What could you do in an open
felucca with the green water running over? You did your best. Five hours
out of that pitch black night you beat up, first trying one harbour and
then the other. Amalfi gave in first, just as the waning moon rose, and
you got under the breakwater at last.
You remember that last of your many narrow escapes to-day as you trudge
up the stony mule-track through the green valleys, and it strikes you
that after all it is easier to walk from Diamante all the way to
Verbicaro, than to face a March storm in the gulf of Salerno in an open
boat on a dark night. Up you go, past that strange ruin of the great
Norman-Saracen castle standing alone on the steep little hill which
rises out of the middle of the valley, commanding the roads on the right
and the left. You have heard of the Saracens but not of the Normans.
What kind of people lived there amongst those bristling ivy-grown
towers? Thieves of course. Were they not Saracens and therefore Turks,
according to your ethnology, and therefore brigands? It is odd that the
government should have allowed them to build a castle just there.
Perhaps they were stronger than the government.
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