In Direst Peril

by David Christie Murray

CHAPTER III

We travelled at apparent random for nearly three weeks, and when at last we reached Itzia, no man could possibly have guessed that we had set out with that little place as our serious destination. It was Brunow who suggested this lingering method of approach, and it was he also who gave a semblance of nature to our proceedings by pausing here and there to set up his camp-stool and easel in some picturesque defile, or in the streets of some quaint village. Twice this innocent blind brought us into collision with the military police, who were in a condition of perpetual disquiet, and suspected everybody. Our papers, however, were in perfect order, and Brunow in particular was so well provided with credentials that we were easily set going again, and so by a circuitous road we approached Itzia, and finally pounced down upon it from the hills.

I found it a village of not more than four or five hundred inhabitants, set in the midst of a green plateau surrounded by gaunt hills, and watered by a fair, broad stream. The fortress in which the Conte di Rossano was confined stood on the lowest slope of the nearest hill, and frowned down upon the village with a threatening aspect, dwarfed as it was almost into nothing by the surrounding majesties of nature. It was a building of modern date—not more than fifty years of age I should be inclined to say—and it boasted nothing in the way of architectural beauty. It was built of an ugly dark stone, was strongly fortified, and was flanked by outlying batteries which surrounded the mouth of the defile which led from Zetta on the frontier. The artillery of to-day would reduce the fortress of Itzia to a rubbish heap in less than an hour; but it was a strong place for the date of its erection, and even now the difficulty of bringing siege guns along the broken and difficult mountain pathways makes it worth calculating as a point of resistance against invasion.

I saw it first at the close of a dull day when a storm was brewing. The sky was overcast, and the clouds were mustering fast from the south in black battalions. Every now and then a hoarse echoing rumble of sound went wandering about in the hollows of the hills with a deep cavernous tone, which sounded astonishingly threatening and foreboding. I suppose that everybody knows more or less the feeling which associates itself with the first view of any memorable place, and fixes itself as it were upon his recollection of it. After all these years I can hardly think of the fortress at Itzia without some return of the depression and half-dismay which fell upon me when I first looked at it, with the black clouds gathering thickly over it, the mountain on which it stood looking as if it would topple over and bury fortress and valley, and one spear-like gleam of bleak sunshine lighting up a few of its windows and a few square yards of its western wall. Of course I had never been guilty of such a madness as to think of approaching the place by anything but wile and stratagem; and its bulk and blackness and the thickness of its walls had nothing in the world to do with the success or failure of my enterprise, and yet I could not resist a feeling of discouragement which almost amounted to a sense of superstition.

We had engaged a guide from some little village, the name of which I forget, at which we had rested on the previous night; and the castle was the first object to which he had called our attention.

“There!” he cried, pausing at a sudden bend in the road, and turning half round upon us with his right hand pointing forward. “There is the fortress of Itzia. The end of your journey, gentlemen.”

I spoke the language very feebly, but I happened to understand every word he said, and his speech gave me a nervous chill. It was not altogether unlikely that the end of our journey lay in that forbidding heap of dark stone, and the thought was not an agreeable one. Brunow caught the fancy too, and turning on me with a smile which I thought not quite natural, said:

“A bad omen!”

We trudged along pretty wearily, for we had made on foot a good five-and-twenty miles that day, and the country had been extremely difficult. The mountain road had scarcely been worthy to be called a road at all, and in the course of it we had had a score or so of break-back climbs. Brunow had held out with an unexpected stoutness, but I think another mile of such a road would have left him helpless; and though I was more innured to personal fatigue than he, I gave half a grunt and half a groan of comfort at the thought of stretching my legs in an arm-chair at the village inn. We were both as hungry as we had a right to be, and finding our feet set upon turf instead of insecure stones with points all over them, we mustered our forces for a brief run downhill. The guide, who had done the journey with a stolid indifference, set up a whoop and raced after us speedily, getting the better of us, and so we entered the village racing like a trio of school-boys, Brunow and I shouting to each other and laughing. Some of the villagers came to their doors and looked with an ox-like kind of wonder after us, but just then the first open growl of the tempest sounded, the premature blackness of the evening was split wide open by a sudden flash, and the rain began to fall as it can only fall in mountain countries and in the tropics, I suppose the inhabitants simply thought we were flying from the storm, and, anyway, at the first sign of it they slammed and fastened their doors, and we raced on, drenched almost to the skin in the first minute.

Brunow knew the inn, of course, and was recognized immediately on his arrival. The fat hostess, stolid as she looked, seemed glad to see him; and her pretty daughter, who looked in the characteristic costume of the country as if she had just stepped off the stage or was just ready to step on to it, received him with demure smiles and blushes. He was quite a lion among the ladies, was Brunow, and I had no doubt he had been doing some little execution here. In a minute or two, at the landlady's bidding, we had stripped off our soaked coats and were sitting by a wood-fire, each in a brief Tyrolean jacket, with lace and silver buttons all about it—the property, as we found out afterwards, of our host and his son, who were out just then shooting on the hills, and likely, as we learned, to be away all night.