"None at all.
"Mines which do not yield, which will never yield, as they exist only on paper; quarries which as yet know not pickaxe or powder; untilled, sandy moors, which they survey with a gesture, saying, 'We begin here, and we go way over yonder, to the devil.' It's the same with the forests,—one whole densely wooded slope of Monte-Rotondo, which belongs to us, it seems, but which it is not practicable to cut unless aeronauts should do duty as woodcutters. So as to the mineral baths, of which this wretched hamlet of Pozzonegro is one of the most important, with its fountain, whose amazing ferruginous properties Paganetti is constantly vaunting. Of packet-boats, not a trace. Yes, there is an old, half-ruined Genoese tower, on the shore of the Bay of Ajaccio, with this inscription on a tarnished panel over its hermetically closed door: 'Paganetti Agency, Maritime Company, Bureau of Information.' The bureau is kept by fat gray lizards in company with a screech-owl. As for the railroads, I noticed that all the excellent Corsicans to whom I mentioned them, replied with cunning smiles, disconnected phrases, full of mystery; and not until this morning did I obtain the exceedingly farcical explanation of all this reticence.
"I had read among the documents which the Governor waves before our eyes from time to time, like a fan to inflate his blague, a deed of a marble quarry at a place called Taverna, two hours from Pozzonegro. Availing myself of our visit to this place, I jumped on a mule this morning, without a word to any one, and, guided by a tall rascal, with the legs of a deer,—a perfect specimen of the Corsican poacher or smuggler, with his great red pipe between his teeth,—I betook myself to Taverna. After a horrible journey among cliffs intersected by crevasses, bogs, and abysses of immeasurable depth, where my mule maliciously amused himself by walking close to the edge, as if he were measuring it with his shoes, we descended an almost perpendicular surface to our destination,—a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the droppings of gulls and mews; for the sea is just below, very near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the beating of the waves and the shrill cries of flocks of birds flying in circles. My guide, who has a holy horror of customs officers and gendarmes, remained at the top of the cliff, because of a small custom-house station on the shore, while I bent my steps toward a tall red building which reared its three stories aloft in that blazing solitude, the windows broken, the roof-tiles in confusion, and over the rotting door an immense sign: 'Caisse Territoriale. Carr—bre—54.' The wind and sun and rain have destroyed the rest.
"Certainly there has been at some time an attempt made to work the mine, for there is a large, square, yawning hole, with cleanly-cut edges and patches of red streaked with brown, like leprous spots, along its sterile walls; and among the nettles at the bottom enormous blocks of marble of the variety known in commerce as griotte, condemned blocks of which no use can be made for lack of a proper road leading to the quarry, or a harbor which would enable boats to approach the hill; and, more than all else, for lack of sufficient funds to supply either of those needs. So the quarry, although within a few cable-lengths of the shore, is abandoned, useless, and a nuisance, like Robinson Crusoe's boat, with the same drawbacks as to availability. These details of the distressing history of our only territorial possession were furnished me by an unhappy survivor, shivering with fever, whom I found in the basement of the yellow house trying to cook a piece of kid over the acrid smoke of a fire of mastic branches.
"That man, who comprises the whole staff of the Caisse Territoriale in Corsica, is Paganetti's foster-father, an ex-lighthouse-keeper who does not mind loneliness. The Governor leaves him there partly from charity, and also because an occasional letter from the Taverna quarry produces a good effect at meetings of shareholders. I had great difficulty in extorting any information from that three-fourths wild man, who gazed at me suspiciously, in ambush behind his goat-skin pelone; he did tell me, however, unintentionally, what the Corsicans understand by the term railroad, and why they assume this mysterious manner when they mention it. While I was trying to find out whether he knew anything of the scheme for an iron road in the island, the old fellow did not put on the cunning smile I had observed in his compatriots, but said to me quite naturally, in very good French, but in a voice as rusty and stiff as an old lock that is seldom used:
"'Oh! moussiou, no need of railroads here—'
"'But they are very valuable, very useful to make communication easier.'
"'I don't say that ain't true; but with the gendarmes we don't need anything more.'
"'The gendarmes?'
"'To be sure.'