Shuffling along in a slowly moving cloud of dust, a train of white oxen advanced, shambling and zig-zagging along the road to meet us. Eight yoke of them there were, a long procession, with half a dozen drivers shouting and tugging at the leading ropes and cracking their whips. They were dragging a low truck, clamped to which was a huge monolith of flawless white marble. Uneasily, as we crawled past them, the animals shook their heads, turning this way and that, as though desperately seeking some way of escape. Their long curving horns clashed together; their soft white dewlaps shook; and into their blank brown eyes there came a look of fear, an entreaty that we should take pity on their invincible stupidity and remember that they simply could not, however hard they tried, get used to motor cars. Mrs. Aldwinkle pointed at the monolith. “Imagine what Michelangelo could have made out of that,” she said. Then, noticing that her pointing hand still grasped the silver flask, she became very solicitous. “You’re sure you wouldn’t like a sip of this?” she asked, leaning forward. The twin blue danger signals glittered in my face. Her garments exhaled a scent in which there was ambergris. Her breath smelt of heliotrope cachous. But even now I did not take fright; I made no effort to escape. Guided by their invincible stupidity, the white oxen had behaved more sensibly than I. We rolled on. The hills came nearer. The far-away peaks of bare limestone were hidden by the glowing mass of the tilled and wooded foothills. Happily I looked at those huge hilly forms. “How beautiful!” I said. Mrs. Aldwinkle seemed to take my words as a personal compliment. “I’m so glad you think so. So awfully ...” she replied in the tone of an author to whom you have just said that you enjoyed his last book so much. We drew nearer; the hills towered up, they opposed themselves like a huge wall. But the barrier parted before us; we passed through the gates of a valley that wound up into the mountain. Our road now ran parallel with the bed of a torrent. In the flanks of the hill to our right a marble quarry made a huge bare scar, hundreds of feet long. The crest of the hill was fringed with a growth of umbrella pines. The straight slender tree trunks jetted up thirty feet without a branch; their wide-spreading flattened domes of foliage formed a thin continuous silhouette, between which and the dark mass of the hill one could see a band of sky, thinly barred by the bare stems. It was as though, to emphasise the outlines of his hills, an artist had drawn a fine and supple brush stroke parallel with the edge of the silhouette and a little apart from it. We rolled on. The high road narrowed into the squalid street of a little town. The car crept along, hooting as it went. “Vezza,” Mrs. Aldwinkle explained. “Michelangelo used to come here for his marbles.” “Indeed?” I was charmed to hear it.