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.
Over the windows of a large shop filled with white crosses, broken columns and statues, I read the legend: “Anglo-American Tombstone Company.” We emerged from the narrow street on to an embankment running along the edge of a river. From the opposite bank the ground rose steeply.
“There,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle on a note of triumph as we crossed the bridge, “that’s my house.” She pointed up. From the hill-top a long façade stared down through twenty windows; a tall tower pricked the sky. “The palace was built in 1630,” she began. I even enjoyed the history lesson.
We had crossed the bridge, we were climbing by a steep and winding road through what was almost a forest of olive trees. The abrupt grassy slope had been built up into innumerable little terraces on which the trees were planted. Here and there, in the grey luminous shadow beneath the trees, little flocks of sheep were grazing. The barefooted children who attended them came running to the side of the road to watch us passing.
“I like to think of these old princely courts,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying. “Like abbeys of … abbeys of….” She shook her brandy flask impatiently. “You know … in Thingumy.”