Part 27

"How about all those deserters?" I inquired.

There was a fair number of them, he said. Young fellows from other provinces who find their way hither across country, God knows how. It was a good soil for deserters--brushwood, deep gullies, lonely stretches of land, and, above all, la tradizione. The tradition, he explained, of that ill-famed forest of Velletri, now extirpated. The deserters were nearly all children--the latest conscripts; a grown man seldom deserts, not because he would not like to do so, but because he has more "judgment" and can weigh the risks. The roads were patrolled by police. A few murders had taken place; yes, just a few murders; one or two stupid people who resented their demands for money or food--

He broke off with another weary smile.

"You have had malaria," I suggested.

"Often."

The fact was patent, not only from his sallow face, but from the peculiar manner....

They brought in a deserter that very afternoon. He lay groaning at the bottom of a cab, having broken his leg in jumping down from somewhere. The rest of the conveyance was filled to overflowing with carbineers. A Sicilian, they said. The whole populace followed the vehicle uphill, reverently, as though attending a funeral. "He is little," said a woman, referring either to his size or his age.

An hour later there was a discussion anent the episode in the fashionable café of Valmontone. A citizen, a well-dressed man, possibly a notary, put the case for United Italy, for intervention against Germany, for military discipline and the shooting of cowardly deserters, into a few phrases so clear, so convincing, that there was a general burst of approval. Then another man said:

"I hate those Sicilians; I have good personal reasons for hating them. But no Sicilian fears death. If they are not brilliant soldiers, they certainly make first-class assassins, which is only another branch of the same business. This boy deserts not because he is afraid of death, but because he still owes a debt. He feels he ought to do something to repay his parents who nursed him when he was a child, and not be sacrificed to that kidnapping camorra of blackguards out yonder"--and he pointed with his thumb, spitting contemptuously the while, in the direction of Rome.

Nobody had any comment to make on this speech. Not a word of protest was raised. The man was entitled to an opinion like everybody else, and might even have obtained his share of approval had the victim been a native. He was only a Sicilian--an outsider. What is one to say of this patriarchal, or parochial, attitude? The enlargement of Italy's boundaries--Albania, Cyrenaica, Asia Minor and so forth--is an ideal that few Italians bother their heads about. They are not sufficiently dense--not yet. To found a world-empire like the British or Roman calls for a certain bullet-headed crassness. One has only to look at the Germans, who have been trying to do so for some time past. That collecting mania.... One single boy who collects postage stamps can infect his whole school with the complaint, and make them all jealous of his fine specimens. England has been collecting, for many centuries, islands and suchlike; she is paying the penalty of her acquisitive mania. She has infected others with the craze and cannot help incurring their envy, seeing that they are now equally acquisitive, but less fortunate. All the good specimens are gone!

That Pergola tavern deserves its name, the courtyard being overhung with green vines and swelling clusters of grapes. The host is a canny old boy, up to any joke and any devilry, I should say. He had already taken a fancy to me on my first visit, for I cured his daughter Vanda of a raging toothache by the application of glycerine and carbolic acid. We went into his cellar, a dim tunnel excavated out of the soft tufa, from whose darkest and chilliest recesses he drew forth a bottle of excellent wine--it might have lain on a glacier, so cold it was. How thoughtful of Providence to deposit this volcanic stuff within a stone's-throw of your dining-table! Nobody need ice his wine at the Pergola.

After a capital repast I sallied forth late at night and walked, striving to resemble a rich English tourist who has lost his way, along the lonely road to Artena, in order to be assassinated by the deserters or, failing that, to hear at least what these fellows have got to say for themselves. My usual luck! Not a deserter was in sight.

Of my sleeping accommodation with certain old ladies, of what happened to their little dog and of other matters trivial to the verge of inanity, I may discourse upon the occasion of some later visit to Valmontone. For this, the second, was by no means the last. Meanwhile, we proceed southwards.

Sant' Agata, Sorrento

Siren-Land revisited....

A delightful stroll, yesterday, with a wild youngster from the village of Torco--what joy to listen to analphabetics for a change: they are indubitably the salt of the earth--down that well-worn track to Crapolla, only to learn that my friend Garibaldi, the ancient fisherman, the genius loci, has died in the interval; thence by boat to the lonely beach of Recomone (sadly noting, as we passed, that the rock-doves at the Grotto delle Palumbe are now all extirpated), where, for the sake of old memories, I indulged in a bathe and then came across an object rare in these regions, a fragment of grey Egyptian granite, relic of some pagan temple and doubtless washed up here in a wintry gale; thence, for a little light refreshment, to Nerano; thence to that ill-famed "House of the Spirits" where my Siren-Land was begun in the company of one who feared no spirits--victim, already, of this cursed war, but then a laughter-loving child--and down to the bay and promontory of Ierate, there to make the unwelcome discovery that certain hideous quarrying operations on the neighbouring hill have utterly ruined the charm of this once secluded site; thence laboriously upwards, past that line of venerable goat-caves, to the summit of Mount San Costanzo.

Nothing has changed. The bay of Naples lay at my feet as of old, flooded in sunshine.

There is a small outdoor cistern here. Peering into its darkness through an aperture in the roof, I noticed that there was water at the bottom; out of the water projected a stone; on the stone, a prisoner for life, sat the most disconsolate lizard imaginable. It must have tumbled through the chink, during some scuffle with a companion, into this humid cell, swum for refuge to that islet and there remained, feeding on the gnats which live in such places. I observed that its tail had grown to an inordinate length--from disuse, very likely; from lack of the usual abrasion against shrubs and stones. An unenviable fate for one of these restless and light-loving creatures, never again to see the sun; to live and die down here, all alone in the dank gloom, chained, as it were, to a few inches of land amid a desolation of black water.

It took my thoughts back to what I saw two days ago while climbing in the torrid hour of noon up that shadeless path where the vanilla-scented orchids grow--the path which runs from Sant' Elia past the shattered Natural Arch to Fontanella. Here, at the hottest turning of the road, sat a woman in great distress. Beside her was a pink pig she had been commissioned to escort down to the farm of Sant' Elia. This beast was suffering hellish torments from the heat and vainly endeavouring, with frenzied grunts of despair, to excavate for itself a hollow in the earth under a thinly clothed myrtle bush. I told the woman of shade lower down. She said she knew about it, but the pig--the pig refused to move! It had been engaged upon this hopeless occupation, without a moment's respite, for an hour or more; nothing would induce it to proceed a step further; it had plainly made up its mind to find shelter here from the burning rays, or die. And of shelter there was none.

What would not this pig (I now thought) have given to be transported into the lizard's cool aquatic paradise; and the lizard, into that scorching sunlight!...

It was not to muse upon the miseries of the animal creation that I have revisited these shores. I came to puzzle once more over the site of that far-famed Athene temple which gave its name to the whole promontory. Now, after again traversing the ground with infinite pleasure, I fail to find any reason for changing what I wrote years ago in a certain pamphlet which some scholar, glancing through these pages and anxious to explore for himself a spot of such celebrity in ancient days, is so little likely to see that he may not be sorry if I here recapitulate its arguments. Others will be well advised to pass over what follows.

Let me begin by saying that the temple, in every probability, stood at the Punta Campanella facing Capri, the actual headland of the Sorrentine peninsula, where--apart from every other kind of evidence--you may pick up to this day small terra-cotta figures of Athene, made presumably to be carried away as keepsakes by visitors to the shrine.

Now for alternative suggestions.

Strabo tells us that the temple was placed on the akron of the promontory; that is, the summit of Mount San Costanzo where we are now standing. (He elsewhere describes it as being "on the straits.") This summit is nearly 500 metres above the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" and scatter them about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of the little chapel or the walls of the fields below. It is incredible that no vestige of a structure like the Athene temple should remain on a spot of this kind, so favourably situated as regards immunity from depredations, owing to its isolated and exalted position. The rock-surface around the summit has not undergone that artificial levelling which an edifice of this importance would necessitate; the terrace is of mediaeval construction, as can be seen by its supporting walls. No doubt the venerable Christian sanctuary there has been frequently repaired and modified; on the terrace-level to the south can be seen the foundations of an earlier chapel, and the slopes are littered with broken bricks, Sorrentine tufa, and old battuto floors. But there is no trace of antique workmanship or material, nor has the rocky path leading up to the shrine been demarcated with chisel-cuts in the ancient fashion. The sister-summit of La Croce is equally unproductive of classical relics.

We must therefore conclude that Strabo was mistaken. And why not? His accounts of many parts of the Roman world are surprisingly accurate, but, according to Professor Pais, "of Italy Strabo seems to have known merely the road which leads from Brindisi to Rome, the road between Rome and Naples and Pozzuoli, and the coast of Etruria between Rome and Populonia." If so, he probably saw no more of the district than can be seen from Naples. He attributes the foundation of this Athene temple to Odysseus: statements of such a kind make one wonder whether the earlier portions of his lost history were more critical than other old treatises which have survived.

So much for Strabo.

Seduced by a modern name, which means nothing more or less than "a temple"--strong evidence, surely--I was inclined to locate the Athene shrine at a spot called Ierate (marked also as Ieranto on some maps, and popularly pronounced Ghiérate the Greek aspirate still surviving) which lies a mile or more eastwards of the Punta Campanella and faces south. "Hieron," I thought: that settles it. You may guess I was not a little proud of this discovery, particularly when it turned out that an ancient building actually did stand there--on the southern slope, namely, of the miniature peninsula which juts into Ierate bay. Here I found fragments of antique bricks, tegulae bipedales, amphoras, pottery of the lustrous Sorrentine ware--Surrentina bibis?--pavements of opus signinum, as well as one large Roman paving flag of the type that is found on the road between Termini and Punta Campanella. (How came this stone here? Did the old road from Stabiae Athene temple go round the promontory and continue as far as Ierate along the southern slope of San Costanzo hill? No road could pass there now; deforestation has denuded the mountain-side of its soil, laying bare the grey rock--a condition at which its mediaeval name of Mons Canutarius already hints.) Well, a more careful examination of the site has convinced me that I was wrong. No temple of this magnificence can have stood here, but only a Roman villa--one of the many pleasure-houses which dotted these shores under the Empire.

So much for myself.