The journey took the whole day and part of the ensuing night; for the
slow cheap train by which they travelled gave way to others, passed
hours motionless, thrust aside and forgotten, and paused at every
little station on the road. They suffered from hunger and thirst,
and heat and draught, and fatigue and contusion, as the poor cattle
suffered in the trucks beside them. But the child did not seem to feel
either exhaustion or pain, or to want anything except to be there--to
be there. The towns, the mountains, the sea, the coast, all so strange
and wonderful to untravelled eyes, had no wonder for her. She only
wanted to get beyond them, to where it was that Cecco lay. Every now
and then she opened her bundle and looked at the little twig of the
lemon-tree.
Alarmed at her aspect, and the racking cough, their companions shrank
away from them as far as the crowding of the waggon allowed of, and
they were left unquestioned and undisturbed, whilst the day wore on and
the sun went down into the sea and the evening deepened into night.
It was dawn when they were told to descend; they had reached their
destination--a dull, sun-baked, fever-stricken little port, with the
salt water on one side of it, and the _machia_ and marsh on the other.
Lizina got down from the train, holding her little bundle in one hand
and in the other her father's wrist. Their limbs were bruised, aching,
trembling, their spines felt broken, their heads seemed like empty
bladders, in which their brains went round and round; but she did
not faint or fall--she went straight onward as though the place was
familiar to her.
Close to the desolate, sand-strewn station there was a fort of
decaying yellow stone, high walls with loopholes, mounds of sand with
sea-thistle and bryony growing in them; before these was the blue
water, and a long stone wall running far out into the water. To the
iron rings in it a few fisher boats were moored by their cables. The
sun was rising over the inland wilderness, where wild boars and buffalo
dwelt under impenetrable thickets. Lizina led her father by the hand
past the fortifications to a little desolate church with crumbling
belfry, where she knew the burial-ground must be. There were four
lime-washed walls, with a black iron door, through the bars of which
the graves within and the rank grass around them could be seen. The
gate was locked; the child sat down on a stone before it and waited.
She motioned to her father to do the same. He was like a poor steer
landed after a long voyage in which he has neither eaten nor drank,
but has been bruised, buffeted, thrown to and fro, galled, stunned,
tormented. They waited, as she wished, in the cool dust of the breaking
day. The bell above in the church steeple was tolling for the first
Mass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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