France -- Description and travel; Italy -- Description and travel; Switzerland -- Description and travel
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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