel is not hidden, but stands out from the
+wall. So be it.  Your fathers and mine were there in the fighting, but
+we do not know their names, and I trust and hope yours spared the
+altars as carefully as mine did.
+
+The road began to climb the hill, and though the heat increased--for
+in Italy long before nine it is glaring noon to us northerners (and
+that reminds me: your fathers and mine, to whom allusion has been made
+above {as they say in the dull history books--[LECTOR. How many more
+interior brackets are we to have? Is this algebra? AUCTOR. You
+yourself, Lector, are responsible for the worst.]} your fathers and
+mine coming down into this country to fight, as was their annual
+custom, must have had a plaguy time of it, when you think that they
+could not get across the Alps till summer-time, and then had to hack
+and hew, and thrust and dig, and slash and climb, and charge and puff,
+and blow and swear, and parry and receive, and aim and dodge, and butt
+and run for their lives at the end, under an unaccustomed sun. No
+wonder they saw visions, the dear people! They are dead now, and we do
+not even know their names.)--Where was I?
+
+LECTOR. You were at the uninteresting remark that the heat was
+increasing.
+
+AUCTOR. Precisely. I remember. Well, the heat was increasing, but it
+seemed far more bearable than it had been in the earlier places; in
+the oven of the Garfagnana or in the deserts of Siena. For with the
+first slopes of the mountain a forest of great chestnut trees
+appeared, and it was so cool under these that there was even moss, as
+though I were back again in my own country where there are full rivers
+in summer-time, deep meadows, and all the completion of home.
+
+Also the height may have begun to tell on the air, but not much, for
+when the forest was behind me, and when I had come to a bare heath
+sloping more gently upwards--a glacis in front of the topmost bulwark
+of the round mountain--- I was oppressed with thirst, and though it
+was not too hot to sing (for I sang, and two lonely carabinieri passed
+me singing, and we recognized as we saluted each other that the
+mountain was full of songs), yet I longed for a bench, a flagon, and
+shade.
+
+And as I longed, a little house appeared, and a woman in the shade
+sewing, and an old man. Also a bench and a table, and a tree over it.
+There I sat down and drank white wine and water many times. The woman
+charged me a halfpenny, and the old man would not talk. He did not
+take his old age garrulously. It was his business, not mine; but I
+should dearly have liked to have talked to him in Lingua Franca, and
+to have heard him on the story of his mountain: where it was haunted,
+by what, and on which nights it was dangerous to be abroad. Such as it
+was, there it was. I left them, and shall perhaps never see them
+again.
+
+The road was interminable, and the crest, from which I promised myself
+the view of the crater-lake, was always just before me, and was never
+reached.  A little spring, caught in a hollow log, refreshed a meadow
+on the right.  Drinking there again, I wondered if I should go on or
+rest; but I was full of antiquity, and a memory in the blood, or what
+not, impelled me to see the lake in the crater before I went to sleep:
+after a few hundred yards this obsession was satisfied.
+
+I passed between two banks, where the road had been worn down at the
+crest of the volcano's rim; then at once, far below, in a circle of
+silent trees with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, I saw
+the Pond of Venus: some miles of brooding water, darkened by the dark
+slopes around it. Its darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn
+of our saved and happy world.
+
+At its hither end a hill, that had once been a cone in the crater,
+stood out all covered with a dense wood. It was the Hill of Venus.
+
+There was no temple, nor no sacrifice, nor no ritual for the Divinity,
+save this solemn attitude of perennial silence; but under the
+influence which still remained and gave the place its savour, it was
+impossible to believe that the gods were dead. There were no men in
+that hollow; nor was there any memory of men, save of men dead these
+thousands of years. There was no life of visible things. The mind
+released itself and was in touch with whatever survives of conquered
+but immortal Spirits.
+
+Thus ready for worship, and in a mood of adoration; filled also with
+the genius which inhabits its native place and is too subtle or too
+pure to suffer the effect of time, I passed down the ridge-way of the
+mountain rim, and came to the edge overlooking that arena whereon was
+first fought out and decided the chief destiny of the world.
+
+For all below was the Campagna. Names that are at the origin of things
+attached to every cleft and distant rock beyond the spreading level,
+or sanctified the gleams of rivers. There below me was Veii; beyond,
+in the Wall of the Apennines, only just escaped from clouds, was Tibur
+that dignified the ravine at the edge of their rising; that crest to
+the right was Tusculum, and far to the south, but clear, on a mountain
+answering my own, was the mother of the City, Alba Longa. The Tiber, a
+dense, brown fog rolling over and concealing it, was the god of the
+wide plain.
+
+There and at that moment I should have seen the City. I stood up on
+the bank and shaded my eyes, straining to catch the dome at least in
+the sunlight; but I could not, for Rome was hidden by the low Sabinian
+hills.
+
+Soracte I saw there--Soracte, of which I had read as a boy. It stood
+up like an acropolis, but it was a citadel for no city. It stood
+alone, like that soul which once haunted its recesses and prophesied
+the conquering advent of the northern kings. I saw the fields where
+the tribes had lived that were the first enemies of the imperfect
+state, before it gave its name to the fortunes of the Latin race.
+
+Dark Etruria lay behind me, forgotten in the backward of my march: a
+furnace and a riddle out of which religion came to the Romans--a place
+that has left no language. But below me, sunlit and easy (as it seemed
+in the cooler air of that summit), was the arena upon which were first
+fought out the chief destinies of the world.
+
+And I still looked down upon it, wondering.
+
+Was it in so small a space that all the legends of one's childhood
+were acted? Was the defence of the bridge against so neighbouring and
+petty an alliance? Were they peasants of a group of huts that handed
+down the great inheritance of discipline, and made an iron channel
+whereby, even to us, the antique virtues could descend as a living
+memory? It must be so; for the villages and ruins in one landscape
+comprised all the first generations of the history of Rome. The stones
+we admire, the large spirit of the last expression came from that
+rough village and sprang from the broils of that one plain; Rome was
+most vigorous before it could speak. So a man's verse, and all he has,
+are but the last outward appearance, late and already rigid, of an
+earlier, more plastic, and diviner fire.
+
+'Upon this arena,' I still said to myself, 'were first fought out the
+chief destinies of the world'; and so, played upon by an unending
+theme, I ate and drank in a reverie, still wondering, and then lay
+down beneath the shade of a little tree that stood alone upon that
+edge of a new world. And wondering, I fell asleep under the morning
+sun.
+
+But this sleep was not like the earlier oblivions that had refreshed
+my ceaseless journey, for I still dreamt as I slept of what I was to
+see, and visions of action without thought--pageants and
+mysteries--surrounded my spirit; and across the darkness of a mind
+remote from the senses there passed whatever is wrapped up in the
+great name of Rome.
+
+When I woke the evening had come. A haze had gathered upon the plain.
+The road fell into Ronciglione, and dreams surrounded it upon every
+side. For the energy of the body those hours of rest had made a fresh
+and enduring vigour; for the soul no rest was needed. It had attained,
+at least for the next hour, a vigour that demanded only the physical
+capacity of endurance; an eagerness worthy of such great occasions
+found a marching vigour for its servant.
+
+In Ronciglione I saw the things that Turner drew; I mean the rocks
+from which a river springs, and houses all massed together, giving the
+steep a kind of crown. This also accompanied that picture, the soft
+light which mourns the sun and lends half-colours to the world. It was
+cool, and the opportunity beckoned. I ate and drank, asking every one
+questions of Rome, and I passed under their great gate and pursued the
+road to the plain. In the mist, as it rose, there rose also a passion
+to achieve.
+
+All the night long, mile after mile, I hurried along the Cassian Way.
+For five days I had slept through the heat, and the southern night had
+become my daytime; and though the mist was dense, and though the moon,
+now past her quarter, only made a vague place in heaven, yet
+expectation and fancy took more than the place of sight. In this fog I
+felt with every step of the night march the approach to the goal.
+
+Long past the place I had marked as a halt, long past Sette Vene, a
+light blurred upon the white wreaths of vapour; distant songs and the
+noise of men feasting ended what had been for many, many hours--for
+more than twenty miles of pressing forward--an exaltation worthy of
+the influence that bred it. Then came on me again, after the full
+march, a necessity for food and for repose. But these things, which
+have been the matter of so much in this book, now seemed subservient
+only to the reaching of an end; they were left aside in the mind.
+
+It was an inn with trellis outside making an arbour. In the yard
+before it many peasants sat at table; their beasts and waggons stood
+in the roadway, though, at this late hour, men were feeding some and
+housing others.  Within, fifty men or more were making a meal or a
+carousal.
+
+What feast or what necessity of travel made them keep the night alive
+I neither knew nor asked; but passing almost unobserved amongst them
+between the long tables, I took my place at the end, and the master
+served me with good food and wine. As I ate the clamour of the
+peasants sounded about me, and I mixed with the energy of numbers.
+
+With a little difficulty I made the master understand that I wished to
+sleep till dawn. He led me out to a small granary (for the house was
+full), and showed me where I should sleep in the scented hay. He would
+take no money for such a lodging, and left me after showing me how the
+door latched and unfastened; and out of so many men, he was the last
+man whom I thanked for a service until I passed the gates of Rome.
+
+Above the soft bed which the hay made, a square window, unglazed, gave
+upon the southern night; the mist hardly drifted in or past it, so
+still was the air. I watched it for a while drowsily; then sleep again
+fell on me.
+
+But as I slept, Rome, Rome still beckoned me, and I woke in a
+struggling light as though at a voice calling, and slipping out I
+could not but go on to the end.
+
+The small square paving of the Via Cassia, all even like a palace
+floor, rang under my steps. The parched banks and strips of dry fields
+showed through the fog (for its dampness did not cure the arid soil of
+the Campagna). The sun rose and the vapour lifted. Then, indeed, I
+peered through the thick air--but still I could see nothing of my
+goal, only confused folds of brown earth and burnt-up grasses, and
+farther off rare and un-northern trees.
+
+I passed an old tower of the Middle Ages that was eaten away at its
+base by time or the quarrying of men; I passed a divergent way on the
+right where a wooden sign said 'The Triumphal Way', and I wondered
+whether it could be the road where ritual had once ordained that
+triumphs should go. It seemed lonely and lost, and divorced from any
+approach to sacred hills.
+
+The road fell into a hollow where soldiers were manoeuvring. Even
+these could not arrest an attention that was fixed upon the
+approaching revelation. The road climbed a little slope where a branch
+went off to the left, and where there was a house and an arbour under
+vines. It was now warm day; trees of great height stood shading the
+sun; the place had taken on an appearance of wealth and care. The mist
+had gone before I reached the summit of the rise.
+
+There, from the summit, between the high villa walls on either
+side--at my very feet I saw the City.
+
+And now all you people whatsoever that are presently reading, may have
+read, or shall in the future read, this my many-sided but now-ending
+book; all you also that in the mysterious designs of Providence may
+not be fated to read it for some very long time to come; you then I
+say, entire, englobed, and universal race of men both in gross and
+regardant, not only living and seeing the sunlight, but dead also
+under the earth; shades, or to come in procession afterwards out of
+the dark places into the day for a little, swarms of you, an army
+without end; all you black and white, red, yellow and brown, men,
+women, children and poets--all of you, wherever you are now, or have
+been, or shall be in your myriads and deka myriads and hendeka
+myriads, the time has come when I must bid you farewell--
+
+  _Ludisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti;
+  Tempus abire tibi est...._
+
+Only Lector I keep by me for a very little while longer with a special
+purpose, but even he must soon leave me; for all good things come to
+an end, and this book is coming to an end--has come to an end. The
+leaves fall, and they are renewed; the sun sets on the Vexin hills,
+but he rises again over the woods of Marly. Human companionship once
+broken can never be restored, and you and I shall not meet or
+understand each other again. It is so of all the poor links whereby we
+try to bridge the impassable gulf between soul and soul. Oh! we spin
+something, I know, but it is very gossamer, thin and strained, and
+even if it does not snap time will at last dissolve it.
+
+Indeed, there is a song on it which you should know, and which runs--
+
+[Bar of music]
+
+So my little human race, both you that have read this book and you
+that have not, good-bye in charity. I loved you all as I wrote. Did
+you all love me as much as I have loved you, by the black stone of
+Rennes I should be rich by now. Indeed, indeed, I have loved you all!
+You, the workers, all puffed up and dyspeptic and ready for the
+asylums; and you, the good-for-nothing lazy drones; you, the strong
+silent men, who have heads quite empty, like gourds; and you also, the
+frivolous, useless men that chatter and gabble to no purpose all day
+long. Even you, that, having begun to read this book, could get no
+further than page 47, and especially you who have read it manfully in
+spite of the flesh, I love you all, and give you here and now my
+final, complete, full, absolving, and comfortable benediction.
+
+To tell the truth, I have noticed one little fault about you. I will
+not call it fatuous, inane, and exasperating vanity or self-
+absorption; I will put it in the form of a parable. Sit you round
+attentively and listen, dispersing yourselves all in order, and do not
+crowd or jostle.
+
+Once, before we humans became the good and self-respecting people we
+are, the Padre Eterno was sitting in heaven with St Michael beside
+him, and He watched the abyss from His great throne, and saw shining
+in the void one far point of light amid some seventeen million others,
+and He said:
+
+'What is that?'
+
+And St Michael answered:
+
+'That is the Earth,' for he felt some pride in it.
+
+'The Earth?' said the Padre Eterno, a little puzzled . . . 'The Earth?
+...?... I do not remember very exactly . . .'
+
+'Why,' answered St Michael, with as much reverence as his annoyance
+could command, 'surely you must recollect the Earth and all the pother
+there was in heaven when it was first suggested to create it, and all
+about Lucifer--'
+
+'Ah!' said the Padre Eterno, thinking twice, 'yes. It is attached to
+Sirius, and--'
+
+'No, no,' said St Michael, quite visibly put out. 'It is the Earth.
+The Earth which has that changing moon and the thing called the sea.'
+
+'Of course, of course,' answered the Padre Eterno quickly, 'I said
+Sirius by a slip of the tongue. Dear me! So that is the Earth! Well,
+well! It is years ago now ... Michael, what are those little things
+swarming up and down all over it?'
+
+'Those,' said St Michael, 'are Men.'
+
+'Men?' said the Padre Eterno, 'Men ... I know the word as well as any
+one, but somehow the connexion escapes me. Men ...' and He mused.
+
+St Michael, with perfect self-restraint, said a few things a trifle
+staccato, defining Man, his dual destiny, his hope of heaven, and all
+the great business in which he himself had fought hard. But from a
+fine military tradition, he said nothing of his actions, nor even of
+his shrine in Normandy, of which he is naturally extremely proud: and
+well he may be.  What a hill!
+
+'I really beg your pardon,' said the Padre Eterno, when he saw the
+importance attached to these little creatures. 'I am sure they are
+worthy of the very fullest attention, and' (he added, for he was sorry
+to have offended) 'how sensible they seem, Michael! There they go,
+buying and selling, and sailing, driving, and wiving, and riding, and
+dancing, and singing, and the rest of it; indeed, they are most
+practical, business-like, and satisfactory little beings. But I notice
+one odd thing.  Here and there are some not doing as the rest, or
+attending to their business, but throwing themselves into all manner
+of attitudes, making the most extraordinary sounds, and clothing
+themselves in the quaintest of garments. What is the meaning of that?'
+
+'Sire!' cried St Michael, in a voice that shook the architraves of
+heaven, 'they are worshipping You!'
+
+'Oh! they are worshipping _me!_ Well, that is the most sensible thing
+I have heard of them yet, and I altogether commend them. _Continuez,'_
+said the Padre Eterno, _'continuez!'_
+
+And since then all has been well with the world; at least where _Us
+continuent._
+
+And so, carissimi, multitudes, all of you good-bye; the day has long
+dawned on the Via Cassia, this dense mist has risen, the city is
+before me, and I am on the threshold of a great experience; I would
+rather be alone.  Good-bye my readers; good-bye the world.
+
+At the foot of the hill I prepared to enter the city, and I lifted up
+my heart.
+
+There was an open space; a tramway: a tram upon it about to be drawn
+by two lean and tired horses whom in the heat many flies disturbed.
+There was dust on everything around.
+
+A bridge was immediately in front. It was adorned with statues in soft
+stone, half-eaten away, but still gesticulating in corruption, after
+the manner of the seventeenth century. Beneath the bridge there
+tumbled and swelled and ran fast a great confusion of yellow water: it
+was the Tiber. Far on the right were white barracks of huge and of
+hideous appearance; over these the Dome of St Peter's rose and looked
+like something newly built. It was of a delicate blue, but made a
+metallic contrast against the sky.
+
+Then (along a road perfectly straight and bounded by factories, mean
+houses and distempered walls: a road littered with many scraps of
+paper, bones, dirt, and refuse) I went on for several hundred yards,
+having the old wall of Rome before me all this time, till I came right
+under it at last; and with the hesitation that befits all great
+actions I entered, putting the right foot first lest I should bring
+further misfortune upon that capital of all our fortunes.
+
+And so the journey ended.
+
+It was the Gate of the Poplar--not of the People. (Ho, Pedant! Did you
+think I missed you, hiding and lurking there?) Many churches were to
+hand; I took the most immediate, which stood just within the wall and
+was called Our Lady of the People--(not 'of the Poplar'. Another fall
+for the learned!  Professor, things go ill with you to-day!). Inside
+were many fine pictures, not in the niminy-piminy manner, but strong,
+full-coloured, and just.
+
+To my chagrin, Mass was ending. I approached a priest and said to him:
+
+_'Pater, quando vel a quella hora e la prossimma Missa?'_
+
+_'Ad nonas,'_ said he.
+
+_'Pol! Hercle!'_ (thought I), 'I have yet twenty minutes to wait!
+Well, as a pilgrimage cannot be said to be over till the first Mass is
+heard in Rome, I have twenty minutes to add to my book.'
+
+So, passing an Egyptian obelisk which the great Augustus had nobly
+dedicated to the Sun, I entered....
+
+LECTOR. But do you intend to tell us nothing of Rome?
+
+AUCTOR. Nothing, dear Lector.
+
+LECTOR. Tell me at least one thing; did you see the Coliseum?
+
+AUCTOR. ... I entered a cafe at the right hand of a very long,
+straight street, called for bread, coffee, and brandy, and
+contemplating my books and worshipping my staff that had been friends
+of mine so long, and friends like all true friends inanimate, I spent
+the few minutes remaining to my happy, common, unshriven, exterior,
+and natural life, in writing down this
+
+LOUD AND FINAL SONG
+
+DITHYRAMBIC EPITHALAMIUM OR THRENODY
+
+  In these boots, and with this staff
+  Two hundred leaguers and a half--
+
+(That means, two and a half hundred leagues. You follow? Not two
+hundred and one half league.... Well--)
+
+  Two hundred leaguers and a half
+  Walked I, went I, paced I, tripped I,
+  Marched I, held I, skelped I, slipped I,
+  Pushed I, panted, swung and dashed I;
+  Picked I, forded, swam and splashed I,
+  Strolled I, climbed I, crawled and scrambled,
+  Dropped and dipped I, ranged and rambled;
+  Plodded I, hobbled I, trudged and tramped I,
+  And in lonely spinnies camped I,
+  And in haunted pinewoods slept I,
+  Lingered, loitered, limped and crept I,
+  Clambered, halted, stepped and leapt I;
+  Slowly sauntered, roundly strode I,
+
+_And_ ... (Oh! Patron saints and Angels 
+               That protect the four evangels! 
+               And you Prophets vel majores 
+               Vel incerti, vel minores,
+               Virgines ac confessores 
+               Chief of whose peculiar glories 
+               Est in Aula Regis stare 
+               Atque orare et exorare 
+               Et clamare et conclamare 
+               Clamantes cum clamoribus 
+               Pro nobis peccatoribus.)
+
+_Let me not conceal it... Rode I. _
+(For who but critics could complain
+Of 'riding' in a railway train?) 
+  _Across the valleys and the high-land, 
+  With all the world on either hand. 
+  Drinking when I had a mind to, 
+  Singing when I felt inclined to; 
+  Nor ever turned my face to home 
+  Till I had slaked my heart at Rome._
+
+
+THE END AGAIN
+
+LECTOR. But this is dogg--
+
+AUCTOR. Not a word!
+
+FINIS
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE PATH TO ROME ***
+
+This file should be named 8tptr10.txt or 8tptr10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8tptr11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8tptr10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+ PROJECT GUTENBERG LITERARY ARCHIVE FOUNDATION
+ 809 North 1500 West
+ Salt Lake City, UT 84116
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/8tptr10.zip b/old/8tptr10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9cd957f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/8tptr10.zip
diff --git a/old/8tptr10h.zip b/old/8tptr10h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e869580
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/8tptr10h.zip