Out at last, by the little chapel,
upon what is the beginning of an inland carriage road--in a land where
even the one-wheeled wheelbarrow has never been seen. The grass grows
thick among the broken stones, and men and beasts have made a narrow
beaten track along the extreme outside edge of the precipice. The new
bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness when you
came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring freshets. A
glance tells you that the massive-looking piers were hollow, built of
one thickness of stone, shell-fashion, and filled with plain earth.
Somebody must have cheated. Nothing new in that. They are all thieves
nowadays, seeking to eat, as you say in your dialect, with a strict
simplicity which leaves nothing to the imagination. At all events this
bridge was a fraud, and the peasants clamber down a steep footpath they
have made through its ruins, and up the other side.
And now you are in the town. The streets are paved, but Verbicaro is not
Naples, not Salerno, not even Amalfi. The pavement is of the roughest
cobble stones, and the pigs are the scavengers. Pigs everywhere, in the
streets, in the houses, at the windows, on the steps of the church in
the market-place, to right and left, before you and behind you--like the
guns at Balaclava.
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