It was night in the cabin. I was puzzled to imagine how our sleeping was to be arranged within the narrow limits. But that was soon managed. My blanket was spread for me on the ground, and I stretched myself on it, beside the innermost wall; I was at a loss, however, for something on which to rest my head. I looked at Angelo. "Divine and wise Angelo," I said, "give ear. I have never, I swear to you, been a Sybarite, yet am I accustomed to pillows. Could not your hospitality provide me with some such convenience?" Angelo pondered; then he handed me his zaïno or shepherd's bag of goatskin, and spoke the winged words—"Now sleep, and felicissima notte!"
Gradually the others laid themselves down, wife and children, on the naked earth, leaning their heads on the wall. Angelo lay nearest the threshold; beside him the youngest child Maria; then Santa his wife, Lily-flower, Paola Maria, and myself. So we all lay peaceably together, our feet turned towards the fire. It was not long till they were all asleep, and I lay contemplating with satisfaction this happily slumbering family of Gymnosophists, and mused on the words of the wise Sancho, when he praised the inventor of sleep, "the mantle that covers all human care, the food that appeases hunger, the water that extinguishes thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that alleviates the heat—in short, the universal money for which all things may be bought, the beam and scale that equalizes king and shepherd." The fire shed a red glow over the singular group. I lamented that I was not a painter. But the intolerable heat and smoke of the pitch-pine would not let me sleep. I rose from time to time and stepped over the sleepers into the free air. I may say this was stepping from hell into heaven—for I walked straight into a cloud that had descended on the hill, and enveloped the cabins.
The night was chill and moist; but the clouds passed off, and the infinite sky threw its myriad lights on the mists, on the craggy heights, and the dark larches. I sat long beside the rushing Restonica, whose tumultuous din broke the impressive silence of the still, pure night. The spirit of solitude had never come so near me as it did that night among the black crags, at the brink of a headlong brook, far up among the clouds and mists, face to face with primitive nature, lost in a foreign island girt with many a mile of sea. In such moments, the feeling of loneliness becomes oppressive, and the sudden thought alarms the soul, that the human being is but an insignificant atom; and that perhaps this spiritual atom may in an instant lose and forget its connexion with all related to it, and remain lonely in void space. But the soul is not thus to be overcome; it spreads its wings for the distant home, there regains its serenity, and loneliness has fled. I listen to sounds that seem to be borne to me from the hills; they sound sometimes like wild laughter—it is the mad Restonica that is so unquiet. These stones are the dumb witnesses to ancient, dreadful birth-pangs, offspring of the fieriest embraces of Uranus and Gaea.
The cold air drove me again to the fire. Overcome with fatigue, I at last fell asleep, when I was suddenly awakened by the clear voice of Santa, who cried several times, Spettacoli divini! spettacoli divini! She was putting the children to rights; they had flung themselves about into all sorts of comic positions. Divine spectacles they were certainly. Lily-flower lay rolled up like a snake half over her mother; Paola had thrown her arm about my neck. The child had perhaps heard an owl in her sleep, or seen the vampire in a dream, that comes to suck the heart's-blood.
I spent the rest of the night sitting looking into the fire, and amused myself with imaginary representations of the heretics whom the Holy Catholic Church has burned to the honour of God. Now this is quite an endless amusement.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MOUNTAIN-TOP.
The day was dawning. I went out and refreshed myself in the waves of the sleepless Restonica, which sprang young and fresh from rock to rock, and hastened down into the valley. The young stream has a beautiful life. After a merry career of twelve hours through ever-green woods, it dies in the waters of the Tavignano. The Restonica gained my affections. I know the whole story of its life; for I have accompanied it in a single day, from its first leap to the end of its course; and many a glorious draught did it afford me. Its water is as clear, as fresh, and as light as ether; and is renowned far and wide throughout the land of Corsica. I never drank better water; it was more grateful than the noblest wine. There is such a keen quality in this incomparable stream, that it cleans iron to the purity of a mirror in the shortest time, and preserves it from rust; Boswell mentions that the Corsicans of Paoli's time laid their rusty gun-barrels in the Restonica to clean them. It makes all the stones and gravel that it washes milk-white; and its channel and banks glitter with such stones down to its confluence with the Tavignano.
On asking my guide to ascend with me now to the summit of Rotondo, he confessed that he did not know the road. Angelo, therefore, became my guide. We began the ascent between three and four o'clock in the morning. It was less dangerous but infinitely more fatiguing than I had supposed.
A number of ridges that rise one above the other, have to be surmounted before we reach Trigione, from which the ascent of the highest peak commences. These successive heights form a mighty scala—a stair piled by the hand of Nature—of colossal steps of primeval reddish granite; huge Titans, storming heaven with rocks in their giant hands, might be fit to stride them. Block lies here over block, vast and formless as chaos, and towering upwards and upwards in such endless masses of monotonous gray, that the heart almost quails, and the foot refuses to go farther. The rains of autumn have, in many places, given the granite such a remarkable smoothness, that it presents large surfaces with all the polish of a mirror. The water was running in a thousand little channels, in exhaustless abundance. Tree vegetation, however, here ceases, and only alder-bushes mark where the young Restonica is collecting its waters.