they climbed 175 steps to the Cappucini convent which hangs like a swallow’s nest in a niche of the cliffs, flanked by that famous terrace the artists paint again and again, from every angle, at every season of the year, at every hour of the day. There they imbibed a very superior tea, while sea and sky did their handsomest, listening meanwhile to a fellow tourist brag of having climbed to Ravello in his motor car.
If one cranes one’s neck from the Cappucini terrace, on a small peak will be seen what purports to be a town, but the conclusion will be irresistible that the only way to reach such a dizzy eminence is by goat’s feet, or hawk’s wings, and the natural inference is that the fellow tourist is fibbing. Nevertheless one hates to be outdone, and one abandons all desire to sleep in one of those coldly clean little monk-cells of the convent, and climbs resolutely down the 175 steps again and interviews Berliet. Berliet thinks his chassis is too long for the sharp turns. Thinks that the road is bad; that it is also unsafe; that the hotel in Ravello is not possible; that he suspects his off fore tire; that there’s not time to do it before dark; that his owner forbids his going to Ravello at all; that he has an appointment that evening with a good-looking lady in Amalfi; that he is tired with his long run, and doesn’t want to any way. All of which eleven reasons appeared so irrefutable, collectively and individually, that Jane and Peripatetica climbed into their seats and announced that they would go to Ravello, and go immediately.
Berliet muttered unpleasant things in his native tongue as to signori being reckless, obstinate, and inconsiderate; wound them up sulkily and took them.
Peripatetica admitted in a whisper that up to that very day she had never even heard of Ravello, which proved to be a really degrading piece of ignorance, for every human being they met for the next three months knew all about the place—or said they did. Further experience taught them to know that Italy is crowded with little crumbling towns one has never heard of before, which when examined prove to be the very particular spots in which took place about a half of all the history that ever happened. History being a thing one must be pretty skilful if one means to evade it in Italy, for the truth is that whenever history took a notion to be, it promptly went on a trip to Italy and was.
They hooted slowly again through narrow streets, pushed more goats and children out their way, and then Berliet swung round on one wheel and began to mount. Began to climb like the foreseen goat, to soar like the imagined hawk, up sharp zigzags that lifted them by almost exact parallels. Everything that puts on power and speed, and makes noises like bomb explosions in a saw-factory, was pushed forward or pulled back. They rushed noisily round and round the peak at locomotive speed, and finally half way up into the very top of the sky they pulled up sharply in a cobble-paved square. Berliet leaped nimbly out, unscrewed a hot lid—with the tail of his linen duster—from which lid liquids and steam and smells boiled as from an angry geyser, and they found themselves in the wild eyrie of Ravello. That ubiquituosity—(with the name of a hotel on his cap)—who springs out from every stone in Italy like a spider upon the foolish swarming tourist fly, was waiting for them in the square as if by appointment, and before they could draw the first gasp of relief he had their possessions loaded upon the backs of the floating population, and they were climbing in the dusk a stone stairway that called itself a street—meekly and weakly unwitting of their possible destination. The destination proved to be a vaulted courtyard, opening behind a doorway which was built of a choice assortment of loot from four periods of architecture and sculpture; proved to be a reckless jumble of winding steps, of crooked passages, of terraces, balconies, and loggias, and the whole of this destination went by the name of the Hotel Bellevue. And once there, then suddenly, after all the noise and odours, the confusion and human clatter of the last three weeks, they stepped quietly out upon a revetment of Paradise.
Below—a thousand feet below—in the blue darkness little sparks of light were Amalfi. In the blue darkness above, hardly farther away it seemed, were the larger sparks of the rolling planets. The cool, lonely darkness bathed their spirits as with a blessed chrism. The place was, for the night, theirs alone, and for one holy moment the swarming tourist failed to swarm.
“In the Highlands! In the country places!”—
murmured Jane, gratefully declining upon a broad balustrade, and Peripatetica echoed softly—declining in her turn—
... “Oh, to dream; oh, to awake and wander