It begins well. It commences with an orthodox square containing a café on either side, an aged tree, a fountain, a postcard shop and a sleeping dog. All this is reassuring and in order. At one corner of the Place a few steps slope up to a gateway with a pointed arch. This also is quite a normal entry to a town. But once inside the gate everything is topsy-turvy and unexpected. You find yourself in a lane, but it is more like a passage through rocks than the high street of a town. The road at once dives under buildings and comes up in a narrow square on one side of which is an official-looking _Mairie_, very modern, with walls of a fashionable yellow, green sun-shutters and a flag pole. Opposite to it are some deserted houses of great age which are in a state of advanced decomposition. [Illustration: A STREET IN GORBIO.] [Illustration: A STREET IN GORBIO.] You then come to a damp and dark tunnel. As there is a gleam of light at the end of it you enter and are at once seized by a smell—a smell of Augean stables. This is no “perfume wafted on the breeze”; but a smell that comes upon you like a shriek, grips you by the throat like a highwayman and throttles you. You rush forward to the open air and stumble among houses made up of loose rocks and superfluous doors propped up by outside stairs. To the right are some steps climbing up through another tunnel that may be a passage in a mine. The exploring spirit urges you to mount this dark ascent. You come out into a real street with real houses and even a shop, but the street is narrow and the way is entirely occupied by a live cow. The cow is standing patiently outside a house that has white steps and a knocker and seems to be waiting for an answer to a message. It has a pleasant and motherly face, but appears, as to its body, to be of unreasonable size. As it is impossible to pass the cow without pushing it into a house you return by the tunnel to the original route. This route now takes the form of a country lane lined with boulders on which grow ferns and other plants of interest and here incontinently appears a church—a fine and ancient edifice bearing the date 1683. Beyond the church you find yourself—not in a cemetery but—on the ramparts of a fortified town and finally by the side of a quite new building of great height, clean and formal, which, at first sight, may be a barrack or a soap factory, but there are neither soldiers nor (I think) soap in Gorbio.