CHAPTER XII

CATANZARO

For half an hour the train slowly ascends.  The carriages are of special construction, light and many-windowed, so that one has good views of the landscape.  Very beautiful was this long, broad, climbing valley, everywhere richly wooded; oranges and olives, carob and lentisk and myrtle, interspersed with cactus (its fruit, the prickly fig, all gathered) and with the sword-like agave.  Glow of sunset lingered upon the hills:  in the green hollow a golden twilight faded to dusk.  The valley narrowed; it became a gorge between dark slopes which closed together and seemed to bar advance.  Here the train stopped, and all the passengers (some half-dozen) alighted.

The sky was still clear enough to show the broad features of the scene before me.  I looked up to a mountain side, so steep that towards the summit it appeared precipitous, and there upon the height, dimly illumined with a last reflex of after-glow, my eyes distinguished something which might be the outline of walls and houses.  This, I knew, was the situation of Catanzaro, but one could not easily imagine by what sort of approach the city would be gained; in the thickening twilight, no trace of a road was discernible, and the flanks of the mountain, a ravine yawning on either hand, looked even more abrupt than the ascent immediately before me.

There, however, stood the diligenza which was somehow to convey me to Catanzaro; I watched its loading with luggage-merchandise and mail-bags—­whilst the exquisite evening melted into night.  When I had thus been occupied for a few minutes, my look once more turned to the mountain, where a surprise awaited me:  the summit was now encircled with little points of radiance, as though a starry diadem had fallen upon it from the sky. “Pronti!” cried our driver.  I climbed to my seat, and we began our journey towards the crowning lights.

By help of long loops the road ascended at a tolerably easy angle; the horse-bells tinkled, the driver shouted encouragement to his beasts, and within the vehicle went on a lively gossiping, with much laughter.  Meanwhile the great moon had risen high enough to illumine the valley below us; silvery grey and green, the lovely hollow seemed of immeasurable length, and beyond it one imagined, rather than discerned, a glimmer of the sea.  By the wayside I now and then caught sight of a huge cactus, trailing its heavy knotted length upon the face of a rock; and at times we brushed beneath overhanging branches of some tree that could not be distinguished.  All the way up we seemed to skirt a sheer precipice, which at moments was alarming in its gloomy depth.  Deeper and deeper below shone the lights of the railway station and of the few houses about it; it seemed as though a false step would drop us down into their midst.