Sir John Constantine: Memoirs of His Adventures At Home and Abroad and Particularly in the Island of Corsica: Beginning with the Year 1756Quiller-Couch, Arthur
General
Sir John Constantine: Memoirs of His Adventures At Home and Abroad and Particularly in the Island of Corsica: Beginning with the Year 1756
Quiller-Couch, Arthur
Corsica (France) -- Fiction
"I know this place," he announced quietly, as he reappeared, after
two or three minutes, in the ruinous doorway; "it is called Paomia.
We can bivouac in peace, and I doubt if by searching we could find a
better spot."
We ate our supper of cold bacon and ship-bread, both slightly damaged
by sea-water--but the wine solaced us, being excellent--and stretched
ourselves to sleep under the ilex boughs, my father undertaking to
stand sentry till daybreak. Nat and I protested against this, and
offered ourselves; but he cut us short. He had his reasons, he said.
It must have been two or even three hours later that I awoke at the
touch of his hand on my shoulder. I stared up through the boughs at
the setting moon, and around me at my comrades asleep in the grasses.
He signed to me not to awake them, but to rise and follow him softly.
Passing through the screen of ilex, we came to a gap in the stone
wall of the garth, and through this, at the base of the hillside
below the forest, to a second screen of cypress which opened suddenly
upon a semicircle of turf; and here, bathed in the moon's rays that
slanted over the cypress-tops, stood a small Doric temple of
weather-stained marble, in proportions most delicate, a background
for a dance of nymphs, a fit tiring-room for Diana and her train.
Its door--if ever it had possessed one--was gone, like every other
door in this strange village. My father led the way up the white
steps, halted on the threshold, and, standing aside lest he should
block the moonlight, pointed within.
I stood at his shoulder and looked. The interior was empty, bare of
all ornament. On the wall facing the door, and cut in plain letters
a foot high, two words in Greek confronted me--
PHILOPATRI STEPHANOPOULOI.
"A tomb?" I asked.
"Yes, and a kinsman's; for the Stephanopouli were of blood the
emperors did not disdain to mate with. In the last rally the Turks
had much ado with them as leaders of the Moreote tribes around Maina,
and north along Taygetus to Sparta. Yes, and there were some who
revived the Spartan name in those days, maintaining the fight among
the mountains until the Turks swarmed across from Crete, overran
Maina and closed the struggle. Yet there was a man, Constantine
Stephanopoulos, the grandfather of this Philopater, who would buy
nothing at the price of slavery, but, collecting a thousand souls--
men, women, and children--escaped by ship from Porto Vitilo and
sailed in search of a new home. At first he had thought of Sicily;
but, finding no welcome there, he came (in the spring of 1675, I
think) to Genoa, and obtained leave from the Genoese to choose a site
in Corsica."
"And it was here he planted his colony?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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