Alone
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Norman Douglas >> Alone
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That Pergola tavern deserves its name, the courtyard being overhung with
green vines and swelling clusters of grapes. The host is a canny old
boy, up to any joke and any devilry, I should say. He had already taken
a fancy to me on my first visit, for I cured his daughter Vanda of a
raging toothache by the application of glycerine and carbolic acid. We
went into his cellar, a dim tunnel excavated out of the soft tufa, from
whose darkest and chilliest recesses he drew forth a bottle of excellent
wine--it might have lain on a glacier, so cold it was. How thoughtful of
Providence to deposit this volcanic stuff within a stone's-throw of your
dining-table! Nobody need ice his wine at the Pergola.
After a capital repast I sallied forth late at night and walked,
striving to resemble a rich English tourist who has lost his way, along
the lonely road to Artena, in order to be assassinated by the deserters
or, failing that, to hear at least what these fellows have got to say
for themselves. My usual luck! Not a deserter was in sight.
Of my sleeping accommodation with certain old ladies, of what happened
to their little dog and of other matters trivial to the verge of
inanity, I may discourse upon the occasion of some later visit to
Valmontone. For this, the second, was by no means the last. Meanwhile,
we proceed southwards.
Sant' Agata, Sorrento
Siren-Land revisited....
A delightful stroll, yesterday, with a wild youngster from the village
of Torco--what joy to listen to analphabetics for a change: they are
indubitably the salt of the earth--down that well-worn track to
Crapolla, only to learn that my friend Garibaldi, the ancient fisherman,
the genius loci, has died in the interval; thence by boat to the lonely
beach of Recomone (sadly noting, as we passed, that the rock-doves at
the Grotto delle Palumbe are now all extirpated), where, for the sake of
old memories, I indulged in a bathe and then came across an object rare
in these regions, a fragment of grey Egyptian granite, relic of some
pagan temple and doubtless washed up here in a wintry gale; thence, for
a little light refreshment, to Nerano; thence to that ill-famed "House
of the Spirits" where my Siren-Land was begun in the company of one who
feared no spirits--victim, already, of this cursed war, but then a
laughter-loving child--and down to the bay and promontory of Ierate,
there to make the unwelcome discovery that certain hideous quarrying
operations on the neighbouring hill have utterly ruined the charm of
this once secluded site; thence laboriously upwards, past that line of
venerable goat-caves, to the summit of Mount San Costanzo.
Nothing has changed. The bay of Naples lay at my feet as of old, flooded
in sunshine.
There is a small outdoor cistern here. Peering into its darkness through
an aperture in the roof, I noticed that there was water at the bottom;
out of the water projected a stone; on the stone, a prisoner for life,
sat the most disconsolate lizard imaginable. It must have tumbled
through the chink, during some scuffle with a companion, into this humid
cell, swum for refuge to that islet and there remained, feeding on the
gnats which live in such places. I observed that its tail had grown to
an inordinate length--from disuse, very likely; from lack of the usual
abrasion against shrubs and stones. An unenviable fate for one of these
restless and light-loving creatures, never again to see the sun; to live
and die down here, all alone in the dank gloom, chained, as it were, to
a few inches of land amid a desolation of black water.
It took my thoughts back to what I saw two days ago while climbing in
the torrid hour of noon up that shadeless path where the vanilla-scented
orchids grow--the path which runs from Sant' Elia past the shattered
Natural Arch to Fontanella. Here, at the hottest turning of the road,
sat a woman in great distress. Beside her was a pink pig she had been
commissioned to escort down to the farm of Sant' Elia. This beast was
suffering hellish torments from the heat and vainly endeavouring, with
frenzied grunts of despair, to excavate for itself a hollow in the earth
under a thinly clothed myrtle bush. I told the woman of shade lower
down. She said she knew about it, but the pig--the pig refused to move!
It had been engaged upon this hopeless occupation, without a moment's
respite, for an hour or more; nothing would induce it to proceed a step
further; it had plainly made up its mind to find shelter here from the
burning rays, or die. And of shelter there was none.
What would not this pig (I now thought) have given to be transported
into the lizard's cool aquatic paradise; and the lizard, into that
scorching sunlight!...
It was not to muse upon the miseries of the animal creation that I have
revisited these shores. I came to puzzle once more over the site of that
far-famed Athene temple which gave its name to the whole promontory.
Now, after again traversing the ground with infinite pleasure, I fail to
find any reason for changing what I wrote years ago in a certain
pamphlet which some scholar, glancing through these pages and anxious to
explore for himself a spot of such celebrity in ancient days, is so
little likely to see that he may not be sorry if I here recapitulate its
arguments. Others will be well advised to pass over what follows.
Let me begin by saying that the temple, in every probability, stood at
the Punta Campanella facing Capri, the actual headland of the Sorrentine
peninsula, where--apart from every other kind of evidence--you may pick
up to this day small terra-cotta figures of Athene, made presumably to
be carried away as keepsakes by visitors to the shrine.
Now for alternative suggestions.
Strabo tells us that the temple was placed on the akron of the
promontory; that is, the summit of Mount San Costanzo where we are now
standing. (He elsewhere describes it as being "on the straits.") This
summit is nearly 500 metres above the sea-level, and here no antique
building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are
visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their
way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the
ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them
about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no
materials of an early period have been incorporated into the masonry of
the little chapel or the walls of the fields below. It is incredible
that no vestige of a structure like the Athene temple should remain on a
spot of this kind, so favourably situated as regards immunity from
depredations, owing to its isolated and exalted position. The
rock-surface around the summit has not undergone that artificial
levelling which an edifice of this importance would necessitate; the
terrace is of mediaeval construction, as can be seen by its supporting
walls. No doubt the venerable Christian sanctuary there has been
frequently repaired and modified; on the terrace-level to the south can
be seen the foundations of an earlier chapel, and the slopes are
littered with broken bricks, Sorrentine tufa, and old battuto floors.
But there is no trace of antique workmanship or material, nor has the
rocky path leading up to the shrine been demarcated with chisel-cuts in
the ancient fashion. The sister-summit of La Croce is equally
unproductive of classical relics.
We must therefore conclude that Strabo was mistaken. And why not? His
accounts of many parts of the Roman world are surprisingly accurate,
but, according to Professor Pais, "of Italy Strabo seems to have known
merely the road which leads from Brindisi to Rome, the road between Rome
and Naples and Pozzuoli, and the coast of Etruria between Rome and
Populonia." If so, he probably saw no more of the district than can be
seen from Naples. He attributes the foundation of this Athene temple to
Odysseus: statements of such a kind make one wonder whether the earlier
portions of his lost history were more critical than other old treatises
which have survived.
So much for Strabo.
Seduced by a modern name, which means nothing more or less than "a
temple"--strong evidence, surely--I was inclined to locate the Athene
shrine at a spot called Ierate (marked also as Ieranto on some maps, and
popularly pronounced Ghierate the Greek aspirate still surviving) which
lies a mile or more eastwards of the Punta Campanella and faces south.
"Hieron," I thought: that settles it. You may guess I was not a little
proud of this discovery, particularly when it turned out that an ancient
building actually did stand there--on the southern slope, namely, of the
miniature peninsula which juts into Ierate bay. Here I found fragments
of antique bricks, tegulae bipedales, amphoras, pottery of the lustrous
Sorrentine ware--Surrentina bibis?--pavements of opus signinum, as well
as one large Roman paving flag of the type that is found on the road
between Termini and Punta Campanella. (How came this stone here? Did the
old road from Stabiae Athene temple go round the promontory and continue
as far as Ierate along the southern slope of San Costanzo hill? No road
could pass there now; deforestation has denuded the mountain-side of its
soil, laying bare the grey rock--a condition at which its mediaeval name
of Mons Canutarius already hints.) Well, a more careful examination of
the site has convinced me that I was wrong. No temple of this
magnificence can have stood here, but only a Roman villa--one of the
many pleasure-houses which dotted these shores under the Empire.
So much for myself.
PEUTINGER'S CHART
Showing ancient road rounding the headland
and terminating at "Templum Minervae."
None the less--and this is a really curious point--an inspection of
Peutinger's Tables seems to bear out my original theory of a temple at
Ierate. For the structure is therein marked not at the Punta Campanella
but, approximately, at Ierate itself, facing south, with the road from
Stabiae over Surrentum rounding the promontory and terminating at the
temple's threshold. Capri and the Punta Campanella are plainly drawn,
though not designated by name. Much as I should like my first
speculation to be proved correct on the evidence of this old chart of
A.D. 226, I fear both of us are mistaken.
So much for Peutinger's Tables.
Beloch makes a further confusion in regard to the local topography. He
says that the "three-peaked rock" which Eratosthenes describes as
separating the gulfs of Cumae and Paestum (that is, of Naples and
Salerno) is Mount San Costanzo. I do not understand Beloch falling into
this error, for the old geographer uses the term skopelos, which is
never applied to a mountain of this size, but to cliffs projecting upon
the sea. Moreover, the landmark is there to this day. I have not the
slightest doubt that Eratosthenes meant the pinnacle of Ierate, which is
three-peaked in a remarkably, and even absurdly, conspicuous manner,
both when viewed from the sea and from the land (from the chapel of S.
M. della Neve, for instance).
Now this projecting cliff of three peaks--they are called, respectively,
Montalto, Ierate, and Mortella; Ierate for short--is not the actual
boundary between the two gulfs; not by a mile or more. No; but from
certain points it might well be mistaken for it. The ancients had no
charts like ours, and the world in consequence presented itself
differently to their senses; even Strabo, says Bunbury, "was so ignorant
of the general form and configuration of the North African coast as to
have no clear conception of the great projection formed by the
Carthaginian territory and the deep bay to the east of it"; and,
coasting along the shore line, this triple-headed skopelos, behind which
lies the inlet of Ierate, might possibly be mistaken for the
turning-point into the gulf of Naples. So it looks when viewed from the
S.E. of Capri; so also from the Siren islets--a veritable headland.
So much for Beloch and Eratosthenes.
To sum up: Strabo is wrong in saying that the temple of Athene stood on
the summit of Mount San Costanzo; I was wrong in thinking that this
temple lay at Ierate; Peutinger's Chart is wrong in figuring the
structure on the south side of the Sorrentine peninsula; Beloch is wrong
in identifying the skopelos trikoruphos of Eratosthenes with Mount San
Costanzo; Eratosthenes is wrong in locating his rock at the boundary
between the two gulfs.
The shrine of Athene lay doubtless at Campanella, whose crag is of
sufficient altitude to justify Roman poets like Statius in their
descriptions of its lofty site. So great a number of old writers concur
in this opinion--Donnorso, Persico, Giannettasio, Mazzella, Anastasio,
Capaccio--that their testimony would alone be overwhelming, had these
men been a little more careful as to what they called a "temple."
Capasso, the acutest modern scholar of these regions, places it "in the
neighbourhood of the Punta Campanella." Professor Pais, in 1900, wrote a
paper on this "Atene Siciliana" which I have not seen. The whole
question is discussed in Filangieri's recent history of Massa
(1908-1910). It also occurs to me that Strabo's term akron may mean an
extremity or point projecting into the sea (a sense in which Homer used
it), and be applicable, therefore, to the Punta Campanella.
Rome
Here we are.
That mysterious nocturnal incident peculiar to Rome has already
occurred--sure sign that the nights are growing sultry. It happens about
six times in the course of every year, during the hot season. You may
read about it in the next morning's paper which records how some young
man, often of good family and apparently in good health, was seen
behaving in the most inexplicable fashion at the hour of about 2 a.m.;
jumping, that is, in a state of Adamitic nudity, into some public
fountain. It goes on to say that the culprit was pursued by the police,
run to earth, and carried to such-and-such a hospital, where his state
of mind is to be investigated. Will our rising generation, it gravely
adds, never learn the most elementary rules of decency?
If I have not had the curiosity to inquire at one of these
establishments what has been the result of the medical examination, it
is because I will wager my last shirt that the invalid's health leaves
nothing to be desired. The genesis of the affair, I take it, is this. He
is in bed, suffering from the heat. Sleep refuses to come. He has
already passed half the night in agony, tossing on his couch during
those leaden hours when not a breath of air is astir. In any other town
he would submit to the torture, knowing it to be irremediable. But Rome
is the city of fountains. It is they who are responsible for this sad
lapse. Their sound is clear by day; after midnight, when the traffic has
died down, it waxes thunderous. He hears it through the window--hears it
perforce, since the streets are ringing with that music, and you cannot
close your ears. He listens, growing hotter and more restless every
moment. He thinks.... That splash of waters! Those frigid wavelets and
cascades! How delicious to bathe his limbs, if only for a moment, in
their bubbling wetness; he is parched with heat, and at this hour of the
night, he reflects, there will not be a soul abroad in the square. So he
hearkens to the seductive melody, conjuring up the picture of that
familiar fountain; he remembers its moistened rim and basin all alive
with jolly turmoil; he sees the miniature cataracts tumbling down in
streaks of glad confusion, till the longing grows too strong to be
controlled.
The thing must be done.
Next day he finds a handful of old donkeys solemnly inquiring into his
state of mind....
I can sympathise with that state of mind, having often undergone the
same purgatory. My room at present happens to be fairly cool; it looks
north, and the fountain down below, audible at this moment, has not yet
tempted me to any breach of decorum. Night is quiet here, save for the
squeakings of some strange animals in the upper regions of the
neighbouring Pantheon; they squeak night and day, and one would take
them to be bats, were it not that bats are supposed to be on the wing
after sunset. There are no mosquitoes in Rome--none worth talking about.
It is well. For mosquitoes have a deplorable habit of indulging in a
second meal, an early breakfast, at about four a.m.--a habit more
destructive to slumber than that regular and legitimate banquet of
theirs. No mosquitoes, and few flies. It is well.
It is more than merely well. For the mosquito, after all, when properly
fed, goes to bed like a gentleman and leaves you alone, whereas that
insatiable and petty curiousness of the fly condemns you to a
never-ending succession of anguished reflex movements. What a
malediction are those flies; how repulsive in life and in death: not to
be touched by human hands! Their every gesture is an obscenity, a
calamity. Fascinated by the ultra-horrible, I have watched them for
hours on end, and one of the most cherished projects of my life is to
assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been
hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born
insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator's reputation--and
thereto add a few of my own. Lucian, the pleasant joker, takes the fly
under his protection. He says, among other things, that "like an honest
man, it is not ashamed to do in public what others only do in private."
I must say, if we all followed the fly's example in this aspect, life
would at last be worth living....
Morning sleep is out of the question, owing to the tram-cars whose
clangour, both here and in Florence, must be heard to be believed. They
are fast rendering these towns uninhabitable. Can folks who cherish a
nuisance of this magnitude compare themselves, in point of refinement,
with those old Hellenic colonists who banished all noises from their
city? Nevermore! Why this din, this blocking of the roadways and general
unseemliness? In order that a few bourgeois may be saved the trouble of
using their legs. And yet we actually pride ourselves on these
detestable things, as if they were inventions to our credit. "We made
them," we say. Did we? It is not we who make them. It is they who make
us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is
these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along
whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels--in a
process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting
a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself
into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth,
that brachycephalism is a Mendelian dominant. [19] No use lamenting.
True.
But the sage will reserve to himself the right of cursing. Those morning
hours, therefore, when I would gladly sleep but for the tram-car
shrieking below, are devoted to the malediction of all modern progress,
wherein I include, with fine impartiality, every single advancement in
culture which happens to lie between my present state and that
comfortable cavern in whose shelter I soon see myself ensconced as of
yore, peacefully sucking somebody's marrow while my women, round the
corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert.... The
telephone, that diabolic invention! It might vex a man if his neighbour
possessed a telephone and he none; how would it be, if neither of them
had it? We can hardly realise, now, the blissful quietude of the
pre-telephone epoch. And the telegraph and the press! They have huddled
mankind together into undignified and unhygienic proximity; we seem to
be breathing each other's air. We know what everybody is doing, in every
corner of the earth; we are told what to think, and to say, and to do.
Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few
solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no
longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning
paper and in it pours--the oracle of the press, that manufactory of
synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to
attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions
ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column,
after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the
Press Club. He has been told what to say--yesterday, for instance, it
was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to
be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena--he has been "doped" by the
editor, who gets the tip--and out he goes! unless he take it--from the
owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus,
and trims his convictions to their taste. That is what the Press can do.
It vitiates our mundane values. It enables a gang to fool the country.
It cretinises the public mind. The time may come when no respectable
person will be seen touching a daily, save on the sly. Newspaper reading
will become a secret vice. As such, I fear, its popularity is not likely
to wane. Having generated, by means of sundry trite reflections of this
nature, an enviable appetite for breakfast, I dress and step out of
doors to where, at a pleasant table, I can imbibe some coffee and make
my plans for loafing through the day.
Hot, these morning hours. Shadeless the streets. The Greeks, the Romans,
the Orientals knew better than to build wide roadways in a land of
sunshine.
There exists an old book or pamphlet entitled "Napoli senza
sole"--Naples without sun. It gives instructions, they say (for I have
never seen it) how foot passengers may keep for ever in the shade at all
hours of the day; how they may reach any point of the town from another
without being forced to cross the squares, those dazzling patches of
sunlight. The feat could have been accomplished formerly even in Rome,
which was always less umbrageous than Naples. It is out of the question
nowadays. You must do as the Romans do--walk slowly and use the tram
whenever possible.
That is what I purpose to do. There is a line which will take me direct
to the Milvian bridge, where I mean to have a bathe, and then a lunch at
the restaurant across the water. Its proprietor is something of a
brigand; so am I, at a pinch. It is "honour among thieves," or "diamond
cut diamond."
Already a few enthusiasts are gathered here, on the glowing sands. But
the water is still cold; indeed, the Tiber is never too warm for me. If
you like it yet more chill, you must walk up to where the Aniene
discharges its waves whose temperature, at this season, is of a kind to
tickle up a walrus.
Whether it be due to the medley of races or to some other cause, there
is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my
old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed,
both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their
freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied
their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on
sunburn--a darker problem than it seems to be. [20]
These men and boys do not grow uniformly sunburnt. They display so many
different colour-shades on their bodies that an artist would be
delighted with the effect. From that peculiar milky hue which, by reason
of some pigment, contrives to resist the rays, the tints diverge; the
reds, the scarcer group, traversing every gradation from pale rose to
the ruddiest of copper--not excluding that strange marbled complexion
concerning which I cannot make up my mind whether it be a beauty or a
defect; while the xanthous tones, the yellows, pass through silvery gold
and apricot and cafe au lait to a duskiness approaching that of the
negro. At this season the skins are still white. Your artist must come
later--not later, however, than the end of August, for on the first of
September the bathing, be the weather never so warm, is officially, and
quite suddenly, at an end. Tiber water is declared to be "unhealthy"
after that date, and liable to give you fever; a relic of the days when
the true origin of malaria was unknown.
A glance at the papers is sufficient to prove that bathing has not yet
begun in earnest. No drowning accidents, up to the present. Later on
they come thick and fast. For this river, with its rapid current and
vindictive swirling eddies, is dangerous to young swimmers; it grips
them in its tawny coils and holds them fast, often within a few yards of
friend or parent who listens, powerless to help, to the victim's cries
of anguish and sees his arm raised imploringly out of that serpent-like
embrace. So it hurries him to destruction, only to be fished up later in
a state, as the newspapers will be careful to inform us, of "incipient
putrefaction."
A murderous flood....
That hoary, trickling structure--that fountain which has forgotten to be
a fountain, so dreamily does the water ooze through obstructive mosses
and emerald growths that dangle in drowsy pendants, like wet beards,
from its venerable lips--that fountain un-trimmed, harmonious, overhung
by ancient ilexes: where shall a more reposeful spot be found? Doubly
delicious, after the turmoil and glistening sheen by the river-bank. For
the foliage of the oaks and sycamores is such that it creates a kind of
twilight, and all around lies the tranquillity of noon. Here, on the
encircling stone bench, you may idle through the sultry hours conversing
with some favourite disciple while the cows trample up to drink amid
moist gurglings and tail-swishings. They gaze at you with gentle eyes,
they blow their sweet breath upon your cheek, and move sedately onward.
The Villa Borghese can be hushed, at such times, in a kind of
enchantment.
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